After the successful conclusion of Operation Overlord in June the combined forces of the American, British, French, Canadian and Polish Armed Forces would eventually go onto field a force of thirteen armoured divisions, as well as numerous independent armoured brigades, to take part in the 1944 battle for Normandy. These armoured units would firstly battle to secure the beachhead and expand on it before ultimately taking the lead in the resulting operations aimed at breaking out of the beachhead area itself. This battlefield was to be a very different one from what either the Allied or Axis armoured units had already been involved in - here they would find no wide-open spaces like what they had seen in the deserts of North Africa or Tunisia nor on The Ukraine or elsewhere on the Ost Front. Instead all the combatants involved in this campaign would soon find themselves being engaged in savage close quarter battles amidst the picturesque fields of Normandy, through the orchards and hedgerows surrounding those fields, and down along the roadways into the area's inhabitants towns and cities. Initially the anticipated goal of achieving mobile armoured warfare as desired by either force failed to materialise, as the Axis forces maintained the necessary pressure to keep the Allied forces pinned down inside their bridgehead. Instead of movement there was to be a brutal slogging match in which the Allies were forced to trade their superior resources with the battle-hardened panzers in an effort to secure first Cherbourg and turn the German flank to either side of Caen. The latter in the British and Canadian sector would go onto become the lynchpin of the whole campaign, because beyond it lay the flat open country all armoured units need in order to succeed. This often overlooked campaign after the invasion is covered here in this illustrated history written by Armoured Warfare Historian and Author Anthony Tucker-Jones.

Pen & Sword Books Limited

Pen & Sword Aviation

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

CN, 2012

"The remarkable photographs collected together for this book show in graphic detail the role armor played in the Allied struggle to exploit the D-Day landings and liberate occupied France and the skill and tenacity of the German panzer units that confronted them. The struggle gave rise to a sequence of battles that were among the most intense, and critical, of any fought in the Second World War.
Anthony Tucker-Jones traces the entire course of the armored campaign through the photographs the D-Day landings, the first clashes of the opposing tanks and antitank guns, then the Allied operations Epsom, Charnwood, Goodwood, Cobra - that culminated in the Allied breakthrough and the destruction of the German 5th Panzer Army at Falaise.
The images offer a fascinating inside view of the fighting itself and of the widespread destruction and horrific casualties that went with it. But they also record the routines of tank warfare, and give a vivid impression of the experience of the tank crews of the day and of the tanks they operated the German Mk IVs, Panthers, Tigers and self-propelled guns, and the Allied Shermans, Churchills and specialized tanks Hobarts Funnies that confronted each other in the French countryside and towns. "

2022-10-16