Page "Battle of Villers-Bocage" Paragraph 69

Other than its initial encounter with the 101st SS Heavy Panzer Battalion's 2nd Company and the subsequent loss of Point 213, the 22nd Armoured Brigade group had repelled every German assault on its positions throughout the two days of fighting.

Students of the battle have therefore looked to the senior commanders involved to explain the " fumbled failure " at Villers-Bocage.

Dempsey remarked after the war that " this attack by 7th Armoured Division should have succeeded.

My feeling that Bucknall and Erskine would have to go started with that failure ... the whole handling of that battle was a disgrace.

Their decision to withdraw Villers-Bocage was done by the corps commander and Erskine.

" Although D ' Este calls Dempsey's comments " excessively harsh " and believes that once the town had been abandoned the Brigade group's eventual withdrawal was inevitable, historians generally support them — some going so far as to suggest that Bucknall threw away the chance to swiftly capture Caen.

General Bernard Montgomery, who had been a patron of Bucknall, conceded that his protégé " could not manage a Corps once the battle became mobile ".

Buckley claims that Bucknall was unprepared to support the attack once problems developed and that Erskine was not suited to the task at hand.

Chester Wilmot agrees with Dempsey's assertion that it was Bucknall, not the Germans, that forced the 7th Armoured Division to retire.

Wilmot claims that Bucknall refused to reinforce the division because he had already decided that its lines of communication were endangered.

He concludes: This great opportunity of disrupting the enemy line and expanding the Allied bridgehead was lost not so much in the woods and orchards around Villers-Bocage, as in the Corps Commander's mind.