The capture of Caen

On 9 July 1944, after two days of heavy fighting, soldiers of the British 3rd Infantry Division and the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division met in the centre of Caen. By around 6 p.m. the whole northern part of the city, as far as the river Orne, was in Allied hands. The capital of the Calvados department, which the invasion plan had set as an objective for the first day, had fallen – in part – after 33 days of fighting, and in a state nobody had previously imagined: on the evening of 7 July almost 470 RAF heavy bombers had turned its old centre into a field of rubble.

The brief statement that after heavy resistance Caen was liberated by British troops on the left wing of the front needs two qualifications. Operation Charnwood (8–9 July) gave the Allies only the northern part of the city up to the Orne; the Germans held the southern districts, including the suburb of Vaucelles, until 18–19 July, when the Canadians took them in Operation Atlantic, conducted in parallel with the British Operation Goodwood. Nor was the capture of Caen a matter for the British alone – the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division took part in the attack and suffered some of its heaviest losses since D-Day.

The city that was to fall on the first day

Caen, with some 60,000 inhabitants before the war, was the most important road and rail junction in Lower Normandy. It lay a dozen or so kilometres from Sword Beach, at the bridges over the Orne and the canal leading to the sea, and to the south of it opened a dry, flat plain stretching towards Falaise – good country for tanks and for building airfields. That is why, in the plan for Operation Overlord, General Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of the invasion ground forces and of 21st Army Group, had made it an objective for the British 3rd Infantry Division on 6 June itself.

On the day of the Normandy landings this objective proved unattainable. The division landed according to plan, but congestion on the beach, delayed tanks and a counter-attack by the German 21st Panzer Division stopped it a few kilometres short of the city, at Lebisey. Over the following days the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend and the Panzer Lehr Division took up positions in front of Caen, and the front froze. Further west, meanwhile, the British entered Bayeux on 7 June, and the Americans took the Cotentin peninsula and, on 26 June, Cherbourg.

Successive attempts to outflank Caen ended in failure. The attack at Villers-Bocage in mid-June stalled, and Operation Epsom (26–30 June) gained a narrow salient beyond the Odon and fighting for Hill 112, but not the city itself. On 4 July the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division took the village of Carpiquet in Operation Windsor, but the neighbouring airfield remained in the hands of the SS. On the American sector, meanwhile, the gruelling Battle of the Hedgerows was under way.

On the German side the stalemate brought on a crisis of command. As early as 1 July Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt proposed a gradual withdrawal from Caen and the transfer of the panzer divisions against the Americans; Adolf Hitler rejected the idea and dismissed him, and on 3 July appointed Field Marshal Günther von Kluge Commander-in-Chief West. Command of Panzer Group West passed to General Heinrich Eberbach. Hitler’s order was simple: Caen was to be held.

On the Allied side the pressure grew by the day. In London and at Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters people were asking why the British were standing still, and the air forces needed the plain south of the city for forward airfields. Montgomery decided to take Caen by a frontal attack preceded by strategic bombing.

The raid of 7 July

On the evening of 7 July, between 9.50 and 10.30 p.m., according to the records of RAF Bomber Command, 467 Avro Lancaster and Handley Page Halifax heavy bombers appeared over Caen. They dropped more than 2,000 tons of bombs (French studies give about 2,500 tons). The raid was meant to smash the German positions north of the city, cut the supply routes and – as the commander of the British Second Army, General Miles Dempsey, stressed – raise the morale of his own soldiers.

For fear of hitting their own troops, the aiming point was moved several kilometres south, into the city, and the target-marking aircraft tended to drop their markers too far rather than too short. As a result the bombs fell mainly on the northern districts and the old centre, rather than on the villages in which the Germans had dug in. According to British analyses, only two tanks of the 12th SS Division were destroyed; the worst hit was the poorly trained 16th Luftwaffe Field Division (PL), which, according to French studies, lost most of its strength. The university buildings burned, and fires raged all night. Mosquitoes followed the bombers, and at 11 p.m. more than 600 guns of three divisions opened fire, supported by warships – the 16-inch (406 mm) guns of the battleship HMS Rodney, the monitor HMS Roberts and the cruisers Belfast and Emerald.

Civilian casualties were much lower than was believed in the first days. The British initially spoke of some 6,000 dead, and the Soviet correspondent attached to 21st Army Group, Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov, of as many as 22,000; the latter figure was repeated after the war by French Communist propaganda. Later findings speak of 300–400 civilians killed that night. Many inhabitants had already left the city or taken shelter in cellars, quarries and buildings marked with the red cross. The raid itself remains one of the most controversial episodes of the campaign: some historians regard it as a needless destruction of the old city, while others stress its importance for the morale of the attackers.

Operation Charnwood

The attack was carried out by the British I Corps under General John Crocker – some 115,000 men, according to British figures. Three divisions advanced on a broad, semicircular front north and north-west of Caen: the British 3rd Infantry Division from the north-east, the British 59th (Staffordshire) Infantry Division from the north, and the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division from the north-west, each supported by an armoured brigade. The defence rested on an arc of fortified villages – Galmanche, La Folie, Buron, Gruchy, Authie, Cussy – and on the walls of the Abbey of Ardenne, from which the commander of the 12th SS Division, SS-Standartenführer Kurt Meyer, had been watching the battlefield for a month. Meyer, who in mid-June had replaced the fallen Fritz Witt, commanded a division made up largely of 17- and 18-year-olds; in the first days of the invasion its soldiers had murdered, according to Canadian findings, some 150 Canadian prisoners at the abbey and in several other places.

At 4.20 a.m. on 8 July the infantry moved off behind a creeping barrage. In the east the British quickly broke through the Luftwaffe division, which had been shattered by the bombing. In the west the attack turned into a fight for every village. The Canadian 9th Brigade did not take Buron until around noon; the assault companies of the Highland Light Infantry of Canada lost some 60 per cent of their strength there, according to Canadian studies. The SS counter-attacked with tanks, and the 59th Division was held up for several hours at Galmanche and La Bijude. In the evening Canadians of the Regina Rifles broke into the Abbey of Ardenne. For the Canadian 3rd Division 8 July was one of the bloodiest days of the entire campaign.

At 7.15 p.m. Meyer, with Eberbach’s consent and against Hitler’s orders, began withdrawing his heavy weapons and the remnants of the Luftwaffe division behind the Orne, and during the night the infantry followed. On the morning of 9 July British and Canadian patrols entered the city, the Canadians occupied the abandoned Carpiquet airfield, and at noon the British 3rd Division reached the Orne. Several bridges in the city survived, but they were blocked by rubble or under fire from the south bank, where the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler had taken up position. The streets were so choked with rubble that tanks could not get through. On the afternoon of 9 July Crocker declared the objectives of the operation achieved.

A city in ruins

The soldiers who entered Caen found a sea of rubble. According to British accounts, some four-fifths of the old city north of the Orne lay in ruins, and fires went on smouldering for several days. Even so, according to French estimates, more than ten thousand inhabitants remained in the city. Some of them survived in underground quarries, among them those at Fleury-sur-Orne south of the city, where several thousand people found shelter. Many others gathered around the Bon Sauveur hospital and the Romanesque Abbey of Saint-Étienne – the Men’s Abbey (Abbaye aux Hommes), founded by William the Conqueror – whose buildings housed the Lycée Malherbe. According to French estimates, several thousand refugees camped for weeks in the abbey church, the cloisters and the school’s halls.

According to accounts from those weeks, members of the Resistance passed word of this “sanitary island” to the Allies, and huge red-cross signs were laid out on the roofs (according to stories repeated in Caen, the sheets were dyed with the blood of the wounded). The quarter around the abbey and the hospital survived almost untouched, while the streets around it were razed to the ground. The abbey, with the tomb of William the Conqueror in the chancel of its church, became for the inhabitants a symbol of survival.

According to French estimates, some 2,000 inhabitants of Caen were killed between 6 June and 19 July, and according to some studies as many as 3,000 – most of them in the bombing of 6–7 June and 7 July and by the artillery fire of both sides. About three-quarters of the city’s buildings were destroyed or damaged, and tens of thousands of people lost their homes. Even so – as Canadian and British soldiers noted – they were warmly welcomed. On 10 July the French flag was raised over the city, and on 13 July a ceremony was held in the Place Saint-Martin at which Scottish pipers played “La Marseillaise”.

Military losses were heavy on both sides. In two days the British and Canadians lost, according to various studies, some 3,500 killed, wounded and missing, and total Allied losses since 6 June had by then exceeded 30,000 men. The 12th SS Division, which claimed to have destroyed more than a hundred Allied tanks in two days, came out of the battle with infantry the size of a battalion; the 16th Luftwaffe Field Division had practically ceased to exist.

The dispute over Montgomery’s strategy

Caen had been taken a month behind schedule and only by half, which as early as the summer of 1944 provoked sharp disputes within the Allied command. Montgomery maintained – in his reports and later in his memoirs – that from the outset he had intended to tie down the main German armoured forces at Caen so that the Americans on the western flank could break through against weaker defences, and that the battle had gone according to his plan. And indeed, in July most of the German panzer divisions in Normandy were facing the British and Canadians. His critics – Eisenhower’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, and the tactical air commanders – accused him of excessive caution and broken promises, recalling that before the invasion he himself had predicted the swift capture of Caen and of the plain towards Falaise.

After the war the dispute moved into the historiography. Some authors accept Montgomery’s version of a “pivot” at Caen, while others – such as the American historian Carlo D’Este – regard it as an interpretation added after the event, though they concede that the final outcome matched the general concept of the campaign. Less contentious is the fact that the British, who remembered the slaughter on the Somme and had dwindling reserves of infantry, tried to substitute artillery and air power for men – at a price that the city itself paid.

Place in the war

The capture of northern Caen did not open the road to Falaise: the Germans dug in behind the Orne and on the Verrières and Bourguébus ridges, and on 10 July the British once again attacked Hill 112 without success. At the same time Charnwood convinced the people of Normandy that the Allies were there to stay, and kept the German panzer divisions on the eastern flank while Omar Bradley’s US First Army prepared for the breakthrough at Saint-Lô.

On 18 July Montgomery launched Operation Goodwood east of the Orne, preceded by even heavier bombing. The British armoured divisions came to a halt on the Bourguébus ridge after losing several hundred tanks, but on 18–19 July the Canadians took Vaucelles and the rest of the city. A week later the Americans launched Operation Cobra, and in August the German armies in Normandy were almost encircled at Falaise – on the very plain towards which Caen was to have opened the way on the first day of the invasion. The rebuilding of the city went on until the 1960s; in 1988 the Caen Memorial, devoted to the battle and to peace, was opened there.