Caen 1944: Montgomerys Break Out Attempt (Campaign, 143)

Rating:
Summary: A Tale of Five Frustrating Offensives
Review: With Osprey's Campaign #143,Caen 1944, Ken Ford follows-up his two earlier volumes in the series on the British D-Day beachheads. As usual, Ford's narrative is solid and well supported by graphics and data. Ford covers the five frustrating British offensives in June-July 1944 that ultimately captured the vital city of Caen but failed to achieve the desired breakout from the beachheads. However, readers should keep in mind that another recent series - Pen & Sword's Battleground Europe series - has titles that cover the same ground, usually in greater detail. While it is unfair to make a direct comparison between the 96-page Osprey format and the 192-page Pen & Sword Format, readers should be aware that Ford did not incorporate some of the material that makes the P&S volumes on Epsom, Hill 112 and Goodwood more original in content. On the other hand, Ford summarizes five battles (Epsom, Windsor, Charnwood, Jupiter and Goodwood) in 96 pages that P&S did in almost 600 pages, so readers seeking an overview of the campaign would be better advised to stick to the Osprey version.

The introductory sections in Caen 1944 are a bit too superficial, with little effort to provide insightful analysis on the strength and weaknesses of both sides. For example, Ford makes little comment on the limited extent of combined arms training in the British armor units prior to D-Day, but this clearly had an impact upon their early performance in Normandy. On the other hand, the desperate German shortage of decent infantry forced them to commit virtually all their armor to defensive missions, thereby robbing them of the initiative. It is noteworthy that no German army infantry divisions played any major role in the five offensives around Caen, which is a telling indictment of where the German army was going in late 1944 (a handful of powerful, high-quality divisions and a bunch of low-quality, odds-and-ends cannon fodder divisions). Ford's discussion of the operational-level issues hews to the company-line that Montgomery's intent always was to fix the German armor in the east while the Yanks broke out in the west, but ignores the facts that Montgomery failed to weight his main effort toward seizing Caen on D-Day and then dilly-dallied in the immediate 4-5 days after D-Day when the German defense around the city was still incomplete. In fact, the Caen campaign bears a lot of similarities to Montgomery's later Operation Market-Garden in that he planned an operation that required considerable risk and boldness, then executed the plan in a very slow and cautious manner that resulted in high loss and failure. Graphically, this volume is excellent. The author provides four 2-D maps (first Allied moves on Caen; Operation Epsom; Operation Charnwood and the Operation Goodwood plan), three 3-D maps (counterattack by 12th SS Panzer on 7 June; Operation Jupiter and Operation Goodwood). Osprey has improved the 3-D maps by adding 1-kilometer gridlines and moving all the text over to one side in sequence (it was always very frustrating to read the previous format, with events thrown helter-skelter all over the page), but at the cost of removing most of the 3-D effect and the elevation now seems pretty flat. The three battle scenes by Peter Dennis (the Regina Rifles street fighting in Caen; 5th Wiltshires attack on Hill 112; Luftwaffe 88mm guns engaging British armor) are excellent.

Ford's account of the initial British moves on Caen in the period 7-13 June 1944 in the critical week after D-Day are surprisingly brief. While his discussion of the 12th SS Panzer counterattack that stopped the Canadians from taking Carpiquet airfield on 7 June is excellent, he gives few details and no maps to display the 7th Armored Division drive to Villers Bocage or the 51st Highland attack east of the Orne. Indeed, the two weeks after D-Day around Caen rate only a few short pages. Instead, Ford focuses most of his intention on the big set-piece battles to get around Caen, which began with Operation Epsom on 24-30 June. Ford admits Epsom achieved little, but he opines that "it did frustrate German plans to push the Allies back into the sea" but by this point everyone on the German side but Hitler realized that the best that could be hoped for was a stalemate. Ford's description of the next offensive - Operation Windsor to seize Carpiquet airfield - is very interesting; the Canadians committed a very reinforced brigade, complete with battleship support, to seize a small area held by only 150 Germans. Amazingly, the Canadians failed to seize the entire airfield and suffered 4-1 casualties. The next two battles, Jupiter and Charnwood, resulted in capture of part of Caen, but at the cost of over 5,000 casualties.

The climax of the Caen campaign was Operation Goodwood, which was either intended as a breakout or a battle of attrition. Ford's account of Goodwood is marred by inadequate research; for example, he claims that "the Germans had been able to pull their panzers out of the frontline" but in fact the 22nd Panzer Regiment and other 21st Panzer units were on the FEBA. By missing this fact, Ford omits mention that the Allied carpet bombing clobbered quite a few German tanks, including several Tiger tanks. There doesn't seem to be much analysis here why Goodwood failed and the key question of whether the gains justified the losses remains unasked. However, Ford does mention that the Germans lost over 100 tanks on the first day of Goodwood (he may be counting assault guns and SP howitzers, too), which if true, means the Montgomery did succeed in whittling down some of the German armor. Overall, Ford's volume is quite good and one of the better Osprey volumes in awhile, but readers interested in greater detail would be advised to read the recent Pen & Sword volumes as well.