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thrust through the weakest point of el's rces. El Alamein was the rst major g und battle the British had won. On N ember 8, combined British and American troops i aded Axis-held Nor A ica under the com­ mand of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Allied troops were now on the o ensive.
Though Hitler still shou d in his speeches about total victo , the noose was slowly tightening. On July 10, 1943 the Allies landed in Sicily; on July 25 Mussolini was erth wn. On September 3 e Allies landed on the mainland of I ly. The battle up the boot of It y was long and bloody, at least partly because the Allied generals made a number of costly mistakes.
In the meantime the Allied high command planned an i sion of France. They set up a "phan m army" in England at Kent to ol the Germans into thinking that the invasion uld strike at s de Calais instead of at Normandy. Ultra told the Allies at their ruse had wo d. Ultra also told them that the Germans did not expect the a ack to e place in the rst week of June because of the bad weather. Their armies were totally unprepared. There re Eisenhower o ered the. attack in spite of the weather. On June ·6, 1944-D D - e Allied troops poured ashore on the beaches of Normandy and pushed deep into France. On ne 20, ssia also launched an o ensive, moving into Europe om the east.
A small group of Germans now decided that de at was in itable and there re the best thing they could do r the country th loved was to assassinate Hitler, take er the government and negotiate a peace treaty with England and America, there eeing their armies to ght the Communist rces. This was not the rst opposition Hitler. The Kreisau Circle, a group of young Christians, had met regularly to plan r Germany of the ture so at evils such as Nazism would not recur, but th were arrested and killed. Admiral Canaris, chief of German intelligence, used his high position to rk against Hitler secretly and saved the lives of some intended victims of concentration camps. But none of the anti-Hitler groups had the really strong leadership they needed.
The leadership nally came om a Bavarian Catholic, Count Klaus von Stau enberg, a brilliant young colonel in the German army who had lost an eye and a hand in the war. The assassination attempt was scheduled r July 20 when Stau enberg was to be with Hitler at gensberg. He care lly prepared a time bomb in his brie ase, carried it in the con r­ ence room, and put the brie ase a table leg near Hitler's chair. The bomb was set to go o in ten minutes. As the time ticked , Stau en-