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Operation Dragoon: The Forgotten Invasion Of World War II, The Champagne Campaign
On August 15, 1944, a vast Allied fleet stood off the coast of France. In the dark hours of the morning, thousands of American and British airborne troops landed inland in the Argens river valley around the town of La Motte, to secure the main road leading towards the north, link up with the French Resistance, and prevent German reinforcements from going to the landing beaches.
Preceded by a massive naval bombardment and commando raids on specific enemy batteries and coastal defenses, three American infantry divisions started landing at 08:00 on beaches near St. Tropez, St. Raphael, and Cavalaire – today some of the priciest coastal real estate in Europe. Where General Lucian Truscott’s 3rd, 36th, and 45th U.S. Divisions came ashore in 1944, today you can find valet parking and a beach full of well-off sunbathers. Where 1,200 noisy landing craft once carried men and equipment ashore, a flotilla of luxury yachts and speedboats bobs gently in the blue waters.
On 16 August, the first of an eventual 260,000 soldiers from the French ‘Army B’ under General de Lattre de Tassigny were ferried ashore. More than half were North African and African native soldiers; the rest were a mix of Free French exiles from France itself, former Vichy forces from North Africa, and French colonists. Over 5,000 of the French personnel who took part in Operation Dragoon were women, who volunteered as clerks, typists, radio operators, translators, ambulance crews, and more. Over 50 of these women were killed in this last year of the war.
Most of the American infantry and armor were sent northwest up the Rhone river valley to cut off the German retreat, while the airborne task force was sent east towards Italy, liberating town by town in what was dubbed the “Champagne Campaign.” Meanwhile, the French divisions were tasked with liberating the civilian port of Marseille and France’s huge navy base at Toulon. Despite pockets of fierce German resistance, often to the death, both were re-taken by August 28 and the ports soon put back in working order to supply the Allied armies as they moved on Germany.
On August 15, 1944, 70 days after the Normandy landings, the Allied troops gained a foothold on the coast of Provence with Operation “Dragoon”, gripping the German occupier and forcing it to retreat. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
The first Liberty transport ships started off-loading on September 15, and within a few weeks Marseille and Toulon were bringing in more supplies than all the Normandy ports combined. A Sherman tank remains today as a memorial to the battle for Marseille, on the road up to Notre Dame de la Garde, the basilica overlooking the city and bay. The troops that took the city were from an Algerian Infantry division, but the tank, like most of their equipment, was made in the USA.
Operation Dragoon met far less resistance than Overlord (D-Day) in Normandy two months earlier, where Field Marshall Rommel had more than twice as many divisions and nearly all the available German armor in France. Allied losses on the beach landing sites on the first day of Dragoon were just 95 killed and 185 wounded, compared with almost 4500 Allied soldiers killed on D-Day. General Blaskowitz, whose Army Group G had to secure the entire south of France from Toulouse in the west to Nice in the east, had on paper two armies under his command, but in reality he had only seven infantry divisions and one tank division. His best tank units had already been ordered north to help fight the main Allied advance in Normandy. In August 1944, Germany was simultaneously fighting the massive new assault in Normandy, holding up the steady if costly Allied advance in Italy, and reeling from its worst military loss ever – Operation Bagration in the east.
On 23 June, Stalin launched this massive attack, which he had promised Churchill and Roosevelt at the 1943 Tehran conference, in exchange for their opening a second front through landings in both western and southern France. Operation Bagration in Belorussia, and several follow-up attacks capitalizing on its success, destroyed Germany’s Army Group Centre, costing Hitler 400,000 casualties (dead and wounded), 120,000 captured, and 57,000 vehicles destroyed including 2,000 tanks. To put it in context, this was more than the German losses in the entire Normandy campaign (240,000 casualties, 210,000 captured, 1,500 tanks and 20,000 vehicles destroyed).
Photo by CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
By August 1944, Germany simply didn’t have the manpower to defend the entire southern coast of France. Although a tactical retreat was an obvious strategic necessity, Hitler, even more paranoid after nearly being killed in an assassination attempt by his own senior officers on 20 July, resisted giving the order until almost too late. Blaskowitz put his limited resources into defending only some crucial points like the ports of Marseille and Toulon as long as possible, and then did his best to evacuate his armies north intact after Hitler finally ordered a general withdrawal from the south on 17 August.
What we know now as D-Day, or Operation Overlord, was aimed at Western France. Operation Anvil, the name of which was changed to Dragoon two weeks before it took place, was to happen at the same time and prevent German troops from reinforcing Normandy. In the planning stages, the two operations were intended to take place simultaneously and be of equal importance. Roosevelt was committed to Anvil; he had given his word to Stalin, who had insisted on both French landings to relieve his own armies. Churchill was against it, believing that the men and material would have been better employed through a new landing in Greece or the Balkans, or to bolster the campaign in Italy, where the Germans had stalled the Allied advance at the Gustav Line.
It is impossible to say what would have happened if the troops diverted to Dragoon had been used in Italy to force their way past the Gothic Line and on towards Austria; or if the landing had been moved to the Balkans. It is hard to believe that the presence of Allied troops in Yugoslavia or Hungary, even if they have gotten that far in time, would have stopped Stalin’s victorious advancing Red Army from overrunning eastern and central Europe.
The landing craft used for Dragoon were also at the expenses of operations in the Pacific against Japan; the re-taking of Burma by the British and the island-hopping campaign of the Americans towards the Japanese home islands. Though the writing was on the wall in both theaters of war, against both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the timing and location of the end game was subject to an ever-changing chain of linked decisions over how to use limited resources. Thousands of fighting men and civilians would yet have to die before it was over, and the commanders’ invidious choices would determine where. In Europe, Eisenhower’s crucial role was as the key diplomat between titanic Allied egos with differing strategic visions.
Underwood Archives/Getty Images
What is undeniable is that the liberation of Marseille and Toulon by August 28, and the speed with which the ports were put back in working order, meant that the Allied forces streaming into Normandy could more quickly be supplied for their final push into Germany. For the people of Provence, liberation came not a moment too soon. Living under Vichy rule from June 1940 until November 1942 brought humiliation and sacrifice. Two more years under the Nazis were worse; men were sent to labor in Germany, goods were taken to fuel the German war effort, and food became increasingly scarce. German occupiers tortured and killed real and suspected Resistance members, and Vichy forces rounded up and sent French and foreign Jews to concentration camps where most were killed.
In addition to German exactions, thousands of French civilians were killed in Allied bombing raids leading up to the landings. In December 1943, Allied bombers attempted to destroy the German submarine bunker in Marseille’s port, killing around 50 civilians. (The reinforced concrete building was so strongly built, using forced labor, that it withstood all attempts and survives to this day. In 2019, considering it far too costly to destroy, city authorities finally allowed a technology company to turn it into a data storage center). On May 27, 1944, over 100 American B-24 Liberator bombers out of Italy bombed Marseille’s railway stations and marshalling yards, killing or injuring several thousand civilians and destroying or damaging more than 10,000 buildings.
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Despite the civilian casualties from bombing, on the whole civilians supported the Allied effort. It did not hurt that the French colonial troops did much of the fighting after the Dragoon landings, including the liberation of Marseille and Toulon. The French units had been re-organized and re-armed after the peace agreement reached with Vichy forces in North Africa following the Allied landings there in November 1942. French units, including most of those involved in Dragoon, took part in the Italian campaigns in 1943, where they earned the respect of Allied commanders. The 1st Free French division was equipped by the British, and the rest of their growing army by the United States. General Leclerc, whose 2nd Armored Division was grudgingly allowed by Eisenhower to be the first into Paris despite a previous strategic decision by to bypass the city, did so with his 200 Sherman tanks and American-built supporting vehicles and weapons. In the south, General de Lattre de Tassigny’s French 1st Army was similarly equipped.
80 years later, it is easy to forget that most Americans were not eager to come to Europe’s aid again in the 1940s, and who knows if or when we would have if not for Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war. Roosevelt distrusted De Gaulle, Churchill distrusted Stalin, and Stalin trusted no one at all – not even his own generals, many of whom he had killed (a fate even the least successful Allied general never had to fear). The Vichy regime was hostile to the Allies, and even among the non-Vichy French in exile, few supported General De Gaulle. In the early years, only a handful chose to join his Free French.
Still, despite competing strategies and differing agendas for the post-war world, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and De Gaulle cooperated effectively to beat Hitler. After years of strife between Vichy and non-Vichy, and stark divisions among the French exiles, a quarter million French soldiers participated in Dragoon. A few months later, De Gaulle brought all the competing armed Resistance groups into a rebuilt national army. Through its effective military participation in the Italian campaign and then Dragoon, France went a long way towards restoring its military pride and re-building its nationhood. The cooperation of all the Allied forces in France laid the ground for joint operations within NATO after the war.
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In Draguignan, a city in the Var department of Provence and former headquarters of the German 19th Army, the American Battle Monuments Commission maintains the Rhone American Cemetery, the only U.S. war cemetery in the south of France. In rows across impeccable lawns, there are the headstones of 852 Americans who died fighting in southern France, including Raymond Bisson, Paul Brown, and Robert Gillman of New Hampshire. The names of 247 other servicemen missing in action or lost or buried at sea are engraved on the Walls of the Missing.
There are Native American code-talkers like Andrew Perry, one of hundreds of who used their language to communicate over the radio, baffling the German and Japanese codebreakers. Perry and his 45th Infantry Division fought their way through North Africa, Sicily, and Italy before landing in Provence. He was killed near the village of Peyroles on August 20th and is buried in Draguignan. There is Private First Class Lattie Tipton, who with the 3rd Infantry Division took part in the landings in Sicily and Anzio. Tipton came ashore with the first wave of Operation Dragoon near Saint-Tropez, where he died fighting under a Sergeant named Audie Murphy, later famous as one of the most decorated American soldiers of World War II and as a movie actor.
There are many other, much smaller monuments scattered all over southern France, mostly dedicated to air-crews. In the village of Pierrefeu-du-Var, and in a field nearby, there are small monuments to P-38 fighter pilots from the 48th and 94th Fighter Squadrons shot down in June and August by anti-aircraft fire while attacking the Orange-Plan de Dieu airfield in preparation for Operation Dragoon. In Marseille’s 14th district is a small plaque to Lieutenant William Wells Bateman, a fighter pilot who died on August 18th, 1944 while attacking German defenses before the French assault to liberate Marseille. Bateman, who was only 21 when he was killed, called his plane “Pudgy the Flying Hangover,” a typically irreverent name a cheerful, brave kid would give to the machine he risked his life in every day. On a hill outside Cannes, there is a larger monument to the B-24 Liberator bomber Strictly from Hunger, which, badly damaged and with its captain dead at the controls, crashed in the hills above the city on May 25, 1944. Four of the crew are still listed as missing.
These men are symbolic of the thousands of others who died in Operation Dragoon, the lesser-known ‘other D-Day,’ and the campaign in southern France. As much as their brothers who fought in Normandy on June 6th, they represent the millions of young Americans and Allies whose bravery, solidarity, and sacrifice brought us three generations of peace and prosperity.
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Simon Hankinson is a Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Border Security and Immigration. From 2017-2020 he was United States Consul General in Marseille.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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