COBRA

COBRA

Operation Cobra was the codename for an offensive launched by the First United States Army seven weeks after the D-Day landings, during the Normandy Campaign of World War II. American Lieutenant General Omar Bradley's intention was to take advantage of the German preoccupation with British and Canadian activity around the town of Caen, in Operation

Goodwood, and immediately punch through the German defenses that were penning in his troops while the Germans were distracted and unbalanced. Once a corridor had been created, the First Army would then be able to advance into Brittany, rolling up the German flanks and freeing itself of the constraints imposed by operating in the Norman bocage countryside. After a slow start the offensive gathered momentum, and German resistance collapsed as scattered remnants of broken units fought to escape to the Seine. Lacking the resources to cope with the situation, the German response was ineffectual, and the entire Normandy front soon collapsed. Operation Cobra, together with concurrent offensives by the Second British and First Canadian Armies, was decisive in securing an Allied victory in the Normandy Campaign

HISTORY

Following the successful Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, progress inland was slow. To facilitate the Allied build-up in France and to secure room for further expansion, the deep water port of Cherbourg on the western flank of the American sector and the historic town of Caen in the British and Canadian sector to the east represented early objectives.The original plan for the Normandy campaign envisioned strong offensive efforts in both sectors, in which Lieutenant-General Sir Miles Dempsey's British Second Army would secure Caen and the area south of it,[11] and Lieutenant General Omar Bradley's U.S. First Army would "wheel round" to the Loire.

General Bernard Montgomery—commanding all Allied ground forces in Normandy—intended Caen to be taken on D-Day, while Cherbourg was expected to fall 15 days later. Second Army was to seize Caen and then form a front to the south-east, extending to, to acquire airfields and protect First Army's left flank while it moved on Cherbourg.Possession of Caen and its surroundings—desirable for open terrain that would permit maneuver warfare—would also give Second Army a suitable staging area for a push south to capture which could be used as the pivot for a swing right to advance on Argentan and then towards the Touques River.Caen's capture has been described by historian L. F. Ellis as the most important D-Day objective assigned to Lieutenant-General Crocker's I Corps. However, both Ellis and Chester Wilmot characterize the Allied plan as "ambitious"; the Caen sector contained the strongest defences in Normandy

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

After the one-day postponement, Cobra got underway at 09:38 on 25 July, when around 600 Allied fighter-bombers attacked strongpoint’s and enemy artillery along a 300 yd (270 m)-wide strip of ground located in the St. Lô area. For the next hour, 1,800 heavy bombers of the U.S. Eighth Air Force saturated a 6,000 yd × 2,200 yd (5,500 m × 2,000 m) area on the Saint-Lô–Periers road, succeeded by a third and final wave of medium bombers.[77] Approximately 3,000 U.S. aircraft had carpet-bombed a narrow section of the front, with the Panzer-Lehr-Division taking the brunt of the attack. However, once again not all the casualties were German; Bradley had specifically requested that the bombers approach the target from the east, out of the sun and parallel to the Saint-Lô–Periers road, in order to minimize the risk of friendly losses, but most of the airmen instead came in from the north, perpendicular to the front line. Bradley, however, had apparently misunderstood explanations from the heavy bomber commanders that a parallel approach was impossible because of the time and space constraints Bradley had set. Additionally, a parallel approach would not in any event have assured that all bombs would fall behind German lines because of deflection errors or obscured aim points due to dust and smoke. Despite efforts by U.S. units to identify their positions, inaccurate bombing by the Eighth Air Force killed 111 men and wounded 490. The dead included Bradley's friend and fellow West Pointer Lieutenant General Lesley McNair—the highest-ranking U.S. soldier to be killed in action in the European Theater of Operations