Many British and Canadian commanders had fought as junior officers on the Western Front in the First World War and believed that an operational approach based on technology and firepower could avoid another long drawn-out bloodbath.

[d] Montgomery studied the COSSAC plan and at a conference on 21 January 1944, advocated a landing on a wider front between Quinéville in the west and Cabourg les Bains on the east side of the Orne river.

[17][16] The compromise forced on the western commanders meant that the central reserve was too small to provide the speed and mass that Rundstedt wanted and too few panzer divisions were near the coast to enable Rommel to defeat the invasion as soon as it began.

[20] Command of the forces further inland was retained by Rundstedt but control of the panzer and panzergrenadier divisions was eventually split between OKW and the two army groups, Rundstedt retaining command only of the three divisions in Heeresgruppe G.[22] The civilian workers of Organisation Todt and troops built Perlenschnur (string of pearls) of steel-and-concrete defensive positions with overlapping fields of fire based on Widerstandsnester (resistance nests) formed into Stützpunkte (strong points) and Stützpunktgruppen (strong point groups).

There is an 18 mi (29 km) stretch between the mouth of the Orne north of Caen and Arromanches on which landings can easily be made, except for reefs, which prevent large ships from approaching the shore.

Many senior officers were absent, and only when it was discovered that parachutists were landing was an alert called by the 7th Army; German troops went off on wild goose chases and found dummy paratroops.

Over the following two days, a foothold was secured across the River Odon and efforts were made to expand this, by capturing tactically valuable points around the salient and moving up the 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division.

[107][108] The attack reinforced the German view that the Allied threat on the eastern flank was the most dangerous and more units were transferred eastwards, including the remaining mobile elements of the 2nd Panzer Division near Caumont.

[112] During the battle, the I SS Panzer Corps had turned the 90 ft (27 m) high Verrières Ridge into their primary fortification, defending it with hundreds of guns, tanks, Nebelwerfers, mortars, and infantry from up to three divisions.

[113] On 18 July, Operation Atlantic began 45 minutes after Goodwood and the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division with tank support, captured Giberville and the Caen industrial suburbs of Colombelles and Vaucelles south the Orne.

Buckley wrote that critics had it that the British "bungled matters again" at Villers Bocage a week after D-Day, when the 7th Armoured Division was "stopped dead in its tracks, apparently by the action of a single Tiger tank".

Badsey wrote that after D-Day, historians and writers concentrate on the defence of Caen by the 12th SS and the 21st Panzer divisions but that the Germans also conducted many pincer attacks against the invasion beaches which were devastated by Allied air and naval bombardment, which made it impossible to manoeuvre north of the Caen–Cherbourg road, just as Rommel had predicted.

Hitler ordered the generals to hold Cherbourg instead, which condemned the Germans to a series of defeats in "hard-fought" battles that were never "close run"; Dollmann, the 7th Army commander, killed himself the next day.

Montgomery is blamed for failing to capture all of the D-Day objectives as if the weather was irrelevant, though it caused all of the airborne drops to be scattered and all of the landing forces to drift eastwards from their beaches.

[129] Badsey wrote that ignoring the significance of the Mulberries was caused by the German emphasis on battlefield effectiveness at the expense of supply, and because orthodox thinking stressed that Cherbourg was the closest big port to the Allied landings.

Copp also wrote that despite demonstrating great powers of resistance, the German armies had shown no skill in defence and that their tactic of immediate counter-attack was persisted with for far too long after its futility in the face of Allied firepower had become obvious.

Badsey wrote that it was possible to write an alternative account and that on 7 June, Eisenhower, Montgomery and Bradley gave the same orders, that the priority was changed from an advance inland, to a merging of the beachheads.

[137] With the WN network on the coast was a second defensive line on a 90–100 ft (27–30 m)-high ridge, 2,500–4,000 yd (1.4–2.3 mi; 2.3–3.7 km) inland, where reserve companies of the battalions in the beach defences and most of the German artillery were placed.

Germany's Generals: Their Rise and Fall, with their own Account of Military Events 1939–1945 (1948), B. H. Liddell Hart gave a dissenting view, which portrayed a German Army that had held out for so long because its leaders understood mobile warfare, having absorbed his pre-war ideas.

[139][j] In his 1952 account, Chester Wilmot, an Australian war correspondent, who had accompanied the Allies in Normandy, wrote of the concern in the 21st Army Group HQ in late June and July, when British attacks had fallen short, despite the support devoted to them.

Buckley wrote that this failed to take account of German "...brutality, the fear, the overtly poisonous racist ideology….the criminalisation of young soldiers, the extreme coercion and...the desperation of the last year of the war".

Analysts criticised the command style of Montgomery, because he had denied initiative to subordinates and caused opportunities on the battlefield to be missed, a possibility that could lead to disaster against the Red Army.

The Germans in Normandy had demonstrated an "extraordinary fighting performance" and had been "glorious", despite the evil of the Nazi cause but the British had been slow and cautious, too reliant on attrition to exploit advantages.

Buckley wrote that the impression of German excellence rested on a narrow definition of effectiveness, in which "close-combat" prowess, derived from ideology, tactics and greater experience, was considered in isolation.

Buckley used a wider definition of effectiveness, in which intelligence, supply, planning, firepower, medical services, liaison, communications and engineering were essential counterparts to battlefield tactics.

[149] Buckley defined operations as the organisation of military units into larger groups as building blocks to campaign objectives, linking minor tactics and politico-strategic aims.

[150] The British had to defeat the Germans with the minimum of casualties to create the circumstances necessary for a lasting peace; since the 1990s the methods used by Montgomery had been re-evaluated, with his "disagreeable....peculiar and difficult personality" being given less prominence.

[151] Monographs on parts of the army have shown that they performed well and the Canadians have been rescued from historical oblivion, through the use of "contemporary documents, reports and operational analyses", rather than journalistic writing, apologetics and testimony.

Montgomery claimed that the bombing of Caen had played a vital part in its subsequent capture but Gray wrote that later assessments of this analysis range "from fantasy to guilty conscience".

The landings at Normandy, the battle and the Second World War are remembered today with many memorials; Caen hosts the Mémorial with a peace museum (Musée de la paix).