Operation Spring Awakening
Operation Frühlingserwachen ("Spring Awakening") (6 – 16 March 1945) was the last major German offensive launched during World War II. The offensive was launched in Hungary on the Eastern Front. This offensive was also known in German as the Plattensee Offensive, in Russian as the Balaton Defensive Operation (6 – 15 March 1945), and in English as the Lake Balaton Offensive.
The offensive was launched by the Germans in great secrecy on 6 March 1945. The German attacks were centered in the Lake Balaton area. This area included some of the last oil reserves still available to the Germans.
Operation Spring Awakening involved many German units withdrawn from the failed Ardennes Offensive on the Western Front including the 6th SS Panzer Army.
Read more about Operation Spring Awakening: Order of Battle, German Plan, German Attack, Soviet Counterattack and Subsequent Operations, Aftermath, Armband Order
Famous quotes containing the words operation, spring and/or awakening:
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the seasons of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.”
—A.C. (Algernon Charles)
“The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)