Normandy breakout (July–August 1944)

Background

By early July 1944 the Allies had been ashore for a month and the campaign had stalled. Caen, a D-Day objective, was only partly in British hands, and south of the Cotentin the First US Army was fighting through the bocage: small fields boxed in by banks and hedgerows that the Germans had linked into a continuous band of strongpoints in depth. Progress was often one hedgerow a day. First Army lost about 40,000 men in July, nine-tenths of them infantry, and by mid-month had asked the United States for 25,000 rifle replacements.

The Germans were bleeding too. By 17 July they had lost about 100,000 men in Normandy, and by 11 July only about 5,200 replacements had reached the front. On 17 July Rommel was wounded, and Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, already Commander-in-Chief West, took direct command of Army Group B as well.

Montgomery, commanding the Allied ground forces, meant the British and Canadians around Caen to draw the German armour onto the eastern flank while the Americans broke out in the west. By 11 July Bradley, discouraged by the hedgerow fighting, had conceived the plan that became Cobra: a carpet of bombs on a narrow front west of St-Lô, then a rush of armour through the gap. It needed a start line along the Périers–St-Lô road, which meant taking St-Lô first, and it needed the panzers held in the east. Those two needs produced the opening battles on this page, fought at either end of the front in the same week of July.

The armies

The Allied side was Montgomery's 21st Army Group: Lieutenant-General Omar Bradley's First US Army in the west and Lieutenant-General Miles Dempsey's Second British Army around Caen, with II Canadian Corps alongside it. On 1 August Bradley moved up to 12th Army Group, Courtney Hodges took over First Army and George Patton's Third Army became operational. More than 1,452,000 Allied troops were ashore by 25 July. Their strength was artillery, air power and sheer numbers of tanks: Cobra was mounted with 2,451 tanks and tank destroyers and over 1,000 guns, Goodwood with 1,369 tanks.

Against them stood Kluge's Army Group B: Paul Hausser's Seventh Army in the west and General Heinrich Eberbach's Panzer Group West at Caen, about 380,000 men by 23 July. How they were spread decided the campaign. Around 25 July seven panzer divisions faced the British and Canadians, but only two, the 2nd SS Panzer and Panzer Lehr, faced the Americans, and Panzer Lehr went into Cobra with about 2,200 combat troops and perhaps 45 serviceable armoured vehicles. German infantry, including General Eugen Meindl's II Parachute Corps at St-Lô, defended skilfully but was being ground away: the 3rd Parachute Division was down to 35 per cent of its authorised strength by the night of 11 July. Overhead, the Luftwaffe barely figured; at Mortain Allied fighters kept it off the battlefield entirely.

The battle

St-Lô, 11–19 July (CDB90 458). XIX Corps attacked east of the Vire on 11 July; on its left the 2nd Division took Hill 192. The 29th Division (Major-General Charles Gerhardt), the force CDB90 counts, pushed along the Martinville ridge and lost nearly 1,000 men in two days. On 15 July Major Sidney Bingham's 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry, was cut off within 1,000 yards of the town; Major Thomas Howie's 3rd Battalion reached it on 17 July, and Howie was killed by a shell soon afterwards. The Germans slipped out that night, and at 18:00 on 18 July Brigadier-General Norman Cota's task force entered St-Lô carrying Howie's flag-draped body, which was laid on the rubble before the church of Sainte-Croix.

Goodwood, 18–20 July (459). After nearly 2,100 aircraft had dropped over 8,000 tons, Dempsey's VIII Corps sent the 11th, Guards and 7th Armoured Divisions out of the cramped bridgehead east of the Orne. The 11th Armoured went in behind a creeping barrage at 07:45 and covered three miles in about an hour, crossing the Caen–Vimont railway. By late morning it was at Bourguébus ridge, where intact gun lines and counter-attacks by the 21st Panzer Division, with the Tigers of the 503rd Heavy Tank Battalion, and the 1st SS stopped it; the Guards were held near Cagny. VIII Corps lost 270 tanks and 1,500 men that day. The 12th SS Panzer Division came back into the line, 19 July gained little, and at about 17:30 on 20 July a violent downpour ended the battle. On the right the Canadians of Operation Atlantic cleared Caen's southern suburbs but failed on Verrières ridge.

Cobra, 24–31 July (460). On 24 July the air attack was called off too late, and bombs falling short killed 25 and wounded 131 in the 30th Division alone. Next morning over 1,500 heavy bombers dropped more than 3,300 tons south of the Périers–St-Lô road, with mediums and fighter-bombers adding over 850 tons and napalm. Bombs from 35 heavies and 42 mediums fell inside American lines, killing 111 and wounding 490, among them Lieutenant-General Lesley McNair, head of Army Ground Forces and the most senior American soldier killed in action in Europe. Panzer Lehr lost perhaps a third of its combat effectives.

Collins's VII Corps attacked at 11:00 and gained only a mile, but Kluge was already reporting that the front had 'burst'. He committed his armour on 26 July. On the 28th the 4th Armored Division took Coutances as the Americans closed a trap around Roncey; by 31 July they held Avranches and the Pontaubault bridge, the gateway to Brittany. 'It's a madhouse here,' said Kluge. CDB90's engagement stops on 27 July.

Mortain, 7–13 August (461; also 612 and 613). Hitler ordered a counter-attack to cut the Avranches corridor, Operation Lüttich, and shortly after midnight on 6–7 August General Hans von Funck's XLVII Panzer Corps struck without artillery preparation: the 2nd SS, 2nd and 116th Panzer Divisions and part of the 1st SS, 120–190 tanks by American estimates. The 2nd SS took Mortain from the 120th Infantry (CDB90's Mortain II); the 2nd Panzer and 1st SS reached Le Mesnil-Tôve and St-Barthélemy, where a battalion of the 117th Infantry lost 350 men (Mortain I). The expected fog never came. After about six miles, artillery, anti-tank guns and some 294 fighter-bomber sorties, many by RAF Typhoons, stopped the attack by afternoon.

East of the town nearly 700 men of the 2nd Battalion, 120th Infantry, held Hill 317 (Hill 314 in most later accounts), directing artillery onto the 2nd SS and living on air drops and on morphine and bandages fired in smoke shells. When relief came at noon on 12 August about 300 had been killed or wounded. The Germans had begun pulling back the night before, as Haislip's XV Corps, past Le Mans, drove north behind them towards Argentan.

Aftermath

No source gives a single casualty bill for these five weeks; the pieces are in the figures' notes. The 30th Division lost almost 2,000 men at Mortain; Goodwood cost VIII Corps over 4,000 men and, by Blumenson's count, about 500 tanks, many later recovered. The Germans lost 20,000 prisoners to First Army in the last six days of July and abandoned close to 100 tanks around Mortain.

The consequences were decisive. Eisenhower had told Bradley that the results of a breakout would be 'incalculable', and the US official historian agrees that they were. Lüttich left Seventh Army and Panzer Group West at the tip of a salient while the Americans swung round to Argentan and the Canadians pushed on Falaise; by 21 August the pocket had trapped about 50,000 Germans.

The arguments have never stopped. Goodwood is the sharpest. Montgomery's notes to Dempsey of 15 July spoke of engaging the German armour and 'writing it down' and of a bridgehead over the Orne, and Stacey reads the battle as a means of holding the panzers in the east, which, with Atlantic and Spring, it did. But Montgomery's messages to Eisenhower read like a promise of a breakthrough, the copies of the orders sent to SHAEF still named Falaise, and Eisenhower and Tedder judged it a failure; Blumenson notes that a real breakthrough would probably have made Cobra unnecessary. Mortain has its own disputes: how much warning Ultra gave, and whether the Typhoons or the ground troops stopped the panzers.

Wargaming it

This is four games, not one. St-Lô is the bocage at its purest: company and battalion fights where every field is a small fortress and the attacker's problem is getting infantry, tanks and artillery to work together across a single hedgerow. A skirmish or platoon-level game suits it, and the cut-off battalion at Martinville and Hill 192 make tidy scenarios.

Goodwood is the opposite: open, rising farmland, three armoured divisions funnelled out of a narrow bridgehead, and a defence in depth of fortified villages and gun lines on Bourguébus ridge. At brigade or divisional scale, with a stand for a troop or platoon, the British player feels the congestion and the German player must decide when to commit the Tigers and the reserve panzer divisions.

Cobra is a game about the carpet: how long the defenders stay stunned, the risk of the bombs falling on your own start line, and whether to commit the armour before the crust is broken, as Collins did on 26 July. Mortain gives the Germans the initiative for once: a night attack, a race against the fog that never comes and the fighter-bombers that do, and an isolated battalion on Hill 314 whose observers can call fire over the whole field.

At operational scale the what-ifs are big ones: Goodwood breaking through to Falaise, the panzers shifted west before Cobra, or Kluge falling back to the Seine instead of attacking at Mortain.

Maps and pictures