Britain's Forgotten Battle: The Reichswald Forest Campaign, 1945

On 8 February 1945, over 50,000 British and Canadian soldiers moved forward to attack German defensive positions, centered on the vast Reichswald Forest, in what proved to be one of the last and bloodiest battles of the whole Second World War in Europe. The Reichswald (German Imperial Forest) on the Rhineland borders of the Netherlands and Germany became the scene of an epic struggle that eventually sucked in over 200,000 British and Canadian service personnel. The Reichswald campaign, sandwiched between better known clashes such as 1944’s Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine in 1945, was a brutal campaign. General Eisenhower himself commented that it involved ‘some of the fiercest fighting of the whole war’. General Montgomery recalled that some of the German units involved ‘fought with a fanaticism un-excelled at any time in the war.’ The authors, Adrian and Dawn L. Bridge, provide a new and timely account of this epic British and Canadian struggle against the German Wermacht, fought out on the forested north-eastern borders of Germany during the dying days of the Second World War.