Operation Dragoon

Podcast Transcript

In the summer of 1944, the Allied forces planned an audacious amphibious landing on the beaches of France.

It involved hundreds of ships, hundreds of thousands of men, and meticulous planning.

Those who landed would face fierce resistance from entrenched German forces.

…and I am not talking about D-Day and the invasion of Normandy.

Learn about Operation Dragoon and the invasion of Southern France on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

1944 was a very busy year for the Allies. There were several major operations that year, which, historically, have garnered the most attention.

Operation Overlord, of course, was the major event of the year as it finally opened up a second front in continental Europe.

Operation Market Garden, which took place later that year, was the largest airborne operation in history.

The Battle of the Bulge later that year became one of the most famous battles of the war.

I’ve previously done episodes on all of these events.

However, another major operation took place that year, which is often overlooked: Operation Dragoon.

Whereas Operation Neptune, the first phase of Operation Overlord, took place in Normandy, Operation Dragoon took place on the southern coast of France.

Normandy had been chosen as the main Allied landing point for the invasion of Europe. It had to be within easy reach of England, or else it wouldn’t have been feasible to support.

But by early 1944, the Allies faced a crucial question: how could they most effectively apply pressure on Germany while supporting the primary invasion of Normandy? The answer lay in opening a second front in France, but not just any second front – one that would serve multiple strategic purposes simultaneously.

The idea of an invasion of Southern France began at the Trident Conference in Washington, DC in May 1943.

Initially, the plan was to conduct the invasion of southern France simultaneously with the invasion of Normandy. This would allow for a two-pronged attack that the Germans would have to deal with.

It was initially dubbed Operation Anvil.

However, it soon became obvious that Operation Anvil wasn’t feasible. The Allies didn’t have enough resources to do a landing in Normandy and in the south. The main problem was the number of landing ships available.

By the time 1944 rolled around, Winston Churchill famously opposed it, preferring to concentrate forces in Italy and potentially the Balkans. Churchill wanted to deplete German resources by attacking and harassing them on the edges of their territory.

He also worried that diverting troops from the Italian campaign would slow progress there, where the Allies had landed in 1943.

However, American military leaders, particularly General George Marshall, strongly advocated for the invasion of southern France. They understood something crucial: Normandy alone wouldn’t provide sufficient port capacity to sustain the massive armies needed to defeat Germany.

I’ve previously talked about the incredible logistics involved in the invasion of Normandy.

The invasion of Europe wasn’t just about landing hundreds of thousands of soldiers, although that was a big part of it. They also had to land equipment, fuel, and supplies to keep the ever-growing Allied contingent on the continent.

Initially, the Allies built what were called Mulberry harbours. These were temporary, portable harbors built by the British. These only only intended to be used until they could control the largest port in Normandy, Cherbourg.

After D-Day, the Allies faced significant difficulties capturing Cherbourg due to rugged terrain, narrow roads, and strong German fortifications.

The Germans had also sabotaged Cherbourg’s port facilities before surrendering on June 29, 1944, rendering the harbor temporarily unusable and delaying its utility for Allied supply lines.

The ports of southern France were more numerous and could easily handle all of the cargo to support the Allied armies in France.

Moreover, Charles de Gaulle was pressing hard for an invasion of Southern France with French troops participating.

Approval for the invasion was given on July 14, and the operation was subsequently renamed Operation Dragoon on August 1. The date for the invasion was set for August 15.

The operational planning for Dragoon showcased the Allies’ growing sophistication in amphibious warfare. By August 1944, they had learned valuable lessons from earlier operations – the disasters at Dieppe, which I covered in a previous episode, as well as the landings in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and most recently, the Normandy.

Each operation had taught them something new about coordinating naval, air, and ground forces across vast distances.

The planners faced unique challenges in southern France.

Unlike Normandy’s relatively gentle beaches, the Mediterranean coast featured steep terrain that could easily become a defensive nightmare.

On the other hand, while the Germans had spent years fortifying what they called the “Atlantic Wall,” their southern defenses were less formidable than those facing the English Channel.

The German presence in Southern France was under the command of Army Group G, led by General Johannes Blaskowitz. These forces were overstretched, understrength, and composed mostly of second-tier units and coastal divisions.

This was because Germany’s main focus was on resisting the Allied advance in Normandy, and the Southern front was considered less critical….and this was exactly what the Allies were planning on.

The Allied plan was not too dissimilar to that of the invasion of Normandy. First, they would use extensive naval bombardment and air support to suppress German defenses. Second, they would employ airborne forces to secure key inland positions. Third, they would coordinate the amphibious assault with an uprising by French Resistance forces, who had been carefully prepared for this moment.

The force assembled for Dragoon was impressive: the US Seventh Army under Lieutenant General Alexander Patch, including three American divisions (3rd, 45th, and 36th Infantry Divisions) and French forces that would eventually form the First French Army under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny.

French forces came from Morocco, Algeria, and Senegal.

The British provided naval and air support, although the Americans and French primarily led the land operation.

Strategic and tactical air support operated from Corsica, Sardinia, and North Africa.

In total, there were about 175,000 Americans, and equal number of French soldiers, over 800 ships including 300 landing craft, and 5000 aircraft involved in Operation Dragoon.

The assault began before dawn on August 15, 1944, along a 45-mile stretch of coastline between Toulon and Cannes. There were three primary landing sites:

Alpha Beach, which was near Cavalaire-sur-Mer and was the location of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division.
Delta Beach, which was in the Saint-Tropez area and was the site of the U.S. 45th Infantry Division.
And Camel Beach, near Saint-Raphaël, where the U.S. 36th Infantry Division landed.

I said that the overall plan was not dissimilar from that of the invasion of Normandy; however, there were differences based on what they learned from D-Day.

The preliminary bombardment was far more sophisticated than earlier operations. Rather than simply pounding the beaches indiscriminately, Allied planners had identified specific German strongpoints, communication centers, and artillery positions. They used intelligence gathered by French Resistance networks to target their fire more precisely.

The First Airborne Task Force parachuted inland during the night to secure key positions and prevent German reinforcements from reaching the beaches. Unlike the scattered drops that had characterized earlier airborne operations, these paratroopers landed with greater accuracy and achieved their objectives more quickly.

When the seaborne assault began at 8:00 AM, German resistance proved lighter than expected. This wasn’t accidental – it reflected the success of Allied deception operations and the Germans’ strategic predicament.

With the Normandy front consuming enormous resources and the Eastern Front demanding constant reinforcement, German commanders in southern France had relatively few high-quality troops available.

By the end of the first day, the Allies had established beachheads on all three beaches.

Once a beachhead had been established, things went much better than they did after the landings in Normandy.

The terrain actually benefited the Allies once they broke through the coastal defenses. The Rhône Valley provided natural corridors for rapid movement northward, and the Germans lacked sufficient reserves to defend every possible avenue of advance.

The port cities of Toulon and Marseille fell much more quickly than anticipated. Toulon surrendered on August 28, and Marseille on the same day, providing the Allies with the major port facilities they desperately needed.

The initial plan was to take the cities in sequence, but the campaign was going so well that the French were able to split their forces and take both cities almost simultaneously.

This was one of the major objectives of the entire campaign, and it opened the floodgates for troops, equipment, and supplies to flood into France. It is hard to stress just how devastating this was to the Germans, even though this gets very little attention.

Operation Overlord, that being the overall Allied invasion of Europe, was at its core a logistical challenge. The amount of resources and personnel that had to be ferried over to France was enormous, and the bottlenecks were the ports, at least in July and August of 1944.

The ports of Toulon and Marseille more than doubled the capacity for the Allies to equip and reinforce France. While the port of Cherbourg was operational by mid-July, it was still damaged due to German sabotage.

Toulon and Marseille were repaired and open to shipping by September 20th.

The Germans were shorthanded in the south as they also had to deal with Operation Cobra in the northwest. Operation Cobra was a breakout of the forces in Normandy into Brittany.

The German Army Group G, realizing the threat of encirclement, began a strategic withdrawal northward.

Allied forces conducted a rapid pursuit up the Rhône Valley, liberating cities like Lyon, Grenoble, and Avignon.

The German retreat was chaotic. While some units managed to escape, many were captured or destroyed in the Rhône Valley. The operation captured or killed over 100,000 German troops.

Lyon, France’s second-largest city, fell on September 3, just nineteen days after the initial landings.

On September 11th, less than a month after the operation began, Dragoon forces linked up with General George Patton’s Third Army near Dijon, effectively uniting the fronts in France.

There is another part to Operation Dragoon that also became highly important: the political aspect.

During the Normandy invasion, French forces played a minor role. The forces that landed on D-Day were primarily American, British, and Canadian.

However, the French played a much larger role in Operation Dragoon.

The prominent role of French forces in liberating their own territory helped restore French national pride and legitimized Charles de Gaulle’s government. When French troops liberated major cities like Toulon, Marseille, and eventually Lyon, it demonstrated that France was participating as an equal partner in its own liberation, not merely being rescued by foreign forces.

This solidified De Gaulle’s position as the de facto leader of France and improved his perception amongst the French population. Something which later allowed him to be elected Prime Minister and then President of France, a position he held until 1969.

Operation Dragoon has been called the “forgotten invasion.”

While I understand why the invasion of Normandy gets more attention, it was much more dramatic and was far larger, I’m at a loss as to why Operation Dragoon has been so forgotten.

Without the port facilities it secured, the logistical challenges of sustaining the Allied advance would have been far more difficult. Without the additional front it opened, German forces might have been able to stabilize their defensive lines elsewhere.

Absent both of those things, the war might have taken much longer and might not have ended in May 1945.

I think Operation Dragoon is probably the best example of the best attributes that the Americans had in the war. They were extremely good at logistics, and they showed a remarkable ability to adapt.

A little more than two months after D-Day, they were able to take what they had learned and used that information to the make the invasion of Southern France one of the most successful campaigns of the entire war.