Eighty years ago this week the allies begin to bite into serious German resistance

 

The allies launched Operation Market Garden, a combined air and ground drive to secure the three bridges across the lower Rhine with the goal of facilitating an early  invasion of German from the north. Following the speedy expulsion of the the Germans from France and then Belgium it was dangerously easy to imagine the German armies were broken and would not offer serious resistance. US airborne divisions seized the two westerly bridges and an Anglo-Polish force took the easterly bridge at Arnhem which lay some one hundred kilometers behind German lines. General Horrock's British XXX Corps opened a drive to force a narrow corrridor to link the bridges with the main body of the allied armies. 

Further south the US army attacked the city of Aachen, the first major objective in Germany. At first the local commander General von Schwerin proposed to surrender the city, which had not been bombed, but Wehrmacht high command decided to make a fight of it. The city was within the formidable Westwall defence belt, known to the British as the Siegfied Line built before the war originally as a counterpart to the Maginot Line to halt a French attack into Germany which never came. The US advance had already been slowed by the defenders and the Germans added about three divisions to their defences. To protect their right flank the Americans attacked the thick woods of the Huertgen Forest, itself strongly fortified. The ground was set for one of the US Army's longest and most gruelling battles.

The German evacuation of Finland following the Finnish armistice with the USSR had begun peacefully but relations degenerated into open warfare, beginning the Lapland War. The Soviets applied steady pressure on the Finns to open hostilities. The immediate flashpoint was the island of Suursaari which dominates the Gulf of Finland and restricts the vlue of the Soviet naval base at Kronstadt. The Germans attempted to seize it by force but failed.