| Operation Perch | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Battle for Caen | |||||||
 Centaur IV tank of the Royal Marines Armoured Support Group near Tilly-sur-Seulles | |||||||
| |||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
 United Kingdom |
 Germany | ||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
|
Bernard Montgomery Miles C. Dempsey Gerard Bucknall |
Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg Sepp Dietrich | ||||||
| Strength | |||||||
|
1 armoured division 2 infantry divisions 2 armoured brigades |
3 panzer divisions 1 infantry division 1 heavy tank battalion | ||||||
Villers-Bocage, a commune in the Calvados department of the Normandy region of Northern France. | |||||||
Operation Perch was a British offensive of the Second World War which took place from 7 to 14 June 1944, during the early stages of the Battle of Normandy. The operation was intended to encircle and seize the German occupied city of Caen, which was a D-Day objective for the British 3rd Infantry Division in the early phases of Operation Overlord. Operation Perch was to begin immediately after the British beach landings with an advance to the south-east of Caen by XXX Corps. Three days after the invasion the city was still in German hands and the operation was amended. The operation was expanded to include I Corps for a pincer attack on Caen.
On the next day, XXX Corps in the west pushed south to Tilly-sur-Seulles, which was occupied by the Panzer-Lehr Division; the village was captured and re-captured several times. I Corps began the eastern thrust two days later from the Orne bridgehead, which had been secured in Operation Tonga on D-Day. I Corps was also delayed by constant counter-attacks of the 21st Panzer Division. With mounting casualties and no sign of a German collapse, the offensive east of Caen was suspended on 13 June.
Further west in the US First Army area, American attacks forced a gap in the German defences. Part of the 7th Armoured Division was diverted from Tilly-sur-Seulles, to advance through the gap in a flanking manoeuvre and force the Panzer Lehr Division to fall back, to avoid encirclement. On 14 June, after two days of battle including the Battle of Villers-Bocage, the 7th Armoured Division was ordered to withdraw towards Caumont. Plans were made to resume the offensive once the 7th Armoured Division had been reinforced but the plans came to nothing when a storm in the English Channel seriously delayed the landing of supplies and reinforcements.
The battle is controversial because many historians and writers have concluded that it was failures by British divisional and corps commanders that squandered an opportunity to capture Caen, rather than the Germans achieving a defensive success. To resist the offensive, the Germans had committed their most powerful armoured reserves, which deprived them of the fighting power for a counter-offensive and forfeited the initiative to the Allies.