D-Day to the Rhine: 1944–45 Early in 1945, the armies of the Western Allies conducted a series of offensives that defeated the Germans in battles starting at the Rhine River and extending to the link up with the Soviets on the Elbe. Those offensives were the payoff of earlier strategic decisions as well as the logistical realities that shaped them.

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• The Fall of East Prussia, 1945 The Red Army’s “East Prussia Offensive Operation” took place from January through April 1945. Conquering the heartland of the Prussian military aristocracy turned out to be one of the costliest and most bitterly contested campaigns fought by the Red Army since Stalingrad.
• Pacific D-Day: Saipan, 15 June 1944 Though Allied victories in 1942/43 captured ground and inflicted staggering losses on the Japanese, their home islands remained beyond the reach of US bombers. In May 1944, however, a new plane—the B-29, with a range of almost 3,000 miles—became available. With the Mariana Islands—which included Saipan—just 1,260 miles from Tokyo, their strategic importance was suddenly highlighted. Victory there would secure bases from which B-29s could strike targets in the home islands.
• Germany’s Middle East Option After the fall of France, Adolf Hitler had three strategic options to use to try to win the war. He soon gave up on the first—invading Britain—as impossible without air and naval supremacy. He eventually opted for the second—the ultimately disastrous, invasion of the USSR. The third option was an advance through the Balkans and Turkey into Iran. From there, German forces would have been in position to attack the Soviets from the south, or they could continue east to India in conjunction with a Japanese advance west from Burma.