Bloody Battle for Tilly

Normandy 1944

The fierce battle to capture the French village of Tilly-la-Campagne was an exceptionally bloody episode in the story of the allied breakout from Normandy in the summer of 1944. Lying to the South of the city of Caen, Tilly was one of a number of stone-built villages that had been fortified by the Germans to hold up the Allied advance, and it saw what was probably the worst of the infantry fighting following D-Day. The Canadian 3rd Division made five attempts to capture the village and lost well over half its fighting men within a month. This work focuses on the infantry travail around the fortified villages south of Caen. It draws on eyewitness accounts to give a portrayal of the battle and a fitting tribute to the youth of Canada and Britain who fought, and the many who died, during the breakout from Normandy in the last summer of the war in Europe.