This article appears in: Winter The Allied planning for Operation Overlord had been ongoing for more than two years. Vast quantities of supplies and hundreds of thousands of fighting men and their machinery of war had crowded southern England. Then, on June 6, , the Allied invasion of Normandy was unleashed.
The expectations for Overlord were ambitious to say the least. Five beachheads were to be consolidated. In the east, the British were to capture the important road and communications center of Caen on D-Day, penetrating inland 20 miles.
To the west, American forces were to slice across the Cotentin Peninsula and capture the major port city of Cherbourg in nine days. Tenacious German resistance and some of the most challenging terrain in the world impeded Allied progress to the extent that the specter of stalemate became quite real to senior commanders, who had pinned their hopes on a quick breakout from the extended beachhead in Normandy and rapid movement across open country, where tanks and armored vehicles could operate freely.
Cherbourg fell to troops of the U. VII Corps, under Maj. Lawton Collins, on June 27, two weeks behind schedule, and Caen was still in German hands at the end of the month; the British and Canadian soldiers of Lt.
Casualties were heavy. British losses neared 4, men, and the Germans lost at least 6, killed, wounded, or captured. Civilians died in great numbers as well. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of all German forces in the West, and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of Army Group B, had deployed the bulk of their armored forces in the defense of Caen, realizing that the plain to the south of the town offered open country and rapid maneuver, while the terrain to the west and south was ideal for prolonged defensive operations and required fewer resources to hold the Americans at bay.
