If you've been studying the Second World War for a hot minute, you've doubtlessly heard of
Operation Overlord a.ka. the Normandy landings. But what about Operation Dragoon, Overlord's
little brother? Operation Dragoon, despite its significance and despite its controversy,
gets hardly any attention, overshadowed by the landing which took place a few months before.
In this video, we're going to cast some of that shadow away.
One of the most interesting things about Operation Dragoon is that it was originally
intended to take place in concert with Operation Overlord. Allied strategists initially codenamed
the operations Sledgehammer and Anvil, and planned for them to kick off simultaneously.
The gist of it was that the first big chunk of the Allied invasion force, Sledgehammer, would
land on the beaches of Normandy in North-West France while the second big chunk, Anvil, would
land on the French Riviera in the south. There were more than a few problems with this plan,
however, and not every Allied leader was fully on board with it. American General George Marshall
conceived Operation Anvil, and American President Franklin D. Roosevelt was all for it. Roosevelt,
Churchill, and Stalin caught up for drinks and war games in Tehran in December 1943
and put at least *some* of their cards on the table. Churchill wasn't keen at all. He didn't
want to withdraw any forces from the Italian campaign, which had been raging for about
half a year at this point, and if any sort of invasion was going to occur, he wanted it to
take place in the Balkans. On mention of the Balkans, Stalin sat up straight in his chair.
Letting Churchill get a foothold in the Balkans would be asking for trouble; on his post-World
War II maps, Stalin had already coloured that part of the world in red. "Yes," he said to Roosevelt,
"Anvil is good plan." With this, Churchill was so mad he almost spilt his tea. Later, though,
it was decided that Operation Overlord needed more manpower and more tank landing ships;
to make matters worse for Operation Anvil, the amphibious landings in Anzio and Nettuno, Italy,
in January 1944 were a bloody mess. If the Allies were going to do a landing, they were going to do
just *one,* and they were going to do it right. They put all their brain- and manpower into
Overlord, and Anvil got put on the back-burner. That is until the Normandy landings were done and
dusted. After that, Anvil came back into fashion, with the Free French and the French Resistance
eager to rid their country of the Germans as fast as possible. The operation was renamed
Dragoon and scheduled to launch on the 15th of August, and Churchill burst a blood vessel.
At this point in the war, the Allies had stuffed up some landings and pulled off some decent ones
too. Heeding the lessons they'd learned, the plan for Operation Dragoon wouldn't be quite
as simple as "let's just dump a whole bunch of dudes on the beach and hope for the best."
They chose a landing site at which the Germans didn't have the high ground—the coastline east of
Toulon and west of Cannes—and they also planned to soften up the Wehrmacht's defences a little
before they attempted to land. At their disposal the Allies had the 6th United States Army Group,
which was composed of the US 7th Army, the French Army B, and some American, Canadian, and French
special forces units. The French Forces of the Interior, the French Resistance's military arm,
was waiting to kick some butt, too, supported by agents of the US Office of Strategic
Services or OSS. In the sea, they had over 600 vessels, most of which were transport ships.
In the air, they had at their disposal the Mediterranean Allied Tactical Air Force,
the Mediterranean Allied Coastal Air Force, and a provisional troop carrier air division;
this amounted to some 3,470 planes. The Allied invasion force amounted to almost 577,000
personnel, not including the 75,000 French guerrillas in the interior. Germany's order
of battle wasn't quite as impressive. Heeresgruppe G or Army Group G stood in
defence of the French coast, but this so-called army group contained but one army, the 19th,
and its ranks were filled by poorly equipped Polish and Czechoslovakian Volksdeutsche, Soviet
Ostlegionen, and old and wounded war veterans. Most of the A-tier units had been sent north,
and really the only formidable unit that remained was the 11th Panzer Division. The Kriegsmarine had
only 45 small ships at their disposal, and the Luftwaffe just 200 aircraft. One advantage the
Germans did have was 75 coastal guns placements, amounting to 1,481 artillery pieces. On the beach,
between 85,000 and 100,000 men would face the Allied invasion, while a few hundred thousand
more Wehrmacht personnel were positioned deeper in Southern France. So how did it all go down?
Before the bulk of the Allied ground forces hit the sand, the special forces units dropped in,
the French Resistance undertook sabotage operations, and Allied naval forces and air
forces bombed everything to hell. Of the spec ops units, the 1st Airborne Task Force landed around
the village of Le Muy, further inland in the drop zone codenamed "Rugby." Their task was to
prevent the enemy from advancing on the beach. The joint American-Canadian 1st Special Service Force,
as part of the sub-operation codenamed Sitka, attacked the islands off that stretch of the
French coast, and the French commandos, struck the mainland on the western flank of the invasion
site, where a bunch of them ran into a minefield and either died or got captured. As for the French
Resistance, they attacked railroads, transport hubs, bridges, and communications infrastructure,
while Allied bombings hammered those targets as well as airports and coastal defences.
With the defence softened up, the US 7th Army, spearheaded by the US VI Corps,
poured from the mouths of amphibious landing vehicles onto the beach,
while the French Army B sat back—for the time being. These initial landings were, in short,
hugely successful, with the Allies suffering just 95 deaths. The landing zone designated "Camel" was
where the enemy put up their strongest defence, ultimately preventing the Allies from landing
in the so-called "Red" sector of that zone. The 7th Army put the Germans on their back
feet and ploughed inland, linking up with the 1st Airborne Task Force at Le Muy. On the 16th,
the second day of Operation Dragoon, the French Army B hit the sand. With the 7th heading inland,
the French swept westward along the coast, fighting their way to the crucial ports of Toulon
and Marseille. The Germans tried to organise counterattacks on Le Muy and the Allied beachhead,
but the Allies had already amassed their forces, and the French Resistance was chipping away
at the Germans from the inside. The German defence devolved into a full-on withdrawal.
Hitler wanted Army Group G to link up with the rest of his forces further north. To buy
themselves some time, the Germans left an infantry division in Toulon and another in Marseille,
while the 11th Panzer Division, bolstered by an infantry division, worked to cover the bulk
of the retreating army group. The French Army B surrounded Toulon and Marseille between the 19th
and 21st, then closed the noose. For just 4,525 casualties, they managed to subdue both German
garrisons, killing or capturing some 29,000 men. On the 21st, the Allied mechanized group
Taskforce Butler moved into the city of Montélimar on the bank of the Rhône River, hoping to cut off
a large portion of the withdrawing Germans. To open the way up again, the 11th Panzer Division,
and its supporting infantry division, rolled in. The situation devolved into a bloody stalemate,
but the Allies were finally able to seize the city on the 29th. Until the 14th of September,
the Allies kept hot on the Wehrmacht's heels, until the remnants of Army Group G formed a stable
defensive line in the Vosges, a range of mountains near the French-German border. All in all,
the Allies inflicted around 159,000 casualties on the Germans, capturing over 131,000 Wehrmacht
personnel; this was in exchange for just 25,500 casualties, mostly American and French.
While this result might sound great, Operation Dragoon was not beyond scrutiny. The Allies had
cleared the Germans out of a big chunk of Southern France in a relatively short span of time,
and taken bucketloads of prisoners, but the rest of Germany's forces in Southern France managed
to retreat to the safety of the mountains. The operation also diverted men and material from
Operation Overlord, which was still in effect, and the Italian Campaign. As Churchill feared,
this ultimately slowed the Western Allies' advance on the German capital, which the Red
Army got to first, and left Stalin's occupation of the Balkans uncontested. On a more positive note,
Dragoon opened up ports and supply routes for the Allies on the Western Front and, of course,
hastened Germany's withdrawal through France. In October that year, for instance, some 525,000
tonnes of war supplies were deposited in the recaptured ports, notably Toulon and Marseille.
But what do you think? Was Operation Dragoon worth it, or are you a sceptic like Churchill?
Where would you have concentrated your forces, if not the French coast between Toulon and Cannes?
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.