Third Army, commanded by Lieutenant General George S. With the capture of this town at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, and an intact bridge at Pontaubault nearby, the American forces had "turned the corner" the German front could no longer be anchored against the sea at its western end and American forces could advance west and south into Brittany. Almost the entire western half of the German front in Normandy collapsed, and on 1 August, American forces captured Avranches. On 25 July 1944, following six weeks of attritional warfare along a stalemated front, American forces under Lieutenant General Omar Bradley mounted an attack code-named Operation Cobra, which broke through the German defenses near Saint-Lô. Although fighting continued around Mortain for six days, the American forces had regained the initiative within a day of the opening of the German attack.Īs the German commanders on the spot had warned Hitler in vain, there was little chance of the attack succeeding, and the concentration of their armoured reserves at the western end of the front in Normandy soon led to disaster, as they were outflanked to their south and the front to their east collapsed, resulting in many of the German troops in Normandy being trapped in the Falaise Pocket. VII Corps, the Germans were soon halted, and the Allies inflicted severe losses on the attacking troops, eventually destroying most of the German tanks involved in the attack. Despite initial success against the defending U.S. The Germans' main force was the XLVII Panzer Corps, with two Heer and one-and-a-half Waffen-SS Panzer Divisions. 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. Lüttich is the German name for the city of Liège, Belgium. positions near Mortain, in northwestern France. 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.
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