1944

The year in brief

On the night of 3–4 January 1944 the Red Army crossed the pre-war Polish border in Volhynia, on 27 January the 872-day siege of Leningrad came to an end, and in the spring Soviet troops retook the Crimea. In Italy the Allies assaulted the Gustav Line four times; on 18 May the Polish II Corps took the ruins of the monastery on Monte Cassino, and on 4 June the Fifth Army entered Rome. On 6 June the Allies landed in Normandy, and from then on Germany fought on three fronts. On 22 June Operation Bagration began, destroying Army Group Centre in Belarus and bringing the Red Army to the Vistula. On 20 July Hitler survived the bomb at the Wolf's Lair. In August Paris was liberated and a coup in Bucharest took Romania out of the Axis; in September Operation Market Garden ended in defeat at Arnhem. In the Pacific the Americans took the Marianas and destroyed the Japanese fleet's air arm in the Philippine Sea, and in October they landed on Leyte.

For Poland it was a year of fighting and disappointment. In Operation Tempest Home Army units struck at the retreating Germans and met the Red Army as the hosts of the land, but after the joint fighting for Wilno and Lwów the NKVD arrested their commanders. Lublin, on whose outskirts Soviet troops took the Majdanek camp, became the seat of the Moscow-dependent PKWN. On 1 August the Home Army began the uprising in Warsaw, to free the capital before the Red Army arrived. In Wola the Germans murdered from 10,000 to several tens of thousands of civilians in three days, while the Red Army stood on the Vistula and did not resume its advance for six weeks. After 63 days of fighting, on 2 October, the Uprising capitulated; the population was expelled and the city destroyed.

The year ended with a German counter-blow. On 16 December three armies struck in the Ardennes to retake Antwerp, but they failed to take Bastogne, which Patton's tanks reached on 26 December. In Hungary the Red Army began its assault on encircled Budapest.