This book, published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of VE Day – the last to be commemorated by significant numbers of surviving veterans – is a graphic account of the storming and taking of Hitler''s Festung Europa (''Fortress Europe'') by the Allies during the final eleven months of the Second World War. From the long-awaited opening of the second front in the West on D-Day, 6 June 1944, to the final surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945, the Allied armies in north-west Europe under the supreme command of Eisenhower fought a gruelling series of battles against Axis forces hardened by years of war and desperate to defend their homeland from destruction. This book shows the relentless progress of the epic war in the European Theatre of Operations, and focuses on the world-famous engagements such as Operation Market Garden (immortalised in the film A Bridge too Far), the Battle of the Bulge (the largest land battle fought by American troops in the Second World War), the Bridge at Remagen, the bombing of Dresden and other German cities, the discovery of the concentration camps, the US link-up with the Red Army on the Elbe, the fall of Berlin, the German surrender and VE Day itself. Written by a leading military historian, Julian Thompson, Victory in Europe contains 30 facsimile items of the Second World War reproduced throughout the book. The reader can re-live this momentous period of history by examining maps, diaries, letters, sketches, secret memos and reports, posters and labels which up till now have remained filed or exhibited in the Imperial War Museum and other museum collections in Northern Europe and America.