Top Photo:  Invasion of Southern France, August 1944. LCTs and LCMs landing supplies on the beach west of St. Rafael, on "D" plus five, 20 August 1944. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command 80-G-K-2112

On August 15, 1944, Allied troops stormed ashore in southern France against light and disorganized German resistance, opening a new front in the liberation of continental Europe. Originally designated Operation Anvil and intended to support the hammer blow of the Normandy landings two months earlier, the renamed Operation Dragoon fulfilled an American desire for a lodgment in southern France that shifted forces from the strategic cul-de-sac of Italy. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had long favored an advance up the Italian Peninsula and through the Ljubljana Gap into the Danube River basin of central Europe, strongly opposed the operation and allegedly insisted on the name change to highlight his being “dragooned” into supporting it.[1] But the landing and subsequent advance up the Rhône valley to link up with troops breaking out from the Normandy beachhead proved to be one of the most significant, and underrated, strategic campaigns of the entire war. 

French forces quickly liberated the vital ports of Marseilles and Toulon, and by winter, a third of Allied supplies were flowing through the lightly damaged and quickly rehabilitated ports and up the largely intact rail lines of the Rhône valley to General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s armies gathered on Germany’s border. The logistical support was even more significant against the backdrop of ports in northern Europe such as Cherbourg, which was still being cleared, and Antwerp, still blocked by German forces in the Scheldt estuary. The landings greatly facilitated the liberation of southern and western France and gave the Allies an entire additional army group along the front stretching from the Swiss Alps to the English Channel. Without the 6th Army Group—consisting of the American Seventh and French First armies—holding the line in Alsace, Eisenhower might not have had sufficient forces or supplies to attempt the Market Garden breakthrough or to halt the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes in the months that followed.

Origins of Operation Anvil/Dragoon

In its original form, Operation Anvil was intended to be a simultaneous landing with Operation Overlord in Normandy designed to stretch German defenses between the two fronts. But delays in breaking out from the Anzio beachhead, which did not link up with forces breaking through the Gustav Line until late May, coupled with shortages of landing craft caused by the expansion of Overlord from a three- to a five-division effort, forced the cancellation. But as the Allied advance in Italy accelerated, with Rome falling on June 4, and as naval forces allocated to Normandy became available again, the Allies resuscitated the plan in mid-July, using primarily Major General Lucien Truscott’s US VI Corps. The corps had been pulled out of the line in Anzio to rest and refit and consisted of three infantry divisions—the 3rd, 36th (originally of the Texas National Guard), and 45th (the “Thunderbirds” of the Oklahoma and Colorado National Guards)—with extensive experience in amphibious operations. The 3rd had conducted landings in North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio, making it one of the Army’s most experienced, and was ably led by Major General John W. “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, a hard-fighting Irishman originally from Delaware with combat experience in World War I. The 36th and 45th had completed a unique course that combined amphibious training on Chesapeake Bay with mountain warfare training on the Seneca Rocks of West Virginia, and had also conducted the Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio landings with VI Corps. 

Invasion of Southern France, August 1944. Map of France showing Mediterranean area. Received September 13, 1944. U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. 80-G-46491

Planners designated a section of the Cote d’Azur for each division—the 3rd on the left near St. Tropez, the 36th on the right near St. Raphael, and the 45th in the center near St. Maxime. Behind the beaches, a makeshift airborne force built around the American 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment and the British 2nd Parachute Brigade Group, would delay any German response toward the beachhead. Follow-on forces under the commander of French Army “B,” General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, included the French II Corps, with the 1st, 3rd (Algerian) and 9th (Colonial) Infantry Divisions and the 1st Armored Division. Their mission was to quickly exploit the success by breaking out of the beachhead to the west toward Toulon and Marseilles, roughly 30 and 60 miles away, respectively. The US Eighth Fleet, under Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, contained all the amphibious vessels, as well as seven British and two American light escort carriers for air support, with naval fire support coming from three American, one French, and one British battleships. Air support from XII Tactical Air Command kept the skies free of Luftwaffe aircraft, providing immediate air support for the ground forces and helping shape the amphibious objective area before the landings. The combined and joint Allied team was well-rested, well-led, highly experienced, and thoroughly primed for the operation.

The German forces, organized as Army Group B under Johannes Blaskowitz, were in a different situation entirely. Most of the nine understrength infantry divisions in southern France were of dubious quality, either resting from commitment on the eastern front or made up of “volunteers” from across the Third Reich. The exception was the 11th Panzer Division under Generalmajor Wend von Wietersheim, which constituted the army group’s mobile reserve. Throughout the campaign in Normandy, the German divisions had seen units siphoned off to feed into that battle, including an entire tank battalion from 11th Panzer. The Allied breakout and rapid advance across northern France in early August threatened the army group’s rear, as the Alps blocked any retreat east into Italy, and threatened to sever the German lines of communication. Though the ports and beaches had been extensively fortified, the defenses mostly faced toward the Mediterranean, meaning they could be turned with a successful landing elsewhere and then taken from behind. 

The Invasion Begins

Southern France Invasion, August 1944. 45th Division Troops wade ashore from USS LCI-552, near Ste. Maxime, on "D-Day", 15 August 1944. LCI-522 is at left. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command. SC 193146

Aided by landings from the 1st Special Service Force, a joint US-Canadian commando unit that neutralized several positions on coastal islands that flanked the landing beaches, the invasion forces secured their lodgments with minimal difficulty. Only resistance in the port of St. Raphael blocked one of the 36th Infantry Division’s beaches, but the forces quickly shifted to two nearby beaches and worked their way inland. The German response faced resistance from both the paratroopers, who had again been scattered across their landing zones, and the local French Resistance forces, which rose immediately to sabotage roads and bridges and prohibit enemy movement. With the initial landings secure, Truscott pushed his corps inland while landing craft ferried the French units back onto their native soil. Hitler ordered his forces defending the ports to barricade themselves in the cities, hoping to tie down the Allied liberators, but they were not up to the task and succumbed to the combined forces of the French army and French Resistance within a week. In the only controversial aspect of the campaign, Truscott had initially held his forces close to the beachhead, in order to repel any German counterattack, as he had personally experienced at both Salerno and Anzio. But the German defenders of southern France in the late summer of 1944 were not the same as those who had defended Italy a year earlier, and Truscott could have gotten an earlier jump on the race inland to Montelimar, a critical chokepoint on the German escape route up the Rhône valley. Instead, Truscott sent only a light armored force, equivalent to a combat command of a US armored division, to secure the vital artery, under the command of his deputy, Brigadier General Frederic Butler, and designated Task Force Butler.

US Army soldiers push inland from practically an uncontested landing on coast of Southern France.  Photograph received 15 August 1944. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.

Aided significantly by the French Resistance, the ad hoc group quickly forced its way through the rugged hills of Provence and debouched into the Rhône Valley on August 21, just ahead of the retreating Germans. This lodgment opened the heaviest fighting of Operation Dragoon, as over the next week, German forces, including von Wietersheim’s 11th Panzer, broke through several of Task Force Butler’s weak roadblocks and at one point threatened to surround and cut off the entire command. Now over 100 miles inland, and dependent on strained supply lines stretching back to the beachhead, the American forces and their French allies lacked sufficient combat power to overwhelm the desperate Germans. Pushed back from the valley itself, American artillerists set up on the surrounding ridges and inflicted fearful casualties on the Germans attempting to run the gauntlet under their noses. Only the arrival of the 36th Infantry Division, once freed from its responsibilities along the coast, enabled the Allies to finally close the corridor with the liberation of Montelimar on August 29. But, as in the near simultaneous Battle of the Falaise Pocket in northern France, most of the Germans had escaped by the time the cork was firmly in the bottle, though they did suffer heavy equipment losses in the process. 

Over the following weeks, French and American forces raced up the Rhône and Saone river valleys in what soldiers overwhelmed by grateful French civilians dubbed the “Champagne Campaign.” However, like Falaise, the Allies again failed to cut off the retreating German forces at Lyon before they finally reached the safety of the foothills of the Vosges Mountains. On September 10, lead elements linked up with General George S. Patton’s Third Army near Dijon, sealing the escape route for German forces in southern and western France and creating a continuous defensive line from Switzerland to the channel.

Significance of Operation Dragoon

In the postwar years, some analysts, primarily British, continued to denigrate Operation Dragoon and the shift of so many highly experienced French and American forces from Italy to France. For the British, the removal of VI Corps contributed to a bogged down offensive along the Pisa-Rimini Line in late 1944 and condemned the 15th Army Group to another winter slogging through the Apennines. While Allied forces finally broke out into the Po River valley in the spring of 1945, the Mediterranean theater had already served its purpose, allowing the Allies to reopen Mare Nostrum to shipping, knock Italy out of the war, and, perhaps most importantly, hone the skills of the war-winning team that was then leading the Allied armies across France into Germany. The decision to launch and support Operation Dragoon was undoubtedly correct, as it shifted forces to the front where they were needed most, allowing the Allies to break through the Westwall near Aachen, blunt the German offensive in the Bulge, and finally vault the Rhine in March 1945. Perhaps even more important than the raw number of troops was the logistical lifeline that Marseille and southern France provided, sustaining far more than just the 6th Army Group forces who had liberated the region.[2] 

The population of Ste. Maxime welcomes a French Tank Destroyer Unit that halted there before pushing on, 16 August 1944. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command. SC 193164

Despite its historical significance, the campaign has lingered in the shadows of the efforts to liberate Rome and Paris the same summer, alongside the Soviet Operation Bagration that heralded the ended of German combat power in the east. The US Army did not even complete its official history of the campaign, Jeffrey Clarke and Robert Ross Smith’s excellent Riviera to the Rhine, until 1993, just in time for the 50th anniversary. But the operation was an exemplar of Allied joint and combined planning, leveraging the growing French contribution in an area where they would be fully motivated to display their maturing talents. Dragoon certainly helped ensure the eventual Allied victory and remains a model of campaign planning and execution for military professionals today.