19441776 Club
Allied troops storm the Riviera; Germans fall back within hours
French and American forces hit three beaches near Saint-Tropez while a German army thinned out by Normandy barely holds the shore.
Two months after Normandy, the Allies opened a second front on France's Mediterranean coast. On August 15, 1944, Major General Lucian Truscott's US VI Corps landed on the Côte d'Azur under cover of Vice Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt's naval task force, with Général Jean de Lattre de Tassigny's French Army B close behind. German Army Group G, stripped of its best units for the northern front, saw its second-rate troops largely surrender, while the remaining better units managed to escape north. Mines proved to be the biggest threat at most beaches, but a single guided bomb, the Henschel Hs 293, caused 40 of the 480 total Allied casualties on its own…
