Operation Dragoon

1. Lead

Operation Dragoon, launched on 15 August 1944, was the Allied invasion of southern France — the second great landing of the summer of 1944, and the one that history has half-forgotten. Two months after D-Day in Normandy, American and French forces under Lieutenant General Alexander Patch landed on the beaches between Toulon and Cannes, on the French Riviera, while French Resistance fighters rose across the south.

Within two weeks, the Allies had taken the great ports of Toulon and Marseille, the German Nineteenth Army was in full retreat up the Rhône valley, and the Dragoon forces were racing north to meet the armies that had broken out of Normandy in Operation Cobra.

On 11 September, near Dijon, the two Allied armies met, and France was, for the first time since 1940, fought over from two directions at once. Dragoon was a swift, well-planned and relatively cheap victory, and it gave the Allies the ports they needed to supply the advance into Germany — yet it has always lived in the shadow of Normandy, and the argument over whether it should have been launched at all has never quite ended.

Dragoon was also, more than any other Allied operation of the war, a French operation. The French Army B under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny — later renamed the French First Army — landed in the second wave, took Toulon and Marseille in some of the hardest fighting of the campaign, and then led the advance up the Rhône.

For France, Dragoon was the liberation of the south by French soldiers, and for the Allies it was the operation that turned the invasion of France into a campaign on two fronts. Its cost was modest by the standards of the war, but its consequences were large: without the ports of southern France, the Allied advance into Germany in the autumn of 1944 would have starved for supplies, and without the French army that landed at Dragoon, the liberation of France would have been an American affair rather than a French one.

2. Key Facts

Date	15 August – 14 September 1944 (landings 15 August; link-up near Dijon 11 September)
Location	French Riviera between Toulon and Cannes; then the Rhône valley to Dijon, France
Result	Allied victory; southern France liberated, Toulon and Marseille taken, German Nineteenth Army driven north
Allied commanders	Lt. Gen. Alexander Patch (US Seventh Army); Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (French Army B / First Army); Maj. Gen. Lucian Truscott (VI Corps)
German commander	Gen. Friedrich Wiese (Nineteenth Army); Field Marshal Johannes Blaskowitz (Army Group G)
Allied strength	About 150,000 men in the first wave; US Seventh Army and French Army B; FFI across southern France
German strength	Nineteenth Army: about 200,000 men on paper, many second-line and static divisions
Allied losses	About 7,000–9,000 American and about 8,000–10,000 French casualties (estimates vary)
German losses	About 7,000–10,000 killed and wounded; about 100,000–130,000 taken prisoner (estimates vary)

3. Background

Anvil Becomes Dragoon

Operation Dragoon began life as Operation Anvil, and it was meant to land in southern France at the same time as the Normandy landings, in June 1944. The plan was to open a second front in France, to draw German divisions away from Normandy, and to take the ports of Toulon and Marseille, which the Allies would need to supply their armies.

But there were not enough landing craft for two invasions at once, and in April 1944 the Anvil forces were stripped of their shipping to support the Normandy landings. The operation was postponed, and for a time it seemed it would be cancelled altogether.

The British, led by Winston Churchill, argued that the forces should be used in Italy instead, to strike towards the Balkans and Vienna, and that a landing in southern France was a waste of resources. The Americans, led by Eisenhower and Marshall, insisted that the landing was essential: without the southern ports, they argued, the Allied armies in France could not be supplied once they had advanced beyond Normandy.

The argument ran through the spring and summer of 1944, and it was settled, in the end, by the success in Normandy: once the breakout from Normandy was under way, the landing craft were free, and the operation — renamed Dragoon, reportedly because Churchill complained that he had been “dragooned” into accepting it — was set for 15 August.

The Germans in the South

The German forces in southern France were commanded by Army Group G under Field Marshal Johannes Blaskowitz, and the army that would face the landings was the Nineteenth Army under General Friedrich Wiese. On paper the Nineteenth Army numbered about 200,000 men, but its divisions were a mixed force: some were good infantry divisions, but many were static coastal divisions made up of older men, convalescents and conscripts from the east, and some were in the process of rebuilding after the fighting in Normandy.

The German defences on the Riviera were strong in places — the coast was fortified with gun positions, minefields and obstacles — but the Germans did not expect a landing in August: they believed the Allies would land in Italy or in the Balkans, and their best divisions had been sent north to Normandy. The French Resistance in the south, the FFI, was also stronger than the Germans knew.

In the weeks before the landings, the Resistance rose across Provence and the Rhône valley, cutting railways, ambushing convoys and seizing towns, and the Germans were already fighting a war behind their own lines before a single Allied soldier had landed.

The Plan

The Allied plan was drawn up by Lieutenant General Alexander Patch, commander of the US Seventh Army, and his staff, and it was a model of careful preparation. The landings would take place on three beaches — Alpha, Delta and Camel — between Toulon and Cannes, with the American VI Corps under Major General Lucian Truscott landing first, followed by the French Army B under General de Lattre.

Before the landings, an airborne force, the 1st Airborne Task Force under Major General Robert Frederick, would drop inland to seize the high ground above the beaches, and the French Resistance would rise to support the landings. The naval forces, under Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, would provide gunfire support, and the air forces, under Major General John Cannon, would bomb the German defences.

The plan called for the Americans to drive west towards Toulon and Marseille, and for the French to take the two ports, while the American VI Corps drove north up the Rhône valley. The whole operation was to be completed within weeks, and the link-up with the Normandy armies was expected by mid-September.

The French Army

The French contribution to Dragoon was the largest French force to fight under French command since 1940, and it mattered politically as much as militarily. The French Army B was made up of divisions that had fought in North Africa and Italy — the 1st Free French Division, the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division, the 9th Colonial Infantry Division, the 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division and the 1st Armoured Division — and its men were French, Algerian, Moroccan and Senegalese.

For de Gaulle, the landing of a French army on French soil, under a French general, was essential: it proved that France was liberating itself, and it gave France an army that would fight its way to Germany. The French divisions had been equipped by the Americans, and they fought with American weapons and American vehicles, but they fought under the French flag, and their first objective was the liberation of the great French ports of the Mediterranean.

4. Opposing Forces

The US Seventh Army

The Allied invasion force was the US Seventh Army under Lieutenant General Alexander Patch, a quiet and competent officer who had commanded American forces on Guadalcanal. Patch’s army consisted of two corps: the American VI Corps under Major General Lucian Truscott, which would make the initial landings, and the French Army B under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, which would land in the second wave and take Toulon and Marseille.

The VI Corps had three infantry divisions — the 3rd, the 36th and the 45th — all veterans of the fighting in Italy, and the 1st Airborne Task Force, a mixed American, British and French airborne formation under Major General Robert Frederick. The naval forces were commanded by Vice Admiral H.

Kent Hewitt, and the air forces by Major General John Cannon, and the whole operation was supported by the French Resistance, whose fighters in Provence and the Rhône valley numbered in the tens of thousands. In total, about 150,000 Allied troops landed in the first wave, with more following in the days after.

The French Army B

The French Army B, renamed the French First Army in September 1944, was the largest French force to take the field since the fall of France. Its divisions — the 1st Free French, the 3rd Algerian, the 9th Colonial, the 2nd Moroccan and the 1st Armoured — had fought in North Africa, at Monte Cassino and in the liberation of Corsica, and they were commanded by General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, one of the most able French generals of the war.

The French army’s task was the hardest of the campaign: to take the fortified ports of Toulon and Marseille, which the Germans had turned into fortresses and which Hitler had ordered to be held to the last man. The French divisions fought with a determination that surprised even their American allies, and their losses in the fighting for the two ports were the heaviest of the campaign.

For the French soldiers, many of them colonial troops who had never seen metropolitan France, the liberation of the Mediterranean ports was a homecoming, and they fought like men who had come home.

The German Nineteenth Army

The German Nineteenth Army under General Friedrich Wiese held the coast of southern France from the Spanish border to the Italian frontier, a front of more than 400 kilometres, with divisions that were, for the most part, second-line formations. The 242nd Infantry Division held Toulon, the 244th held Marseille, and the 198th, 338th and other divisions held the Riviera coast and the Rhône valley.

The best German formation in the south, the 11th Panzer Division, was held in reserve near Toulouse, too far away to reach the beaches in time. The German air force in the south was negligible, and the German navy had only a handful of small craft in the Mediterranean.

The Nineteenth Army’s greatest weakness was its length: it had to defend a coast that was too long for its strength, and once the Allies had landed, it had no reserves to throw them back into the sea. Wiese’s orders from Hitler were to hold the ports and to fight for every metre of ground, but the orders could not be carried out, because the army did not have the men or the means.

	Allies	Germany
Infantry	US VI Corps: 3rd, 36th, 45th Infantry Divisions; French Army B: 1st Free French, 3rd Algerian, 9th Colonial, 2nd Moroccan Divisions	Nineteenth Army: 242nd (Toulon), 244th (Marseille), 198th, 338th and other infantry divisions
Armour	French 1st Armoured Division; US tank battalions	11th Panzer Division in reserve near Toulouse
Airborne	1st Airborne Task Force (American, British, French)	—
Naval	Vice Adm. Hewitt: battleships, cruisers, destroyers and landing craft	A handful of small craft; no major warships
Air support	Maj. Gen. Cannon: tactical air forces; total Allied air superiority	Luftwaffe: negligible in the south
Resistance	FFI across Provence and the Rhône valley (tens of thousands)	—

5. The Battle

15 August: The Landings

The landings began in the early hours of 15 August. Before dawn, the 1st Airborne Task Force dropped inland, around Le Muy, and seized the high ground above the beaches, though the drops were scattered and the paratroopers had to fight their way to their objectives.

At 08:00, the first waves of the American VI Corps landed on the three beaches — Alpha, near Saint-Tropez; Delta, near Sainte-Maxime; and Camel, near Saint-Raphaël — under cover of a naval bombardment that had begun at dawn. The resistance on the beaches was lighter than at Normandy: the German coastal defences were strong in places, and the fighting on Camel Beach, where the 36th Division landed, was sharp, but by nightfall the Americans had landed some 60,000 men and had advanced several kilometres inland.

The French Resistance rose across Provence, cutting the railways and seizing towns, and the German Nineteenth Army, taken by surprise, began to retreat. The landings had cost the Allies fewer than 200 men killed on the first day, and the operation was, by the standards of amphibious warfare, a triumph.

16–24 August: The Advance

The advance after the landings was swift. The American VI Corps drove north and west, and by 18 August it had taken Draguignan and was advancing on the Rhône valley. The French Army B landed on 16 August and moved west towards Toulon and Marseille, and the Resistance rose in both cities.

The Germans, meanwhile, were in retreat: Wiese had ordered the Nineteenth Army to withdraw north up the Rhône valley, but the retreat was hampered by the Resistance, which cut the roads and railways, and by the Allied air forces, which attacked the retreating columns by day.

The American advance was so fast that the German rearguards could not hold it: on 19 August, the Americans took Montélimar, on the Rhône, and for a week the battle of Montélimar raged, as the American 36th Division tried to cut the German retreat route and the Germans fought desperately to keep it open.

The battle was one of the hardest of the campaign, and it cost the Americans heavily, but it delayed the German retreat and allowed the French to take the ports.

The Battle of Montélimar

The battle of Montélimar, fought from 21 to 28 August, was the key battle of the pursuit. The American 36th Division, advancing up the Rhône, reached Montélimar on 21 August and seized the high ground north of the town, cutting the main German retreat route up the valley.

The Germans, who had to get their army north, attacked the American positions again and again, and the fighting was bitter: the Americans were outnumbered, their supply lines were stretched, and the Germans threw everything they had at the road. The 36th Division held, though at heavy cost, and the German retreat was delayed by days.

The delay mattered: it gave the French time to take Toulon and Marseille, and it gave the Allied air forces time to destroy the German columns on the roads. The battle of Montélimar is remembered as one of the finest defensive actions of the American army in the war, and it is also remembered for its cost: the 36th Division, which had already fought hard in Italy, lost heavily in the week at Montélimar.

20–28 August: Toulon and Marseille

The taking of Toulon and Marseille was the French army’s battle, and it was the hardest fighting of the campaign. Toulon, the great French naval base, was defended by the German 242nd Infantry Division under General Johannes Baessler, and its fortifications — the forts on the hills around the harbour, the coastal guns and the minefields — were formidable.

The French 3rd Algerian and 9th Colonial Divisions attacked Toulon on 20 August, and after a week of hard fighting, street by street and fort by fort, the city fell on 26 August. Marseille, the largest port of France, was defended by the 244th Infantry Division under General Hans Schäfer, and the French 1st Free French Division and the 3rd Algerian Division attacked it on 23 August.

The fighting in Marseille was fierce, and the city was not cleared until 28 August, when Schäfer surrendered with some 11,000 men. The two ports had cost the French army heavily — about 2,000 killed in the two battles — but their capture was the strategic prize of the operation: Toulon and Marseille would become the main supply ports for the Allied armies in France, and by the autumn of 1944 they were handling more supplies than the Normandy ports.

29 August – 11 September: Up the Rhône

After the fall of the ports, the Allied advance up the Rhône valley became a pursuit. The American VI Corps and the French First Army drove north, taking Lyon on 3 September and Dijon on 11 September, and the German Nineteenth Army, harried by the Resistance and by the Allied air forces, retreated towards the Belfort Gap and the German border.

On 11 September, near Dijon, the leading elements of the Dragoon forces met the leading elements of Patton’s Third Army, which had come from Normandy, and the two Allied armies were joined. The link-up was the end of the operation: southern France was liberated, the German army in the south was in retreat, and the Allied armies in France were now a single front, from the Mediterranean to the Channel.

Operation Dragoon was formally closed on 14 September, when the Seventh Army came under the command of the 6th Army Group, and the campaign in southern France became part of the general advance towards Germany.

6. Turning Point

The Ports

The turning point of Operation Dragoon was the capture of Toulon and Marseille. The operation had been justified, from the beginning, by the need for ports: without Toulon and Marseille, the Allied armies in France could not be supplied once they had advanced beyond Normandy, and the whole argument for Dragoon rested on the ports.

The French army’s capture of the two ports, in the last week of August, turned the argument into a fact. By the autumn of 1944, Marseille alone was handling more supplies than all the Normandy ports together, and the supply line from the Mediterranean became the lifeline of the Allied armies in the south.

The capture of the ports was also a French victory, won by French soldiers, and it gave France a claim on the liberation of its own soil that no one could dispute. The ports were the reason for Dragoon, and they were its turning point.

The Link-up at Dijon

The second turning point was the link-up near Dijon on 11 September, when the Dragoon forces met Patton’s Third Army. The meeting ended the separation of the two Allied invasions of France and created a single front from the Mediterranean to the Channel.

It also settled, in practice, the argument over Dragoon: the operation had not been a diversion, but the second half of the invasion of France, and the armies that landed in the south had done what the planners had hoped — they had taken the ports, destroyed the German Nineteenth Army, and joined the armies from Normandy.

The link-up was celebrated as a moment of unity, and the photographs of American and French soldiers shaking hands near Dijon became one of the images of the liberation. After Dijon, there were no longer two invasions of France, but one, and the war moved on towards Germany.

The meeting at Dijon was also a meeting of two supply systems: the Normandy ports in the north and the Mediterranean ports in the south, which together would feed the Allied armies through the autumn. The 6th Army Group, formed from the Dragoon forces, became the southern wing of the Allied front, and it fought its way to the Rhine and into Germany.

7. Casualties and Losses

The Cost

The casualty figures for Operation Dragoon are approximate, and the American and French figures are usually given separately. American losses in the operation are usually put at about 7,000 to 9,000 men killed, wounded and missing, including the heavy losses of the 36th Division at Montélimar. French losses are usually put at about 8,000 to 10,000, including about 2,000 killed in the fighting for Toulon and Marseille.

The French losses were the heaviest of the campaign in proportion to the forces engaged, and they fell above all on the colonial divisions that took the two ports. German losses are usually given as about 7,000 to 10,000 killed and wounded, and about 100,000 to 130,000 taken prisoner — a figure that includes the men captured during the retreat up the Rhône valley and in the fighting that followed.

The total of Allied casualties, about 15,000 to 19,000, was modest by the standards of the war, and it was far smaller than the losses of the Normandy campaign. Dragoon was, by comparison, a cheap victory, and its cheapness was one of the reasons it was criticised: its critics argued that a victory so cheap could not have been necessary.

Why the German Prisoner Figures Are So Large

The German prisoner figure — about 100,000 to 130,000 men — is large, and it needs explanation. The Nineteenth Army did not lose 100,000 men in battle; it lost them in the retreat. As the army withdrew up the Rhône valley, harried by the Resistance and by the Allied air forces, its columns were cut off, its supply lines were destroyed, and whole units surrendered when they found the road ahead blocked and the road behind cut.

Many of the prisoners were second-line troops — older men, convalescents and conscripts — who had little stomach for a fighting retreat, and many more were administrative and support troops who had no part in the fighting at all. The figure also includes men captured in the weeks after the operation formally ended, as the Allied armies mopped up the German stragglers in the south.

The large number of prisoners is a measure of the collapse of the German army in the south, not of the scale of the fighting.

	Allies	Germany
Killed	About 2,000 French killed at Toulon and Marseille; American and French killed in the campaign, several thousand in total (estimates vary)	About 7,000–10,000 killed and wounded (estimates vary)
Wounded and missing	American about 7,000–9,000 total casualties; French about 8,000–10,000 total casualties	Included in the figures above
Prisoners	—	About 100,000–130,000 taken prisoner (estimates vary)
Total	About 15,000–19,000 Allied casualties	About 7,000–10,000 killed and wounded; about 100,000–130,000 captured

8. Map and Geography

The Riviera Coast

Operation Dragoon was fought on the French Riviera, the Mediterranean coast between Toulon and Cannes, and the ground shaped the landings. The coast is a narrow strip between the sea and the hills of Provence, and the beaches — Alpha, Delta and Camel — were small coves and stretches of sand backed by hills that the airborne force had to seize before the landings could succeed.

The towns of the Riviera — Saint-Tropez, Sainte-Maxime, Saint-Raphaël, Fréjus — were small resorts in 1944, and the roads that ran along the coast were the only routes inland. The German defences were concentrated on the beaches and on the hills above them, and the Allied plan depended on the airborne landings at Le Muy, which cut the roads behind the beaches and prevented the Germans from reinforcing the coast.

The geography of the Riviera favoured the attacker in one respect: the coast was short, the beaches were close together, and the Allied naval gunfire could cover them all.

The Rhône Valley

After the landings, the geography of the campaign was the geography of the Rhône valley. The Rhône flows south from Lyon to the Mediterranean, through a broad valley between the Alps in the east and the Massif Central in the west, and the valley is the great north-south route of France.

The German retreat ran up the valley, and the Allied pursuit followed it, and the battle of Montélimar was fought for the road that ran through the valley at its narrowest point. The valley also explains the speed of the Allied advance: once the Germans had been driven from the valley, there was nothing to stop the Allies until they reached Dijon and the Belfort Gap, and the French and American columns covered hundreds of kilometres in a few weeks.

The Rhône valley was the highway of the campaign, and whoever held it held southern France.

The valley was also the route of the French Resistance: the maquis of the Rhône and the Alps cut the railways, ambushed the German columns, and seized the towns ahead of the Allied advance, and the German retreat became a running battle with an enemy that was everywhere and nowhere.

9. Outcome and Legacy

The Ports and the Supply Line

The outcome of Operation Dragoon was the liberation of southern France and the opening of the Mediterranean supply line. Toulon and Marseille became the main ports for the Allied armies in France, and by the autumn of 1944 they were handling more supplies than the Normandy ports.

The supply line from the Mediterranean was the lifeline of the 6th Army Group, which fought its way from the Rhône to the Rhine and into Germany, and without it the Allied advance in the south would have starved. The operation also destroyed the German Nineteenth Army as a fighting force: the army that retreated up the Rhône valley was a shadow of the force that had held the coast in August, and it would not recover.

The link-up at Dijon on 11 September joined the two Allied invasions of France into a single front, and the war in France became a war on one front, from the Channel to the Mediterranean.

The Argument Over Dragoon

The legacy of Dragoon has always been bound up with the argument over whether it should have been launched at all. Churchill, who had opposed the operation, argued after the war that the forces would have been better used in Italy, and that the landing in southern France was a waste of resources that could have struck at the Balkans and Vienna.

The Americans, and the French, argued the opposite: that the ports were essential, that the operation destroyed a German army, and that the liberation of southern France by French troops was a political necessity. Historians have generally sided with the Americans: the ports were indeed essential, the German Nineteenth Army was indeed destroyed, and the operation was, by the standards of the war, a cheap victory.

But the argument has never quite ended, and Dragoon remains the most debated of the Allied landings of 1944 — a victory that was also a question.

Memory

Dragoon is remembered in southern France as the liberation of Provence, and every 15 August the towns of the Riviera commemorate the landings. The French army’s capture of Toulon and Marseille is remembered as a French victory, and the monuments in the two ports honour the colonial soldiers — Algerians, Moroccans and Senegalese — who fought and died for a France many of them had never seen.

In the United States, Dragoon is remembered as the “other D-Day”, the landing that history forgot, and the veterans of the Seventh Army have long argued that their victory deserves more recognition than it has received. The operation’s relative obscurity is itself a part of its story: Dragoon was a success, and successes that come cheaply are remembered less than victories that come at a terrible price.

The landings are also remembered by the men who made them: the American divisions that landed on the Riviera went on to fight in the Vosges and in Germany, and the French divisions went on to liberate Alsace and to cross the Rhine. Dragoon was the beginning of their war, not the end of it.

10. Commanders

Allied Commanders

Lieutenant General Alexander Patch (United States). Commander of the US Seventh Army and of Operation Dragoon. Patch had commanded American forces on Guadalcanal and in the Pacific, and he planned and carried out the landings in southern France with a care that made the operation one of the smoothest of the war. He commanded the Seventh Army through the advance to the Rhine and died in November 1945, shortly after the war.

General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (France). Commander of the French Army B, later the French First Army. De Lattre commanded the French forces that took Toulon and Marseille and led the advance up the Rhône, and he went on to command the French First Army through the fighting in Alsace and into Germany. He was made a Marshal of France in 1952 and later commanded French forces in Indochina.

Major General Lucian Truscott (United States). Commander of VI Corps, which made the initial landings. Truscott was one of the most able American corps commanders of the war, a veteran of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, and his corps led the advance up the Rhône valley. He later commanded the Fifth Army in Italy.

Major General Robert Frederick (United States). Commander of the 1st Airborne Task Force, which dropped inland before the landings and seized the high ground above the beaches. Frederick had commanded the 1st Special Service Force, the “Devil’s Brigade”, in Italy, and his airborne force’s work at Le Muy was essential to the success of the landings.

German Commanders

General Friedrich Wiese (Germany). Commander of the Nineteenth Army in southern France. Wiese commanded the defence of the Riviera coast and the retreat up the Rhône valley, and his army was effectively destroyed in the campaign. He was relieved of command in December 1944 and survived the war.

Field Marshal Johannes Blaskowitz (Germany). Commander of Army Group G, which included the Nineteenth Army. Blaskowitz was a career officer who had commanded in Poland and France, and he was responsible for the defence of southern France. He was tried for war crimes after the war and killed himself in 1948 while awaiting trial.

General Hans Schäfer (Germany). Commander of the 244th Infantry Division, which defended Marseille. Schäfer’s division held the port city for five days against the French 1st Free French Division and the 3rd Algerian Division, fighting street by street, before surrendering on 28 August 1944 with some 11,000 men. His defence delayed the capture of the port, but it could not save it, and Marseille became the main supply port of the Allied armies in France.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was Operation Dragoon?
Operation Dragoon began with the landings on 15 August 1944. Toulon fell on 26 August and Marseille on 28 August, the Allied armies met near Dijon on 11 September, and the operation formally closed on 14 September 1944.

Where did the Dragoon landings take place?
The landings took place on three beaches — Alpha, Delta and Camel — on the French Riviera between Toulon and Cannes, near Saint-Tropez, Sainte-Maxime and Saint-Raphaël.

Why was Operation Dragoon launched?
Dragoon was launched to open a second front in France, to take the ports of Toulon and Marseille, which the Allies needed to supply their armies, and to destroy the German Nineteenth Army in southern France. The French also insisted on a French army landing on French soil.

Why was it called Dragoon?
The operation was originally called Anvil. It was renamed Dragoon, reportedly because Winston Churchill, who opposed the operation, complained that he had been “dragooned” — forced — into accepting it.

Who took Toulon and Marseille?
The two ports were taken by the French Army B under General de Lattre de Tassigny. Toulon fell on 26 August 1944 and Marseille on 28 August 1944, after a week of hard fighting by the French divisions.

How many casualties did Operation Dragoon cause?
Allied losses were about 15,000–19,000 men in total, including about 7,000–9,000 Americans and about 8,000–10,000 French. German losses were about 7,000–10,000 killed and wounded and about 100,000–130,000 taken prisoner.

Related articles

• Falaise Pocket
• Gazala
• Liberation of Paris

Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Operation Dragoon” — dates, strength, casualty figures and the course of the operation.
2. US Army Center of Military History, Riviera to the Rhine, United States Army in World War II series — the official history of Dragoon and the advance up the Rhône.
3. Encyclopædia Britannica, “Operation Dragoon” — background, the landings and the ports.
4. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, The History of the French First Army (Allen & Unwin, 1952) — the French commander’s account of Toulon, Marseille and the Rhône.
5. Jeffrey J. Clarke and Robert Ross Smith, Riviera to the Rhine (Center of Military History, 1993) — the American official history.
6. William B. Breuer, Operation Dragoon: The Allied Invasion of the South of France (Presidio, 1987) — the landings and the campaign.

Further reading

• Robin Cross, Operation Dragoon (in The Oxford Companion to World War II, Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Peter Caddick-Adams, Sand and Steel (Oxford University Press, 2019), on the landings of 1944.