The US campaign in Germany began sooner than anticipated in mid-September 1944. With the decimation of the German army in the west in a sequence of summer encirclement battles at Falaise, the Seine river, and finally the Mons pocket in Belgium, the Wehrmacht was in headlong retreat. In the 1930s, Germany had erected a series of fortified defenses along the Westwall, better known as the Siegfried line. However, not expecting to need them so soon, many of the pillboxes and other fortifications were unmanned or had no armament. As a result, when the US 3rd Armored Division suddenly appeared on the German frontier near Aachen in mid-September, the Siegfried line proved to be a hollow defense. The US 5th Armored Division also made a penetration further south, on the approaches of Bitburg through the forested Eifel region. Although the US Army made a narrow penetration of the Siegfried line near Aachen. Allied attention was focused elsewhere. Priority in September was given to Operation Market Garden, the British plan to seize the Rhine river bridge at Arnhem by airborne assault. The failure at Arnhem was critical for Allied plans since it distracted the British 21st Army Group from clearing the Scheldt estuary leading into the harbor at Antwerp. Without a functioning port at Antwerp, Allied forces in the Low Countries were critically short of supplies. German forces had wrecked the port facilities at Cherbourg and in the Breton ports, and the ports at Normandy were not sufficient to supply the Allied armies for offensive operations. Until the approaches to Antwerp were cleared in late November, the pace of Allied operations along the German frontier were restricted by inadequate supplies.
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