The Battle for Caen (June to August 1944) is the name given to fighting between the British Second Army and the German Panzergruppe West in the Second World War for control of the city of Caen and its vicinity during the larger Battle of Normandy. The battles followed Operation Neptune, the Allied landings on the French coast on 6 June 1944 (D-Day).
Caen was destroyed by Allied bombing and the damage from ground combat, which caused many French civilian casualties. After the battle, little of the prewar city remained, and reconstruction of the city took until 1962.
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Intelligence gained from reading German wireless messages coded by Enigma cipher machines was codenamed Ultra by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park in England; by mid-1943, Ultra regularly was, unknown to the Germans, being read and passed on to senior Allied commanders.[2][b] German measures to repel an invasion and the success of Allied deception measures could be gauged by reference to Ultra and other sources of intelligence.[3] In March 1944, decrypts showed that invasions were expected anywhere from Norway to Spain. On 5 March, the Kriegsmarine (German navy) thought that up to six divisions would invade Norway and Fremde Heere West (FHW, Foreign Armies West), the intelligence department of Oberkommando des Heeres (German army high command) that studied the Allied order of battle put the danger zone between the Pas de Calais and the Loire valley. Rundstedt forecast a 20-division invasion in early May, probably between Boulogne and Normandy but identified accurately the concentration area between Southampton and Portsmouth. Anti-invasion practices were conducted from Bruges to the Loire and one scheme assumed an invasion 50 km (31 mi) wide from Ouistreham to Isigny; on 1 June, FHW predicted an invasion on 12 June either on the Mediterranean coast or in the Balkans.[4][c]
From 7 to 8 April Montgomery held Operation Thunderclap, a planning exercise in which the intention of the operation was given as simultaneous attacks north of the Carentan Estuary and between the estuary and the Orne, to capture a bridgehead that included airfield sites and the port of Cherbourg. Montgomery forecast a rapid German reinforcement of the Normandy front by D+4, from a Westheer (Western army) total of sixty divisions, ten being panzer or Panzergrenadier divisions, to conduct a counter-offensive against the landing beaches. Montgomery predicted that the German offensive would be defeated and the Germans would have to change to the defensive by D+8 to contain the Allied lodgement. The Second Army, comprising British and Canadian divisions, was to land west of the Orne, protected by an airborne division which was to land east of the river and capture the Orne bridges at Benouville and Ranville. The Anglo-Canadians were to advance south and south-east, to capture ground for airfields and guard the eastern flank of the First Army as it attacked Cherbourg. Montgomery used a map to show phase lines, a planning device inherited from the COSSAC plan, to show a first phase complete by D+20, with the battlefront along a line running from the Channel coast to east of Caen, south-west of the city, south of Vire and south of Avranches to the coast.[12][13]
Three infantry divisions and three armoured brigades of I Corps were to attack southwards through Caen to the Orne river and capture bridgeheads in the districts of Caen south of the river.[84][85] An armoured column was prepared to advance through the city to rush the bridges to exploit the victory and sweep on through southern Caen toward the Verrires and Bourgubus ridges, opening the way for the Second Army to advance toward Falaise.[86] New tactics were tried, including a preparatory bombardment by Allied strategic bombers to assist the Anglo-Canadian advance and to prevent German reinforcements from reaching the battle or retreating.[87][88][89] Suppression of the German defences was a secondary consideration; close support aircraft and 656 guns supported the attack.[90]
The 12th SS Panzer Division withdrew during the night and early on 9 July, British and Canadian patrols entered the city and Canadians occupied Carpiquet airfield.[99] By noon, the Allied infantry had reached the north bank of the Orne.[100] Some bridges were left intact but were blocked by rubble and covered by German troops on the south bank poised for a counter-attack.[101][102] Following the battle "In the houses that were still standing there slowly came life, as the French civilians realized that we had taken the city. They came running out of their houses with glasses and bottles of wine."[98]
In a 2004 academic study, Robert Citino criticised the British on D-Day, at Villers-Bocage, Epsom and Goodwood, for failing to use mobile warfare tactics and in 2009, Antony Beevor wrote that the British had not been sufficiently ruthless. Buckley wrote that these critics concentrated on British failings; only a few hours after the landings began on 6 June, the British army was "supposedly fluffing its lines"; in 1962 the historian Alexander McKee described the D-Day rush on Caen degenerating into a "plodding advance by a few hundred riflemen", a failure which condemned the British to costly battles of attrition. Buckley wrote that critics had it that the British "bungled matters again" at Villers Bocage a week after D-Day, when the 7th Armoured Division was "stopped dead in its tracks, apparently by the action of a single Tiger tank". For the next few weeks, despite plentiful resources, the British attacks on Caen "seemingly made little headway", while the US First Army captured Cherbourg and the Cotentin Peninsula. After the capture of the Cotentin, the Americans pushed south and were poised for Operation Cobra by 25 July. The British Operation Goodwood, which had taken place east of Caen the week before, was written off as a "humiliating failure", with 400 tanks knocked out. When the Germans were finally driven from Normandy, the British "seemingly made a hash of the pursuit" by not trapping German forces west of Antwerp.[123]
Buckley wrote that criticism of the performance of the British army came to a head in the 1980s and was reflected in popular films, television programmes, board and computer games. The view of the British army as "triumphant and successful" had been replaced by one of an "unimaginative force which only prevailed...through sheer weight of resources and...outmoded attritional methods". Artillery was the main infantry-killer of the war and it was Allied, especially British artillery, which was the most feared by the Germans after 1942; British guns dominated the battlefield and prevented concentration and manoeuvre. The British also emphasised support for the infantry and tanks by all arms and provided plenty of equipment and ammunition, while the Germans had to improvise and lurch from crisis to crisis.[124] In Normandy, the Anglo-Canadians had experienced casualty rates similar to those of the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917 and by the end of August, each of the seven British infantry divisions in France had suffered about 75 percent casualties. Riflemen amounted to 15 percent of the army and bore 70 percent of the losses, yet the human cost of the Battle of Normandy, much of which was fought by the Anglo-Canadians against Panzergruppe West for possession of Caen, came within War Office expectations. The Anglo-Canadians played a crucial role in Normandy but managed to avoid a bloodbath like those of the First World War and the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945.[125]
On 14 June, a period of Anglo-Canadian set-piece attacks and wider-front US attacks began, after which Allied attacks were delayed or weakened only by the weather; Badsey wrote that the German commanders admitted defeat on 17 June but Hitler refused Rommel and Rundstedt permission to retreat. Hitler ordered the generals to hold Cherbourg instead, which condemned the Germans to a series of defeats in "hard-fought" battles that were never "close run"; Dollmann, the 7th Army commander, killed himself the next day. The German commanders interpreted apparent Allied caution according to their military ethos, which took little notice of French civilian and German army casualties, in contrast to the Allied duty to protect French civilians and use tactics which conserved manpower.[129]
Badsey wrote that histories of the battle acknowledge the importance of Cherbourg to the Allies as an entrept for supplies and that landing on the Calvados coast, instead of the Cotentin peninsula was a compromise, because of the defensive advantage that the terrain of the peninsula gave to the Germans and the importance of gaining ground south of Caen for airfields. The Germans assumed that Cherbourg was the Allied Schwerpunkt (point of main effort) despite being able to see the Allied Mulberry harbours being built. The Luftwaffe was ordered to make a maximum effort against Allied shipping on 7 June, yet bombing and mining sorties by Luftflotte 3 were ineffectual. None of the extant records of Heeresgruppe B and the 7th Army show any understanding that the Mulberries had freed the Allies from the need to capture Cherbourg quickly.[131] On 14 June, the First Army surprised the Germans again, by attacking across the Cotentin Peninsula but took until D+21 to take the port, rather than the planned D+16 and only half the expected tonnage was unloaded from July.[129] Badsey wrote that ignoring the significance of the Mulberries was caused by the German emphasis on battlefield effectiveness at the expense of supply and because orthodox thinking stressed that Cherbourg was the closest big port to the Allied landings.[132]
In Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy (2003), Terry Copp wrote that the Canadian performance in Normandy had been underestimated and described the tactical and operational flair of the Canadian army. Copp also wrote that despite demonstrating great powers of resistance, the German armies had shown no skill in defence and that their tactic of immediate counter-attack was persisted with for far too long after its futility in the face of Allied firepower had become obvious. The Germans had singularly failed to rise to the Allied challenge and that much of this was due to the Allies denying them the opportunity, a considerable tactical, operational and strategic achievement.[133] Copp also wrote that the Anglo-Canadian armies had been criticised for a lack of a formal tank-infantry "battlegroup doctrine" similar to that used in the German armies and that this was correct; everything was allowed and armoured unit commanders chose the methods to be used, which turned out to be an advantage when they discovered in the first few days of the invasion that swift reorganisation and improvisation were needed.[134] be457b7860
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