After D-Day, the Allies found themselves slugging it out with the Germans in a nearly static attrition battle, for weeks. The Germans were, as usual, displaying a horrendous capacity to defend, and to counter-attack if they found an opening, extracting a high blood-price for every bit of ground. The Allied lodgment was sealed off, bottled up by the Germans. Montgomery’s attempt to breakout, GOODWOOD, had only served to litter the field with the scorched wrecks of one third of Britain’s armored strength on the continent. The Americans got to try next. July 25 was a carpet bombing of the German positions in front of the Americans, followed by a ground attack. By 60 years ago today, the Americans had pushed aside the German resistance in their path and the German defensive position was beginning to unravel. Patton arrived to take command of Third Army, and his moment and his Army’s moment on the stage of history began in earnest. Third Army broke through at Avranches on August 1. The wild ride which followed pushed the Germans out of France. (Short summaries of events here and here. Good timeline here.)
We celebrate D-Day, and rightly so. We should not forget that the weeks following were harsh and thankless and at times seemingly hopeless, and many feared that a stalemate was in the making. We should not forget those hard and bloody days endured by the Allied armies, nor the spectacular race across France which ensued when the Germans finally cracked.
(A recent, brilliant book on the Normandy campaign is Clash of Arms: How the Allies Won in Normandy by Russell A. Hart. This book is so good I’d like to do a post just on it. But I’ll probably never get to it. Reviewed here, and here (scroll down) and here.) (I also recently read Military Power : Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle by Stephen Biddle, which is an extraordinary book, which I really must write about here at some point. It is not really on topic, though it does have a chapter on the GOODWOOD battle. While I’m digressing, see also Biddle’s Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare to get an idea of his intellectual approach and rigor.)
Another Update
A thought occurs to me. Has anyone considered the analogy of the failure to plan for the hedgerows, since everyone was focused on getting ashore on D-Day which they really should have known about, and which really was a terrible error, — and the failure of planning for postwar Iraq, since everyone was thinking of a harder campaign with many more civilian casualties, possible use of gas by Saddam, millions of refugees, protracted urban combat in Baghdad, etc.? Did anyone think the proper response was to fire Montgomery or Eisenhower, or for that matter to vote for Dewey instead of FDR in the November 1944 election as a result of this planning failure? I think there is an analogy here … .
Update:
The expert on the hedgerows and dealing with them is Michael D. Doubler. This is from his book Busting the Bocage: American Combined Arms Operations in France, 6 June–31 July 1944: