Allied numbers and material support clearly had an impact, but it was significant that the fighting forces had defeated even the most fanatical German formations in the field. Most of the divisions committed to the defence of France were either wiped out or reduced to remnants. Hitler's refusal to allow his commanders freedom to give up ground, and insistence on reinforcing failure, gave the Allies a more complete victory than they could have hoped for, as enemy units were sucked in to the maelstrom and destroyed. The Allied plan for a broad, phased advance was overtaken by events, and the final breakout was dramatic. It was a battle of attrition, which the Allies with their vast superiority in men and materiel were bound to win. Instead, armoured divisions were fed into the line piecemeal to shore up depleted infantry formations. For its part, the German High Command was never able to gather sufficient resources for a concentrated counter-offensive. The Normandy campaign became a costly slogging match against a tenacious and often more experienced enemy who had the advantage of terrain well-suited to defence.Īs attacks inevitably bogged down, the Allies relied increasingly on their artillery and air support. But success in getting and staying ashore was tempered by an inability to capture ground inland. General Montgomery’s strategy in the weeks after D-Day focused on taking Caen in the east of the lodgement area, around which the bulk of the German armour was concentrated, and facilitating the build-up and breakout of American forces in the west.
In the event, the city was not fully occupied until mid-July. Caen was a strategically important road junction, beyond which lay open country suitable for the deployment of armoured formations and the construction of airfields. The key objective for D-Day - beyond establishing a firm foothold ashore - was the capture of the city of Caen, which lay south of the British assault area.
Many were attracted to the idea of expanding the Allied thrust into the 'soft underbelly' of Europe, perhaps even opening a new theatre of operations in the Balkans.īut the German response to D-Day, when it came, was slow and confused thanks to a complex command structure and the successful Allied deception plan, which held open the threat of a landing in the Pas de Calais even into July. The fear of heavy losses in a direct confrontation with elite German formations in north-west Europe was always in the minds of Churchill and his generals. Lessons would be learned too from amphibious assaults in Sicily and Italy, where Allied forces put in lacklustre performances against enemy troops of lower quality than might be expected in France. D-Day would need prodigious aerial and naval firepower to soften the beach defences, air superiority to allow forces to assemble and deploy without hindrance and a host of specialised armoured vehicles to tackle obstacles on the beaches. The disastrous large-scale raid on the port of Dieppe in 1942 had shown what could be expected from a direct assault on Hitler’s 'Atlantic Wall' with insufficient resources. But this delay worked to the Allies' advantage. US involvement in the Mediterranean effectively put back the invasion of France to 1944.
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