The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (198 page)

Parisians line the Champs-Élysées on August 29 to cheer the U.S. 28th Infantry Division, marching through Paris before taking up pursuit of the German army to the east.

Assault forces from the U.S. VI Corps file ashore near St.-Tropez in southern France during Operation
DRAGOON
on August 15, 1944.

Major General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., shown here after his promotion to three-star general in October, commanded the U.S. VI Corps during the invasion of southern France and the subsequent pursuit up the Rhône River. This was Truscott’s third amphibious invasion of the war.

Lieutenant General Alexander M. Patch, Jr., commander of the U.S. Seventh Army in southern France, and his son, Captain Alexander M. “Mac” Patch III, shortly before the young officer’s death.
(U.S. Military Academy)

General Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny, described by one admirer as “an animal of action,” commanded the French First Army as part of the 6th Army Group in southern France.
(©KEYSTONE-FRANCE)

Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, the chief American logistician as commander of the Communications Zone. “Heavy on ceremony, somewhat forbidding in manner and appearance, and occasionally tactless,” as the Army’s official history described him, “General Lee often aroused suspicions and created opposition.”

British paratroopers in a C-47 transport plane, bound for Holland in Operation
MARKET GARDEN
.

More than twenty thousand parachutists and glider troops descended behind German lines on September 17, 1944, in the biggest, boldest airborne operation of the war.

By late September 1944, the once-handsome Dutch town of Nijmegen had been reduced to ruins, although the road bridge leading toward Arnhem, ten miles north, still spanned the Waal River.

GIs from the 1st Infantry Division battle through central Aachen on October 17, 1944, several days before German defenders finally capitulated.

Captain Joseph T. Dawson helped stave off German counterattacks at Aachen. “These bitter tragic months of terrible war leave one morally as well as physically exhausted,” he told his family. Here Dawson receives the Distinguished Service Cross from Eisenhower for heroics at Omaha Beach.
(McCormick Research Center, First Division Museum)

Riflemen from the 110th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Division creep through the Hürtgen Forest near Vossenack in early November. “The days were so terrible that I would pray for darkness,” one soldier recalled, “and the nights were so bad that I would pray for daylight.”