After the bitter fighting in the Normandy hedgerows, the Allied liberation of Northern France was in stark contrast - after weeks of painfully slow progress there followed a phase of lightening advances that did not stop until the frontline troops finally outran the ability of the logistic units to maintain the flow of consumables along ever increasing lines of communication. These thrusts culminated with the liberation of Brussels & marked the end of one possibly the greatest defeat that the Wermacht suffered in WWII.

To put this in perspective, the other three significant defeats that the German Army had suffered up until that point of the war were:

Stalingrad (1942/3)
Tunisia (1943)
The destruction of Army Group Centre in White Russia (1944).

Whilst the Battle of Stalingrad caused large human losses, the actual loss in terms of German units was approximately 20 divisions, of which 2 were armoured, or 1/10th of the German divisions in Russia or 1/15th of the total German Army strength. Whilst the loss of the 6th Army could not be replaced, the Wermacht was still strong enough to mount its largest armoured offensive of the war, at Kursk, in the summer of 1943. Furthermore, even after the retreat for Stalingrad, German forces were still 500 miles inside Russia.

The destruction of the Afrika Korps in the spring of 1943 represented an altogether different type of defeat. It destroyed the Italian Empire & accelerated Italy's withdrawal from the war. It ended Hitler's only area of operations outside Europe. However, it terms of the loss of men & material, the defeat only cost the German High Command 8 divisions or 125,000 men.

The scale of defeat suffered by Army Group Centre was of completely another magnitude. On June 22 1944, 140 Russian divisions launched an offensive along a 350-mile front. In 3 weeks Soviet forces had driven 250 miles, only halting when they too, out ran their logistics. In the process, the German 4th & 9th Armies totalling some 28 divisions comprising of some 300,000 men had been utterly destroyed.

Compare these figures with the Battle of Normandy. When the German High Command was at last able to start to regroup in mid September 1944, its 12 armoured divisions should have fielded some 1,800 tanks; they had 120. 2,200 German tanks had been destroyed in the fighting in Normandy.

Of the infantry divisions deployed in the West, 21 were still in the order of battle in September: 3 divisions had been evacuated altogether, 9 were being refitted, 7 were under siege in various French ports & 8 had been dissolved as being beyond repair. Of the 21 divisions still capable of fighting, 8 were classified as remnants. A total of 27 infantry divisions had been destroyed by Allied forces, 11 panzer divisions reduced to tatters, 250,000 German soldiers were dead, a further 250,000 were wounded or POWs.

The advances of late July to August were only possible because of the scale of destruction that had so recently occurred. That is worth remembering as the key to Normandy.

Footnote: Most of the above has been (cough cough) borrowed from John Keegan's analysis in his excellent book Six Armies in Normandy - if you don't have a copy, may I take this opportunity to commend it to you