corps of the First Army were concentrated elsewhere, VIII Corps occupied a long stretch of the front from the area south of Liège, across the Ardennes and into Luxembourg. The length of the deployment meant that the Corps' front line was only lightly defended, leaving it vulnerable. Following a few months of relative calm in Belgium, on 16 December 1944 the Germans launched the Ardennes Offensive with over a quarter of a million soldiers. Antwerp was the ultimate objective of the German offensive, but the German advance stalled before the Meuse River, at Celles near Dinant, and was pushed back in furious fighting over a period of six weeks in bitterly cold weather by American, British and Belgian troops. Belgian towns and civilians in the Ardennes suffered during the offensive as homes were reduced to ruins, and there were instances of German troops shooting civilians. Around 90% of the town of La Roche-en-Ardenne was destroyed during fighting. By 4 February 1945, the country was reported to be free of German troops. In the six months following Allied liberation, Belgian towns were widely targeted by the unpiloted German V-Bombs. A total of 2,342 of these rockets (1610 of the more advanced V-2s and about 732 V-1s) fell in a 10-mile radius around Antwerp alone. A post-war SHAEF report estimated V-Bombs had been responsible for killing 5,000 people and injuring a further 21,000, mostly in the cities of Liège and Antwerp. The period after liberation also saw a wave of prosecutions of those suspected of collaboration during the war. 400,000 Belgians were investigated for collaboration of whom 56,000 were prosecuted. Nearly 250 were executed. Léon Degrelle, despite being sentenced to death, managed to escape to Francoist Spain where he remained until his death in 1994. Legacy and aftermath After the experience of World War II, Belgium abandoned its neutral stance in international politics, in favour of military, political and economic integration. In 1949, Belgium joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deployed troops to fight alongside other United Nations forces in the Korean War in 1950. Belgium was also a key player in the unsuccessful negotiations about the creation of a European Defence Community (EDC) in the 1950s. Belgium was assigned a sector of the British zone in West Germany, around the city of Cologne, which it occupied from 1945. Belgian soldiers remained in Germany until their final withdrawal in 2002. Economically,