10. Operation Dragoon, Southern France, August-September, 1944
With American troops fighting in northern France in the summer of 1944 an on-again/off-again attack in the south of France was resurrected in July, driven by the need to capture ports of a size sufficient to be used to ease the growing supply problems encountered by the Allied armies. The battle of southern France was an American led affair, supported by French troops who captured the Mediterranean ports of Marseille and Toulon, and Canadian commandos. The Americans were led by Lucian Truscott, who had learned the necessity of advancing inland from the invasion beaches as quickly as possible from the Anzio debacle. The Germans were aware of the coming invasion and prepared a withdrawal ahead of the advancing Americans until they consolidated their forces in defensive positions. The Americans moved inland faster than the Germans could withdraw, attacking them from behind and along their flanks.
On September 14 Truscott was ordered to cease the offensive and consolidated the gains made while the Germans developed a defense line in the Vosges Mountains. The four week battle up the Rhone Valley cost the Americans 7,301 men killed, about half of the total casualties suffered by the American forces. Although American military leaders considered the battle a victory, senior British personnel, including Field Marshal Montgomery and Winston Churchill deemed it an unnecessary operation, with the former arguing that it diverted resources which would have been better used in his theater of operations. Churchill believed that it gave Stalin a free hand in the Balkans, and that the Allies should have attacked there, rather than in the south of France.