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Operation Bluecoat
Operation Bluecoat was a British offensive in the Battle of Normandy, from 30 July until 7 August 1944, during the Second World War. The geographical objectives of the attack, undertaken by VIII Corps and XXX Corps of the British Second Army (Lieutenant-General Miles Dempsey), were to secure the road junction of Vire and the high ground of Mont Pinçon. The attack was made at short notice to exploit the success of Operation Cobra by the First US Army after it broke out on the western flank of the Normandy beachhead and to exploit the withdrawal of the 2nd Panzer Division from the Caumont area, to take part in ''Unternehmen Lüttich'' (Operation Liège) a German counter-offensive against the Americans. Background From 18 to 20 July, the British Second Army conducted Operation Goodwood on the eastern flank of the Allied beachhead south-east of Caen, in a southerly direction, which had forced the Germans to keep the bulk of their armoured units in the east around Cae ...
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Operation Overlord
Operation Overlord was the codename for the Battle of Normandy, the Allied operation that launched the successful invasion 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. The decision to undertake a cross-channel invasion in 1944 was taken at the Trident Conference in Washington in May 1943. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed commander of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, and General Bernard Montgomery was named commander of the 21st Army Group, which comprised all the land forces involved in the invasion. The coast of Normandy of northwestern France was chosen as the site of the invasion, with the Americans assigned to land at sect ...
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First United States Army
First Army is the oldest and longest-established field army of the United States Army. It served as a theater army, having seen service in both World War I and World War II, and supplied the US army with soldiers and equipment during the Korean War and the Vietnam war under some of the most famous and distinguished officers of the U.S. Army. It now serves as a mobilization, readiness and training command. History Establishment and World War I The First Army was established on 10 August 1918 as a field army when sufficient American military manpower had arrived on the Western Front during the final months of World War I. The large number of troops assigned to the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) required the activation of subordinate commands. To fill this need, First Army was the first of three field armies established under the AEF. The first commander was General John J. Pershing, who also served as Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the AEF. The headquarters planned ...
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11th Armoured Division (United Kingdom)
The 11th Armoured Division was an armoured division of the British Army which was created in March 1941 during the Second World War. The division was formed in response to the unanticipated success of the German panzer divisions. The 11th Armoured was responsible for several major victories in the Battle of Normandy from in the summer of 1944, shortly after the Normandy landings, and it participated in the Allied advance from Paris to the Rhine, the Rhine crossing in March 1945. It was disbanded in January 1946 and reformed towards the end of 1950. In 1956, it was converted into the 4th Infantry Division. Background and formation The 11th Armoured Division was organized in March 1941, in Yorkshire under Northern Command, under Major-General Percy Hobart. A veteran of the Royal Tank Regiment, he had already strongly influenced the shape of the 7th Armoured Division, but his original and innovative ideas had led to his early retirement from the army. Reinstated after the ...
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7th Armoured Division (United Kingdom)
The 7th Armoured Division was an armoured division of the British Army that saw distinguished active service during the Second World War, where its exploits in the Western Desert Campaign gained it the ''Desert Rats'' nickname. After the Munich Agreement, the division was formed in Egypt during 1938 as the Mobile Division (Egypt) and its first divisional commander was the tank theorist Major-General Sir Percy Hobart. In February 1940, the name of the unit was changed to the 7th Armoured Division. The division fought in most major battles during the North African Campaign; later it would land and fight in the Italian Campaign during the early stages of the invasion of Italy before being withdrawn to the United Kingdom where it prepared to fight in North-west Europe. It began landing in Normandy during the afternoon of D-Day, 6 June 1944, and fought its way across Europe ending the war in Kiel and Hamburg, Germany. Although the division was disbanded during the 1950s, ...
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V Corps (United States)
V Corps (), formerly known as the Fifth Corps, is a regular corps of the United States Army at Fort Knox. It was previously active during World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Kosovo War, and the War on Terrorism. Shoulder sleeve insignia The corps's shoulder patch, a pentagon whose points lie on an imaginary circle 2 1/8 inches (5.40 cm) in diameter whose edges are white lines 3/16-inch (.48 cm) in width and whose radial lines are white 1/8-inch (.32 cm) in width, was approved on 3 December 1918. The triangles thus outlined in white are flag blue. The pentagon represents the number of the Corps, while blue and white are the colors associated with Corps flags. History World War I V Corps was organized 7–12 July 1918 in the Regular Army in France, as part of the American Expeditionary Forces. By the end of World War I, the Corps had fought in three named campaigns. Headquarters Company, V Corps was withdrawn from the Organized Reserve on 1 October 19 ...
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The British Army In Normandy 1944 B8181
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pr ...
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21st Panzer Division (Wehrmacht)
The 21st Panzer Division was a German armoured division best known for its role in the battles of the North African Campaign from 1941–1943 during World War II when it was one of the two armoured divisions making up the Deutsches Afrikakorps (DAK). 1941–1942 The Italian army group in North Africa was routed by the British Commonwealth Western Desert Force in Operation Compass 9 December 1940 – 9 February 1941 under General Wavell. The German Armed Forces High Command ('' Oberkommando der Wehrmacht'') decided to send a "blocking force" to Libya to support the Italian army, commanded by the future Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The German blocking force at first was based only on Panzer Regiment 5, which was put together from the second regiment of the 3rd Panzer Division. These elements were organized into the 5th Light Division when they arrived in Africa from 10 February – 12 March 1941. On 2 March 1941, the first 8.8 cm "88" dual purpose anti-aircraft/anti-tank ...
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Ultra
adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. ''Ultra'' eventually became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence. The name arose because the intelligence obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification then used (''Most Secret'') and so was regarded as being ''Ultra Secret''. Several other cryptonyms had been used for such intelligence. The code name ''Boniface'' was used as a cover name for ''Ultra''. In order to ensure that the successful code-breaking did not become apparent to the Germans, British intelligence created a fictional MI6 master spy, Boniface, who controlled a fictional series of agents throughout Germany. Information obtained through code-breaking was often attributed ...
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Caen
Caen (, ; nrf, Kaem) is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the department of Calvados. The city proper has 105,512 inhabitants (), while its functional urban area has 470,000,Comparateur de territoire
INSEE, retrieved 20 June 2022.
making Caen the second largest urban area in Normandy and the 19th largest in France. It is also the third largest commune in all of Normandy after Le Havre and . It is located inland from the
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Operation Goodwood
Operation Goodwood was a British offensive during the Second World War, which took place between 18 and 20 July 1944 as part of the larger battle for Caen in Normandy, France. The objective of the operation was a limited attack to the south, from the Orne bridgehead, to capture the rest of Caen and the Bourguébus Ridge beyond. At least one historian has called the operation the largest tank battle that the British Army has ever fought. Goodwood was preceded by Operations Greenline and Pomegranate in the Second Battle of the Odon west of Caen, to divert German attention from the area east of Caen. Goodwood began when the British VIII Corps, with three armoured divisions, attacked to seize the German-held Bourguébus Ridge, the area between Bretteville-sur-Laize and Vimont and to inflict maximum casualties on the Germans. On 18 July, the British I Corps conducted an attack to secure a series of villages to the east of VIII Corps; to the west, the II Canadian Corps launched ...
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Counteroffensive
In the study of military tactics, a counter-offensive is a large-scale strategic offensive military operation, usually by forces that had successfully halted the enemy's offensive, while occupying defensive positions. The counter-offensive is executed after exhausting the enemy's front line troops and after the enemy reserves had been committed to combat and proven incapable of breaching defenses, but ''before'' the enemy has had the opportunity to assume new defensive positions. Sometimes the counter-offensive can be of a more limited operational maneuver nature, with more limited objectives rather than those seeking attainment of a strategic goal. A counter-offensive as considered by Clausewitz to be the most efficient means of forcing the attacker to abandon offensive plans.p.540, Briggs Counter-offensives can be executed not only on land, but also by the naval forces and air forces. Strategic counter-offensives have been recorded by military historians in many wars throu ...
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Operation Lüttich
Operation Lüttich (7–13 August 1944) was the codename of the Nazi German counter-attack during the Battle of Normandy, which occurred near U.S. positions near Mortain, in northwestern France. ''Lüttich'' is the German name for the city of Liège, Belgium. In British and American histories of the Second World War, the German Operation Lüttich is known as the Mortain counter-attack, which Hitler ordered to regain territory gained by the First United States Army during Operation Cobra by reaching the coast of the Avranches region, which is at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, in order to isolate the units of the Third United States Army that had advanced into Brittany. The Germans' main force was the XLVII Panzer Corps, with two ''Heer'' and one-and-a-half ''Waffen-SS'' Panzer Divisions. Despite initial success against the defending U.S. VII Corps, the Germans were soon halted, and the Allies inflicted severe losses on the attacking troops, eventually destroying most of the ...
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