Soldiers assigned to a cannon company in the 90th Infantry Division fire an M3 105mm howitzer during fighting near Carentan, France, June 11, 1944. by Ralph Bennett By the beginning of July 1944, the invasion was hanging fire. Cherbourg had fallen, but St. Lô and Caen—primary objectives of the Americans and British respectively—still resisted capture and the bridgehead was nowhere more than twenty-five miles deep and occupied only a fifth of the area planned for the first month. It was not yet clear how gravely the British attack across the river Odon ( Epsom ) had weakened the German armor, nor that it had in fact forestalled their last effort to break the Allied front, and an American attempt to seize the St. Lô–Coutances road as a start line for further operations failed on 3 and 4 July. Churchill was accusing Montgomery of going too slowly and Eisenhower warning him to avoid stalemate—a charge soon to be repeated by newspapers in the United States. The first exhilaration of ...