Welcome to "total war"..
On July 7th, General Montgomery opted for the bluntest strategy available: organize an air-raid of 450 heavy bombers, drop 6,000 tons of explosives on the city, and drive ground forces through from the North. More than 5,000 French civilians died as a result. But, this plan was controversial for strategic, as well as moral, reasons. Montgomery's motivation behind organizing the raid is unclear. But it is clear that the bombing was far from being as beneficial as the Allies had hoped.
The nauseating part of that is that Caen could have (should have) been taken on June 6th itself. But Montgomery was unwilling to bear the human cost of such an assault, being his cautious self.. As a result, the Germans sent their best SS divisions to Caen and the human toll became astronomical, resulting in even more human casualties on both sides.
Had Caen been taken on the first day, the odds are that the entire german position in Normandy would have folded and they would have to retreat back to the next natural defensive line, the Seine river. And they would have been obliterated by US airpower all along the way.
The failure to take Caen on D-Day was probably one the great strategic errors that prevented defeating Germany in 1944. It compares only to Market-Garden, and the failure to capture the Scheldt Estuary, as reasons for the tragic human loss that occurred from September, 1944 through May, 1945.
Hawk@itsallrelative.com |
