THE SITUATION IN THE FALL OF 1944

The German armies had suffered catastrophic defeats in the summer of 1944, and these defeats were accompanied by huge losses. It is not possible to give exact figures, but the killed, captured, and missing (most of whom were either dead or prisoners) from the beginning of June to the middle of September were in excess of one million and are likely to have been over one and a half million. These defeats on land in the east, west, and south were accompanied by huge losses of materiel. Vast numbers of tanks and guns were destroyed in the fighting and additional quantities either fell into the hands of Germany's enemies or were destroyed by the Germans themselves, when surrounded or cut off, in order to prevent their capture.

Great losses were by no means confined to the land battle. In the air, the German defenses had been crushed through the intervention of long-range fighters in early 1944—on top of the steady attrition suffered by the German air force in prior years. This defeat had reduced the once mighty Luftwaffe to the thankless role of trying to get back into the struggle for control of the air with masses of inexperienced and inadequately trained pilots. The American and British air forces dominated the skies over Western, Central and Southern Europe and the Red Air Force had by this time overwhelming superiority in the East. The destruction by the American air force of much of Germany's synthetic oil industry made any revival of the German air effort doubtful: planes were often destroyed on the ground because they lacked fuel.

At sea, the last German surface raiders and larger ships had long since been swept from the oceans or confined to support duties in the Baltic Sea. German submarines had as yet been unable to recover from their 1943 defeat. October 1944 was a month when they managed to sink only one merchant ship of just over 6000 tons on all the world's oceans. Driven out of the Black Sea and Mediterranean, German submarines had also lost their bases on the French Atlantic coast.