The Tigers that had survived the battle now pulled back, with this action leaving the remainder of the fighting to the Panzer Lehr infantry. By 17:00 hours, an exhausted General Erskine gave the order for the 22nd Brigade to pull out of Villers-Bocage. The battered remnants of this force were to take up their positions on a hill to the east. However, they were given no respite and were pressed closely during the night by the German troops. By the following morning, the Germans had severely dented the British force's morale and had managed to inflict more than 100 casualties.

The Germans continued to press forward, with the 101st SS Battalion's Tigers supporting elements of the 2nd Panzer Division. The men of these units were now arriving in accordance with orders, determined to give their full support to their battling comrades on the Normandy Front.

The Desert Rats withdraw

A full-scale withdrawal of the 7th Armoured Division was now ordered by a panicked Montgomery. The commander was haunted by visions of his once élite division being cut off behind German lines where it would be left to an uncertain fate. Accordingly, at 14:00 hours, more than 300 RAF heavy bombers started raining 1727 tonnes (1700 tons) of bombs on Villers-Bocage to cover the withdrawal of the Desert Rats. A total count of one Waffen-SS Tiger was destroyed and three damaged in this massive airborne raid. The action would also leave 29 Tiger crew members as casualties.

Still the Germans pressed the retreating British, and when the 2nd Panzer's reconnaissance battalion (comprising three motorized companies and one heavy motorized company) hit the 7th Armoured in the flank, Erskine called in fire from 160 British and American heavy guns to allow his men to break contact. One Tiger was knocked out in this fighting. By nightfall on 14 June, the 7th Armoured Division was back at its start-line of two days earlier. It would go down in the annals of history as the unit that suffered the first major Allied defeat of the entire Normandy campaign.

Instead of being a Blitzkrieg, Operation Perch had ended as a shambolic retreat. The materiel losses on the British side were not great and numbered fewer than 50 tanks. However, during the action, a whole divisional attack had first been thwarted and then decisively thrown back.

Waffen-SS leadership

The military author Michael Reynolds, in his excellent book "Steel Inferno", provides a succinct explanation of why the Germans were victorious at Villers-Bocage: "In the event, many of his [Montgomery's] commanders at every level - company, battalion, brigade, division and corps - failed him, and more importantly failed their men. They displayed none of the panache, drive, imagination or willingness to take risks which this operation demanded. One can only guess what might have happened if the roles were reversed and men like Kurt Meyer, Joachim Peiper and Max Wünsche had been in command, with their tanks operating, like those of the British, under conditions of total air superiority."

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