British Fronts Map Pack: Wave 6

On D-Day, each beachhead and army had their own objectives. The combination of British and Canadian infantry landing at Juno and Sword beaches were focussed towards the villages and towns surrounding Caen, one of the largest cities in the region. Despite rapid advances by Commando and Infantry forces in the early days of the Invasion of France, Operation after Operation failed to gain entry to Caen itself, and by the time Caen was finally encircled, a majority of the city was destroyed. On the outskirts of the city, where it was first attacked by British and Canadian infantry, there was considerably less destruction, but buildings were still on the verge of collapse, roads were saturated with rubble, and the defending Wehrmacht were densely dug in. The rest of Caen would take considerably longer to liberate.

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Operation Market Garden was rapidly declining. Communication failure was among the countless flaws of the Allied plan to liberate The Netherlands, but in particular, this issue brought about many new dangerous scenarios. While John Frosts’ airborne elite were dying in the Battle for Arnhem, British and American regiments raced to link up with them, oblivious to their predicament, or the well-prepared forces that awaited them. The road to Elst, like many of the roads between Arnhem and Nijmegen, was saturated with Axis forces, and combat here was brutal, staggered and slow.

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To all intents and purposes, Operation Ladbroke, part of the Allied Invasion of Sicily, was a full-scale assault. The way it panned out in reality, however, was considerably less effective than the later invasions of France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Inexperienced pilots, faulty gliders and poor weather conditions caused the airborne from American and British regiments to be scattered all over the coast of Sicily, despite only departing from the recently conquered Tunisia. What they lacked in accuracy, however, these units made up for in chaos, which was wrought all over the Axis positions by scattered soldiers, intent on collapsing their foe’s infrastructure from within.

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