Seventy-five years after its conclusion, it’s easy to think of World War II simply through the prism of certain major battles. Those such as the Battle of Britain, Operation Torch in North Africa, D-Day, Midway, Sicily, Okinawa, the dropping of the atomic bombs.
While all those events are worthy of our contemplation, we shouldn’t forget the other campaigns that supported them. To honor those who fought and fell for freedom, we should also strive to remember the battles that made their more famous partners so pivotal. Doing so, we understand how the “absolute victory” that Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised after the attack on Pearl Harbor was won.
Take what happened 76 years ago today in relation to D-Day.
It was July 30, 1944, 54 days after the landings that saw allied armies pour into France. But the allies were stuck, constricted from mobility by the deep hedgerows or “Bocage” of northern Normandy. And by the refusal of elite German armor and airborne infantry divisions to give ground. Contained in a narrow part of the northern Cotentin Peninsula, controlling an area linked by the port of Cherbourg to Carentan to Bayeux, the allies needed to get moving. To break the deadlock, 1st Army Cmdr. Gen. Omar Bradley had five days earlier launched Operation Cobra. Supported by diversionary British and Canadian attacks against German armored divisions on the American left flank, Cobra would match air supremacy to a combined artillery-infantry-armored assault by the Army’s VII and VIII Corps.
The fighting was fierce with outgunned and undersupplied German forces fighting a desperate defense and, as at Saint-Denis-le-Gast, launching occasionally bold counterattacks. But the tactical means of this American victory were the same as the strategic means by which the allies ultimately won the war: aggressive action matched to the overwhelming supremacy of equipment and force. Smashing their way through the German lines, by July 30, the Americans had the Wehrmacht in full and disorganized retreat. The U.S. Army records how “more than 100,000 combat troops poured south through a gap not five miles wide, soon turning the German left flank and capturing several key bridges near Avranches, the gateway from Normandy to Brittany.”
Then Avranches was taken, and the approaches into mainland France thus secured.
But the victory wasn’t yet complete. To tie down German armored forces, the British Army’s XXX Corps, famed for its action in North Africa, launched a diversionary assault under Operation Bluecoat. It worked. By Aug. 1, George Patton was in action as commander of the 3rd Army. Patton’s celebratory poem, Absolute War, spoke to why Bradley had restored him to combat command and to what was to come. “Let’s take a chance now that we have the ball. Let’s forget those fine firm bases in the dreary shell raked spaces. Let’s shoot the works and win! Yes, win it all!”
Patton charged across France, taking advantage of Adolf Hitler’s predictably idiotic refusal to allow his forces to regroup in depth. By August’s end, Patton would be just outside Metz, only 20 miles from the German border. Yes, more battles and more suffering were to follow, such as at Mortagne just one week after Cobra. But it was all these victories that made the final victory possible.
Remember what happened 76 years ago today, those who died to see it done, and why it matters.
