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From D-Day to V-Day

June 1944

June 30, 1944 - D-Day + 24

The last day of the month the invasion started

On June 30, 1944, Field Marshal Montgomery, the Commander of the 21st Army Group, ordered the US First Army to attack enemy forces in the Villers-Bocage area while the British Second Army tried to conquer Caen.

Under pressure from the US VII Corps’ 9th Infantry Division, the enemy’s defense line of the Cotentin Peninsula near Cap de la Hague collapsed. After dawn, the 39th Infantry Regiment of the 9th Infantry Division sent a scouting mission out to the tip of the peninsula. The 101st Airborne Division, which had been to hell and back on the first days of the invasion when the fate of the Allied Expeditionary Forces hung on each and every man, substituted the 4th Infantry Division in Cherbourg. The soldiers under Major General Raymond O. Barton, Commander of the 4th Infantry Division, could now start to prepare for the upcoming offensive in the southern sector of the front.

In the course of the final day of June, Combat Command A from the VIII Corps’ 3rd Armored Division conquered set targets lying northeast of St Lô, thus significantly assisting the 115th RCT from the 29th Infantry Division. This is the same division that landed in the Omaha sector on June 6, 1944.

On this day, “Czechoslovak” fighter aircraft from the Royal Air Force escorted a huge company of British bombers. A total of 151 Lancasters, 105 Halifaxes and 10 Mosquitoes from the No. 3, 4 and 8 Groups RAF focused their sights on the area near Villers-Bocage, where a large group of enemy tanks from the 2nd and 9th German Panzer Divisions had been discovered. During the mission, a total of 1,100 tons of bombs were dropped – and the results were very good. Never before in the Second World War had an air force strike on a concentration of land troops been as effective as it was on this fateful day of June 30, 1944. The four-engine aircraft from Bomber Command attacked the German Panzerwaffe, thus preventing it from launching a strike against the British-Canadian troops exhausted from Operation Epsom. The heavy bombers’ raid occurred near the area where the German tank ace SS-Obersturmbannführer Michael Wittmann used his Tiger to destroy up to thirty British land force vehicles, including several light and medium Stuart, Sherman Firefly and Cromwell tanks from the 4th Country of London Yeomanry.