Pitched battle
When the Allies landed at Normandy, the pitched battle strategy used by the commander of the British land forces, general Bernard Montgomery, was to confront German armoured units with constant harassment from British armies on the eastern flank of the beachhead. The role of the British forces would be to act as a great shield for the Allied landing, constantly sucking the German armour on to that shield on the left (east), and constantly grinding it down with punishing blows from artillery, tanks and Allied aircraft. As the shield held the Germans, the Americans were to push in the west on the right of the Allied line, breaking through the German defences. The British role in the strategy would thus not be a glamorous one, but a brutal battle in a punishing cauldron of attrition, in and around the key city of Caen.
Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower affirmed Montgomery's overall strategy in a message of 10 July, urging stronger efforts:

I am familiar with your plan for generally holding firmly with your left, attracting thereto all of the enemy armour, while your right pushes down the Peninsula and threatens the rear and flank of the forces facing the Second British Army.. It appears to me that we must use all possible energy in a determined effort to prevent a stalemate or facing the necessity of fighting a major defensive battle with the slight depth we now have in the bridgehead... please be assured that I will produce everything that is humanly possible to assist you in any plan that promises to get us the elbow room we need. The air and everything else will be available.

Montgomery's overall pitched conception of the battle eventually bore fruit, but it took two months of bitter fighting in and around the city of Caen to come to fruition.

Post war: During the Post war period, pitched battles became outdated because of increasing emphasis on camouflage, guerrilla warfare and strategic bombing, all of which prevented the largescale deployment of organised units of troops. Battles became increasingly reliant upon many smaller skirmishes along a frontline or sporadic combat in an area of hostility and no longer resembled pitched battles in any form.

See also: Battle
List of battles
Military tactics
Naval battle
War
Meeting engagement
Siege
Ambush

References: 

Bibliography: "Policy of the Protectionists". Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. 71 (440): 645–68. June 1852. Archived from the original on 2015-09-23. Retrieved 2010-06-16.


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