p The second front in Europe was not opened when it should have been—not in 1941, and not in 1942. Nor was it opened in 1943, after the tide had been turned by the war effort of the Soviet people. Not until the war had, in effect, entered its final stage, not until it was clear that the Soviet Union could go it alone to final victory, liberating the peoples of Europe, were the British and US troops issued the order to land on the northern coast of France.

p The blame for the deliberate delay may be laid at the door of British and US reactionary groups. To say the least, it was a crime against all nations that had risen to combat the fascist intruders, a crime, too, against the peoples of Britain and the United States. The nations paid heavily for it in lives and property.

p Even in 1944, Winston Churchill still tried to postpone the invasion. He insisted on a large-scale offensive in Italy, though this augured few advantages from the point of view of shortening the war. Having begun in January, that offensive developed at a leisurely pace. Not until June 5 did British and US troops at last enter Rome, the Italian capital.

p In the meantime, the international situation became less and less favourable for the imperialist policy-makers in the USA and Britain. To delay longer would have damaged their interests. Soviet prestige and the power of Soviet arms, bringing freedom to the European peoples, increased rapidly. The anti-fascist movement spread across most of the European 161 countries, including Germany. The fight in France under a progressive leadership gained in intensity as a direct consequence of the smashing Red Army victories. French patriots saw German divisions entraining eastward, never to return. The Communist Party of France called on the nation to prepare for a country-wide armed rising.

p The freedom struggle of the French, gradually developing into a general armed rising against the German invader, alarmed reactionaries all over the world. The most inveterate opponents of a second front began urging haste.

p Opening the front, the US and British rulers were above all pursuing their own imperialist aims, hoping to prevent Germany’s total defeat, to save the reactionaries in Europe from total annihilation, to block democratisation in countries delivered from fascism and to raise a barrier to the Red Army’s westward advance. Also, not forgetting their rivalry, the US and British imperialists were eager to occupy positions of advantage on the European continent.

p General Omar Bradley, in command of US troops in Europe, described the aims of the Normandy landing thus: "To avoid chaos on the continent it would have been necessary for us to mount such forces as we had, cross the Channel at once, move on into Germany, disarm its troops, and seize control of the nation."  [161•1 

p There we have another of the Second World War riddles. On the one hand, the United States and Britain at last opened the second front (as part of joint action with the USSR against nazi Germany) and, on the other, the ruling groups in those two countries, scheming to turn that second front against the progressives, whose influence would certainly have been strong in Europe once fascism was flattened, strove to exploit fascism rather than destroy it. As part of this scheming, the British Government expanded its intelligence operations against the Soviet Union shortly before the Normandy landing. The job was assigned to the special British Intelligence Service Department dealing with Soviet affairs and the world communist movement, and better known as the anti-communist service. Heading that service from 1944 was Harold Adrian Russell Philby, third in line in the Intelligence Service and seen as likely to reach the top rung.  [161•2 

p The true nature of Philby’s work was one of the bestguarded secrets that imperialist intelligence could not break for decades. Philby, it turned out, was a convinced Communist. "You can imagine,” he later said modestly, "what information I was able to send to Moscow."  [162•1 

p Never, therefore, were the true intentions and aims of the US and British rulers a total secret for the Soviet Union.

p Operation Overlord, envisaging the invasion of Northern France, had long been ready. The priming for it had begun long before. The Commands did their utmost to keep it secret from the Germans until landing day in order to secure the surprise factor. But since the secret of the successive’ postponements of the second front between 1941 and 1943 was not well enough kept—who can tell whether deliberately or not—and the nazis knew of them through their agents, the latest date, too, leaked out.

p Foreign Minister Anthony Eden briefed British diplomats abroad of the Teheran Conference decisions, including those on the second front. Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the ambassador in Ankara, meanwhile, attached little importance to guarding war secrets and kept his confidential files in a black briefcase in his bedroom, where they were photographed by Elyasa Bazna, cover name Cicero, who was Knatchbull-Hugessen’s butler and at the same time an agent of the nazi secret service. For his troubles, by the way, Cicero was paid in counterfeit pounds sterling. The details of the story were learned postwar from Bazna’s own memoirs and those of the SS resident in Ankara, Ludwig Moyzisch. The affair was so utterly scandalous that it was raised in the House of Commons on October 18, 1950, with Foreign Minister Bevin admitting the facts, which, he begged, should not be taken too seriously, because the documents were only photographed,

p not stolen.  [162•2 

p There were other leaks. Shortly before the Normandy landing a parcel addressed to a woman residing in a Chicago quarter populated chiefly by Germans, was accidentally examined by the postal authorities. It was found to contain secret documents relating to Operation Overlord.  [162•3 

p But knowledge of Allied secrets no longer helped the 163 nazis when the Red Army mounted its Byelorussian operation. It kept the German forces engaged, and reinforcing garrisons in France was out of the question. Another factor favouring the Anglo-Americans was the Resistance Movement, highly active in France, Belgium and Italy. It created for the German forces no end of trouble, disrupting rear activity in the West.

p German leaders had dreaded war on two fronts in Bismarck’s time. And the First World War proved their fears well grounded. Hitler had gambled on the contradictions between the European powers, thinking he could divide them. But he could not escape the inevitable: the Third Reich was at last between hammer and anvil.

p German troops deployed against the Allies in Northern France, Belgium and Holland comprised 45 divisions, including seven panzer and one motorised. The divisions were under-m’anned, with some 25 to 50 per cent numerically inferior to the Allied divisions. About half of them consisted of over-age personnel or boys of 17.  [163•1  The German 3rd Air Fleet, stationed in Western Europe, had only 90 bombers and 70 fighters in operational condition out of a total of 500 aircraft,  [163•2  and the nazi navy in the Atlantic, the North and Baltic seas had four battleships, seven cruisers and 419 submarines, of which 90 were training vessels.  [163•3  Patrolling of the French coast was assigned to Naval Command West, which had a few destroyers and torpedo-boats, 30 motor torpedo-boats and 36 submarines.  [163•4 

p Allied forces standing by for the invasion consisted of 37 British and US divisions, including 10 tank divisions, and 12 brigades, plus one French and one Polish division. Allied planes totalled 11,000 combat planes, plus 2,300 transports and 2,600 gliders. The landing was supported by a fleet of 6 battleships, 2 monitors, 22 cruisers, 93 destroyers and other vessels, while the number of transport and landing vessels of all kinds exceeded 6,000.  [163•5 

p After a succession of fresh delays, this time due to objective difficulties, the invasion was at last set for June 6, 1944, jumping off at 01.30 hours under cover of darkness. Enemy 164 resistance on land and in the air was negligible. In two days the US and British troops secured a bridgehead, which they methodically expanded.

p When the landing began Eisenhower ordered the French population to cease fighting the Germans. But the French patriots ignored his demand. Their activity behind the nazi lines had contributed to the Anglo-American success, and even in the immediate vicinity of the landing area, partisans and franctireurs cleared the Germans out of 42 towns and hundreds of villages, helping the landing force to consolidate and develop its bridgehead.

p French historian Pierre Montauban holds that if the partisans "had not sluiced off a considerable number of enemy troops, if they had not detained German reinforcements sent against the Anglo-American landing force, the Allies may have been flung back into the Sea."  [164•1  Eisenhower, too, later admitted that the French patriots had done well. "Throughout France,” he wrote, "the Free French had been of inestimable value to the campaigns They were particularly active ’in Brittany, but on every portion of the front we secured help from them in a multitude of ways. Without their great assistance the liberation of France and the defeat of the enemy in Western Europe would have consumed a much longer time and meant greater losses to ourselves"  [164•2 .

p Despite the favourable situation, the Anglo-American forces advanced slowly —something like an average 4 km a day. This was because ruling quarters in the United States and Britain were in no hurry to build up large actions., not to impair too drastically German resistance to the Red Army offensive. Not until 90 days after the Normandy landing was the Allied bridgehead 100 km long and 30-50 km wide. On August 15 three US and seven French divisions landed in Southern France.

p From their bridgehead in Northern France the Allied armies moved east on July 25, 1944, and in a month, helped by the partisans, cleared all north-western France, save a few port-towns in Brittany.

p French resistance mounted. A countrywide armed rising against the occupation forces broke out. The insurrectionists relieved the cities of Lyons and Toulouse, 18 departments 165 south of the Loire and west of the Rhone, and the area from the Western Alps to the Italian and Swiss frontiers. Half a million men fought in the organised units of the French home guard, and at least another million participated in the national uprising. It was a mighty movement unmatched in French history. And it was headed by Communists.

p The rising in Paris erupted on August 19 as the culmination of the struggle to liberate France. The Parisians suppressed the fairly large and well-equipped German garrison. The rising was headed by Henri Rol-Tanguy, a worker and Communist with combat experience in Spain. Actively involved was a group of Soviet war prisoners who had escaped from German concentration camps. They captured the building of the Soviet Embassy situated in the heart of the French capital and hoisted the Soviet flag.

p By the evening of August 22, the insurrectionists had liberated 70 blocks of Paris. The German Command, infuriated though impotent, ordered the city’s destruction. But the people frustrated the criminal plan. The main nazi forces in Paris were totally defeated in clashes on August 23 and 24. The final assault, ending in complete victory, began in the morning of August 25. A company of General Jacques Leclerc’s 2nd Tank Division, operating with the Allied troops, participated. General Leclerc and Colonel RolTanguy received the surrender of the remnants of the German garrison jointly—a gesture acknowledging the role played in liberating Paris by the workers and people of the capital.

p US and British troops close to Paris offered no aid. General Omar Bradley notes: "We would... enter it (Paris— Ed.) at our leisure — I might just as well tell you we are not at all anxious to liberate Paris right now___" "It would be good if Paris could pull in its belt and live with the Germans a little longer...."  [165•1  And another US general, George S. Patton, said: "I could have taken it had I not been told not to."  [165•2 

p The successful Paris rising spurred the Allied troops. French territory was soon cleared of the enemy and in September Anglo-American forces entered Belgium. Again, armed action by patriots, this time Belgian, was prominent. The Belgian partisans liberated a number of provinces and cities on their own, including Antwerp, enabling the Allies 166 to cross little Belgium Without delay and approach the German frontier. The US and French forces of the 6th Allied Group of Armies reached the Rhine and in November 1944 captured the city of Strasbourg.

p The second front had an unquestionably positive effect on the final outcome of the Second World War. Compressed between two fronts, Germany had not a glimmer of hope. Inexorably, retribution approached. Any other government but the gang of adventurers heading the country and.ready to sacrifice millions of lives for their designs, would have recognised the futility of further resistance.

Once France was free, there arose the question of her place in the postwar world. The US and British governments held that she would not regain her great power status due to heavy war losses. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was eager to help the French recover as an independent and sovereign power. Offering friendly aid and support, the Soviet people held that the USSR and France had the traditional common interest of preventing German aggression in Europe and safeguarding peace. To assist France, the Soviet Government invited French Government representatives to visit Moscow. A -Soviet-French Treaty of Alliance and Mutual Assistance was concluded there on December 10, 1944, assuring France the friendship of the USSR in the difficult early postwar months. Thanks to this support, France regained her place among the great powers as reflected in the UN Charter and a series of Allied decisions concerning Germany.