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In the fighting up to 1944, the Allies had suffered a large number of lost battles, and only started to win in 1942 and 1943, but the cumulative effect was to weaken the Axis nations relative to the Allies, who continued to convert their superior population, resources, and industrial capacity into military power. Most of 1944 consisted of the Allies deciding what they would do, and then doing it.
In the Pacific, the US Army and Navy were conducting parallel offensives, the Navy's starting later but going faster, and they met at the Philippines. In June, the Navy drive hit and took the Marianas Islands, which were later the base for the bombing of Japan. The Japanese Navy came out to fight, and was decisively defeated, its air power broken forever. In October, the combined drive hit the central Philippines at the island of Leyte, triggering the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle ever, in which Japanese naval power was effectively broken. This victory cut Japan off from the southern areas where she was getting resources.
In Italy, the Allies struggled ineptly up the boot. The good Western Allied commanders had pretty much all gone to France, and the remaining commanders were unable to do more than push the Germans back slowly.
The Soviet Union launched numerous offensives during 1944, which were mostly successful. By the end of the year, they had thrown Axis forces off Soviet territory, taken much of Poland, and forced Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria to attack Germany. The Germans evacuated Greece, and the British moved in after them. Yugoslavia was freed, and remained under the partisan leader Tito. The German forces themselves had taken very heavy casualties.
The main Western Allied campaign of the year was the invasion of France in June 1944, featuring a very hard fight on one of the beaches, a very slow grinding advance for a month and a half, a breakout in late July that drove the Germans mostly out of France by September, and then the Allies coming to the end of their supply lines and having to advance only slowly.
Both Britain and the US had been sending heavy bombers to attack German cities and industry, without achieving results proportionate to the effort. In 1944, this changed. The United States finally had long-range escort fighters, so their bombers were able to range across Germany in the daytime. The British were defeated by the depth of German defenses early in the year, but the landing in France and the advance after that destroyed the forward German defenses, and British night bombers hit all over Germany.
Another very important feature of the bombing was that the Allies finally picked good types of targets and stuck to them. The British had been relatively ineffective due to their insistence on bombing city centers, and the US had been relatively ineffective due to their seeming inability to attack one sort of target hard enough to make a difference. For example, the raids on Huels and Schweinfurt caused serious shortages in synthetic rubber and ball bearings respectively, each almost enough to hurt German war production. Had either synthetic rubber or ball bearings been hit another few times, the Germans would have been in trouble. In 1944, the primary targets were German oil production and the German transportation system (although both the British and US air forces dropped a lot of bombs on other kinds of targets), and these two worked together to cripple the German war economy.
Near the end of the year, France had been liberated, but Hitler had not given up on the war. He assembled a large attacking force in the West, and attempted to cut off and destroy about half of the Western Allied forces in the West. He correctly assumed that defeating the Soviets first was impossible, but hoped that he could defeat the West and throw enough force East to stabilize the situation and eventually reverse it. Naturally, the method he chose was not feasible militarily, but nothing was. The diehard Nazi general Model proposed a smaller solution, aimed at destroying one Allied army, and that might have worked. Of course, it would have had very little effect on the war. In any event, the American army performed very well in repelling the offensive, and it ended as a fiasco. Although many German troops had been cut off from Germany along the Baltic coast, Hitler refused to evacuate them. His plan was that, as long as the Baltic was essentially a German lake, he could use it to train crews for the new generation of submarines that would, he thought, cut off Allied shipping in the Eastern Atlantic. Hitler can be seen as coming up with all sorts of hairbrained schemes, but they all had the virtue that they conceivably could have affected the eventual outcome of the war, and only hairbrained schemes had that promise.
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All contents of these pages Copyright 1997, 1998 by David H. Thornley.