| Battle for Brittany | |||||||
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| Part of the Western Front of World War II | |||||||
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Axis  Germany | |||||||
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The Battle for Brittany took place between August and October 1944. After the Allies broke out of Normandy in June 1944, Brittany became targeted for its well developed ports which the Allies intended to use, whilst also stopping their continued use by German U-boats.
The main objective of this battle was to secure Breton ports which could prove useful to the Allies to land more supplies.
The secondary objective of this battle was to end the use of Breton ports for U-boat operations.
Once liberated, the Allies planned to build an additional harbour at Quiberon. [1]
One of the first targets in Brittany, was a bridge at Pontaubault across the River Sélune. The Americans apparently quickly started experiencing communication issues with their rear command HQs, due to their rapid advance into northern Brittany, leading to other issues such as supplying the units on the move. [2]
The advance of the 8th Corps also brought an additional problem relating to the local resistance. The campaign in Brittany intended the French Resistance to openly fight the Germans. A French Forces of the Interior (FFI) officer based in London, Albert Eon, was flown in to lead an estimated 20,000 local fighters. Equipment was para-dropped in, but due to the rapid American advance, these weapons frequently landed in areas already captured forcing it to be moved up to them. The FFI did have some initial success:
Groups of FFI openly accompanied the Americans, where their local knowledge was used.
One assumed reason for the rapid advance of the Americans was that the Germans, had moved most of their forces back to the heavily defended ports, resulting in fewer troops in the interior than expected. These ports had been designated as fortresses to allow for their continued use by the Germans, to deny use by the Allies and finally if necessary to destroy and prevent them from ever being useful to the Allies. [3]
By the time the 20th Corps arrived in Nantes on August 6, its port facilities was in ruins. Also on the 6th, the Americans arrived at the outskirts of Brest, where fighting began and the city finally falling on September 18.
Similar problems were experienced at the pocket of St. Malo, where intelligence from the Resistance indicated a force of 10,000 Germans. The Americans encountered fierce opposition but they gradually advanced to the city's citadel, where the engineered defences meant that 1000-pound bombs were of little use. In desperation, the Americans prepared to drop napalm when the Germans finally surrendered. [4]
The Americans with the FFI faced a similar doggedness at the Brest pocket. Over 75 strong points in the city were attacked, but this proved to be slow-going and time-consuming. By the time of Germany's surrender on September 18, the Americans had lost 10,000 killed and wounded, whilst Brest was destroyed including its port, rendering it useless for Allies purposes.
Rather than risk the same at the Lorient and St. Nazaire pockets, the Americans simply surrounded these ports for the rest of the war, keeping the Germans isolated. Their surrender came at the end of the war. By that time, the need for these port facilities in Brittany had become redundant when the Port of Antwerp was captured.
This decision to use two armored divisions for the battle of Brittany has been criticised in hindsight, as they could have been used far more profitably in the rapid Allied advance eastward across France. Ironically, after so much effort, German sabotage proved so effective that the liberated Breton ports were unusable for the remainder of the war. [5]
Operation Dragoon was the code name for the landing operation of the Allied invasion of Provence on 15 August 1944. Although initially designed to be executed in conjunction with Operation Overlord, the Allied landing in Normandy, a lack of available resources led to a cancellation of the second landing. By July 1944 the landing was reconsidered, as the clogged-up ports in Normandy did not have the capacity to adequately supply the Allied forces. Concurrently, the High Command of the French Liberation Army pushed for a revival of the operation that would include large numbers of French troops. As a result, the operation was finally approved in July to be executed in August.
Operation Cobra was an offensive launched by the First United States Army under Lieutenant General Omar Bradley seven weeks after the D-Day landings, during the Normandy campaign of World War II. The intention was to take advantage of the distraction of the Germans by the British and Canadian attacks around Caen in Operation Goodwood, and thereby break through the German defenses that were penning in their forces, while the Germans were unbalanced. Once a corridor had been created, the First Army would then be able to advance into Brittany, rolling up the German flanks once free of the constraints of the bocage country. After a slow start, the offensive gathered momentum and German resistance collapsed as scattered remnants of broken units fought to escape to the Seine. Lacking the resources to cope with the situation, the German response was ineffectual and the entire Normandy front soon collapsed. Operation Cobra, together with concurrent offensives by the British Second Army and the Canadian First Army, was decisive in securing an Allied victory in the Normandy campaign.
Utah, commonly known as Utah Beach, was the code name for one of the five sectors of the Allied invasion of German-occupied France in the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944 (D-Day), during World War II. The westernmost of the five code-named landing beaches in Normandy, Utah is on the Cotentin Peninsula, west of the mouths of the Douve and Vire rivers. Amphibious landings at Utah were undertaken by United States Army troops, with sea transport, mine sweeping, and a naval bombardment force provided by the United States Navy and Coast Guard as well as elements from the British, Dutch and other Allied navies.
The Siegfried Line campaign was a phase in the Western European campaign of World War II, which involved actions near the German defensive Siegfried Line.
The Battle of Cherbourg was part of the Battle of Normandy during World War II. It was fought immediately after the successful Allied landings on 6 June 1944. Allied troops, mainly American, isolated and captured the fortified port, which was considered vital to the campaign in Western Europe, in a hard-fought, month-long campaign.
The Battle for Brest was fought in August and September 1944 on the Western Front during World War II. Part of the overall Battle for Brittany and the Allied plan for the invasion of mainland Europe called for the capture of port facilities, in order to ensure the timely delivery of the enormous amount of war materiel required to supply the invading Allied forces. It was estimated that the 37 Allied divisions to be on the continent by September 1944 would need 26,000 tons of supplies each day. The main port the Allied forces hoped to seize and put into their service was Brest, in northwestern France.
Operation Overlord was the codename for the Battle of Normandy, the Allied operation that launched the successful liberation of German-occupied Western Europe during World War II. The operation was launched on 6 June 1944 (D-Day) with the Normandy landings. A 1,200-plane airborne assault preceded an amphibious assault involving more than 5,000 vessels. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on 6 June, and more than two million Allied troops were in France by the end of August.
Operation Chastity was a World War II plan by the Allies to seize Quiberon Bay, France, enabling the construction of an artificial harbor to support Allied operations in Northern France in 1944.
The U.S. VIII Corps was a corps of the United States Army that saw service during various times over a fifty-year period during the 20th century. The VIII Corps was organized 26–29 November 1918 in the Regular Army in France and demobilized on 20 April 1919. The VIII Corps was soon reactivated, being constituted in the Organized Reserves in 1921. It was allotted to the Regular Army in 1933 and activated on 14 October 1940 at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. The VIII Corps fought across Europe from Normandy to Czechoslovakia in World War II. After World War II, the corps was inactivated and reactivated several times, with the final inactivation occurring in 1968.
Wilhelm Fahrmbacher was a general in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II who commanded several corps, including VII Corps, XXV Corps and LXXXIV Corps, fighting on both the Eastern Front and Western Front.
In World War II, the Atlantic pockets were locations along the coasts of the Netherlands, Belgium and France chosen as strongholds by the occupying German forces, to be defended as long as possible against land attack by the Allies.
The Battle of Marseille was an urban battle of World War II that took place August 21–28, 1944, and led to the liberation of Marseille by Free French forces under the command of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. The groundwork was laid by the Allied invasion of southern France in Operation Dragoon on 15 August 1944 by the United States Seventh Army, with major support from the French First Army.
The XXV Army Corps was an army corps of Germany's Wehrmacht during World War II.
The Saint-Nazaire Pocket was an Atlantic pocket that existed from August 1944 until 11 May 1945 and was formed by the withdrawal of German troops from Loire-Inférieure during the liberation of the department by the allied forces. It was centred around the port and the submarine base of Saint-Nazaire and extended to the east as far as Saint-Omer-de-Blain and from La Roche-Bernard in the north to Pornic in the south.
The Battle of Saint-Malo was fought between Allied and German forces to control the French coastal town of Saint-Malo during World War II. The battle formed part of the Allied breakout across France and took place between 4 August and 2 September 1944. United States Army units, with the support of Free French and British forces, successfully assaulted the town and defeated its German defenders. The German garrison on a nearby island continued to resist until 2 September.
The liberation of Rennes, along with its surrounding settlements, took place on 4 August 1944 by the joint action of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) and the 8th Infantry Division of the United States Army led by General Georges S. Patton, ending four years of capture of the city by the Nazi Germans as part of the liberation of Brittany.
Albert Eon was a head of the military resistance in Brittany, north-west France in World War II and developer of the Specialized Airborne of France.
Raymond Emmanuel Marie Siméon Chomel was a French General and leader of the resistance during World War Two.
The French Forces of the West, was a French Army Group created on 14 October 1944 by the Provisional Government of the French Republic to regroup French military forces in Western France, with the aim to contain or reduce the remaining pockets of German resistance on the French Atlantic coast.
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