Status Updates From Fire and Steel: The End of ...

Part of the underlying logic of the VARSITY airborne operation had been to help fix Armeegruppe B 's armored reserves and prevent them from being deployed elsewhere and it that the airborne operation was highly succesful.

As Stalingrad, or Ortana had demonstrated earlier.. urban warfare was not only an expensive business, but one in which the West's air suppremacy was an asset of limited value. Eisenhower saw no point in capturing an objective like Berlin at the estimated price of 100k casualties, only to later hand it over as part of the Soviet occupation zone as already defined at Yalta.

The weather, so often overlooked in these accounts, made a difference here, for the drizzle of spring softened everything apart from metalled roads, forcing the American vehicles to keep to the highways, where they were targeted by Panzerfaust wielding Volksgrenadiers. Despite the overcast, Messerschmitt 109s and jet-propelled 262 swooped on US units at every turn.

Those 67 Wehrmacht "divisions" in the West included 150k fully equipped personnel uselessly bottled up in four Atlantic ports, the Channel Islands & Dunkirk. In addition, 23 divisions were still contesting Italy against Mark Clark's Fifteenth Army Group, with 11 pointlessly lurking in Norway & 12 operating in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean.

"The Rhine is as swift as the Rhône, as wide as the Loire, limpid and green as the Somme, historic as the Tiber, royal as the Danube, mysterious as the Nile, spangled with gold like a river of America and covered with fables and phantoms like a river of Asia."

VICTOR HUGO

The Reich's western moat, a cornerstone of the German psyche, had proved to be a gentler experience than 6th Army Group had right to expect.

The throb of a hundred little engines carried through the silence of the night & the Germans soon realised what was afoot. The first wave of the Thunderbirds were unmolested, but the second wave had a hard time, losing half its boats, their occupants swept away & drowned in the speedy current.Enough made it, there was a glint of bayonets in the moonlight & the closest German positions fell.