Chapter 4 The Normandy Campaign in Close Combat | 67 |
Soon after the Allies commit to the invasion of France, it becomes clear that an adequate troop and supply buildup for the landings will take longer than anticipated. In the interim, the Americans agree to join the British in invading North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. At the Trident conference, held in Washington in May 1943, the date for the invasion of France, known as
Preparations for Operation Overlord
Over the next twelve months, southern England resembles an enormous armed camp, as it becomes the site of the biggest buildup of men and materiel ever assembled for a military operation. By June 1944 nearly three million Allied troops have gathered under Eisenhower’s com- mand. The invasion now has a new codename: Operation Overlord, which Churchill has selected from a list compiled by his Chiefs of Staff. It also has a new location: the Calvados coast in Normandy, roughly between the town of Cabourg and the Cotentin Peninsula in northwest- ern France. Although this stretch of coastline is a greater distance from England than the Pas de Calais and the Cotentin Peninsula, it is less fortified and has fewer natural obstacles and better beaches for landing craft than either of those locations. The Normandy beaches are also within range of Allied fighter cover from airfields in southern England.
In the months before the invasion, the U.S. and British forces conduct training exercises that focus on the difficulties of amphibious landing operations. The training for the advance inland, held on the moors of southern England, relies on textbook tactics, notably the open order advance, two companies forward. Unfortunately, this training virtually ignores the actual hazards that await those who survive the assault on the beach. The Allied troops learn little about tactics for infiltrating the Norman hedgerow country, the bocage, with its small fields bounded by tall, dense hedges, an art the Germans have mastered. The invaders will pay a heavy price for this oversight.
British General Bernard Montgomery
“. . . the [bocage] area will not be an easy one for forces to advance through rapidly in the face of determined resistance . .
. . The tactics employed in fighting through the bocage country should be given considerable study.”
Supreme Headquarters, Allied
Expeditionary Force (SHAEF),
April 1944
“We simply did not expect to remain in the bocage long enough to justify studying it as a major tactical problem.”
An American senior staff officer, quoted by Max Hastings in Overlord:
