Villers-Bocage has been lodged in most people’s memory as an embarrassing and costly defeat for the British Army in Normandy. The flaw in this point of view is that it is entirely reliant on the focus being on just ten minutes of fighting plucked from a two-day battle. Consequently, it has been exploited by some historians wishing to malign the quality of British troops and, more particularly, British Generalship during the campaign in Normandy.
The battle has all the classic elements to attract the reader – elite formations locked in desperate combat, and a single ‘hero’ around whom a myth has evolved. It feeds a strange fascination with the Waffen-SS and appears to enhance the reputation of that most iconic of fighting vehicles – the Tiger tank. The trouble is that, in concentrating on those ten minutes alone, the true nature of the fighting, and a correct appreciation of the outcome is entirely lost.
For the revisionist historian the rest of the battle does not fit the desired narrative.
In re-examining the battle, it quickly becomes apparent that most of the received history is wrong. Far from being the crushing defeat that is so often it is described, Villers-Bocage marks one of the most astonishing and compelling feats of arms by the British in the course of the campaign and set the course for tactical application that would make victory in Normandy inevitable. The shortcoming was that territory was lost and so the scale of the reversal inflicted on the Germans was never realised. Until now.
This book provides a minutely detailed examination of the course of the action. Dozens of first-hand accounts are brought together, sifted for relevance, and unpacked into a comprehensible time-line. Both German and British histories and personal accounts have been pieced together providing an astonishing level of corroboration. An unprecedented quantity of photographs, from multiple sources, add definition and visual verification of the facts. This is combined with extensive mapping to illustrate the course of the battle in order to provide complete clarity for the reader.
RELEASE WILL BE 30th MAY 2023 - AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER