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 centred on the vast Reichswald Forest, in what proved to be one of the last and bloodiest battles of the whole of the Second World War in Europe. The Reichswald (German Imperial Forest) on the Rhineland borders of the Netherlands and Germany became the location of an epic struggle that eventually sucked in over 200,000 British and Canadian service personnel.

The campaign, sandwiched between better-known clashes such as 1944’s Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine in 1945, was brutal. The Allies suffered nearly 16,000 casualties, the Germans an estimated 44,000. Drawing on a wealth of sources from British, Canadian and European museums and archives, the authors provide a new and timely account - on the 80th anniversary - of this epic British and Canadian struggle against the Wehrmacht, fought out on the north-eastern borders of Germany during the dying days of the war in Europe.

Adrian L. Bridge was born in the local area and has a BA in history, an MA, a PGCE, and was a postgraduate research scholar with the British Academy. He lectured in history for nearly 20 years, at various further and higher-education institutions. Although semi-retired, Adrian continues to work on a part-time basis as a senior assessment specialist with the Cambridge Assessment wing of the University of Cambridge.

Dawn L. Bridge is a history graduate, originally from Stoke. She is a specialist in women’s history, having organized and delivered exhibitions on the subject. Dawn has delivered a number of local history talks to Cheshire Women’s Institutes and Mothers’ Unions.