The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  For four more days, Hill 314 remained what a German officer called a “thorn in the flesh.” Hitler on August 9 again demanded that “the Allied invasion front be rolled up” with a renewed lunge toward Avranches by an improvised strike force under the Fifth Panzer Army commander, General Heinrich Eberbach. Arriving on the battlefield with little more than a radio truck, Eberbach told Kluge that the task was both impossible and “very unpleasant.” At 6:20 P.M. that Wednesday, an SS officer scrambled up Montjoie under a white flag to demand the Americans capitulate within ninety minutes or be “blown to bits.” Wounded GIs in slit trenches yelled, “No, no, don’t surrender,” and the senior officer on the hill, 1st Lieutenant Ralph A. Kerley, a lanky Texan, sent the envoy packing with a string of profanities. Five artillery battalions shattered a subsequent attack by bellowing Germans who fired machine guns and flicked grenades. Kerley called down one fire mission on his own command post. The field-gray tide receded.

  Each night more slain soldiers on Hill 314 were tucked into makeshift morgues among the rocks after their bodies were searched for food and ammunition. Officers hoped that in removing the dead from sight they would bolster morale, but Montjoie reeked of men transformed into carrion. Each day Lieutenant Weiss set his precious radio batteries on a rocky shelf and let the sun recharge them a bit. Foragers filled canteens from a scummy cistern and found turnips, cabbages, and a few rabbits in a hutch. An effort to shoot medical supplies to the hilltop garrison in empty artillery smoke shells failed: G-forces shattered morphine syrettes and plasma bottles, and even crushed surgical tape into flat disks. A dozen C-47s using blue and orange parachutes sprinkled rations and other supplies over the hillcrest at 4:30 P.M. on August 10, but half the bundles drifted beyond the American perimeter into no-man’s-land. On the night of August 11, the frustrated 30th Division chief of staff declared, “I want Mortain demolished.… Burn it up so nothing can live there.” Artillery scourged the village like brimstone.

  And then the battle ended. Even Hitler acknowledged futility. “The attack failed,” he said ominously, “because Field Marshal von Kluge wanted it to fail.” Sitting at a table in La Roche–Guyon with a map spread before him, Kluge tapped Avranches with his finger and said, “This is where I lose my reputation as a soldier.” Before dawn on August 12, German columns skulked off to the north and east. A relief regiment from the 35th Division hiked up Hill 314 to carry off 300 dead and wounded; another 370 men walked down, including Lieutenants Weiss and Kerley. The 30th Division alone had suffered 1,800 casualties in the six-day brawl for Mortain, and other units together tallied almost as many.

  Survivors would be fed, decorated, and returned to the fight. American artillery had once again displayed the killing prowess that had made it the king of battle since the Boston bookseller Henry Knox turned to gunnery in the Revolution. Here too the U.S. Army had asserted a dominance on the battlefield—with firepower, tenacity, and a credible display of combined arms competence—that would only intensify over the next eight months, as the European campaign grew ever more feverish.

  French civilians returning to wrecked Mortain “stood crying and rocking back and forth, as though in prayer,” a witness reported. GIs made puns about whether yet another town had been liberated or “ob-liberated.” Lieutenant Weiss, a dutiful son, sat down and scribbled his mother a letter on August 13. “Not much to write home about from here,” he told her. “You know more about what goes on than we do.”

  * * *

  Ultra’s big ears had given the Allied high command a clear sense of German intentions since before the onset of the Mortain offensive on August 7. Decrypted enemy radio transmissions were neither timely nor detailed enough to forewarn the 30th Division, but intercepted messages soon disclosed both Kluge’s battle plan and the obstacles to executing it. A decrypt on August 10 revealed that a renewed attack toward Avranches likely would begin the next day. Kluge’s order had carried a plaintive ring: the “decisive thrust must lead to success.”

  Encouraged by Eisenhower, Bradley kept most of Third Army galloping east toward Le Mans, convinced that airpower and Collins’s VII Corps could blunt the German offensive even if the “decisive thrust” squeezed past Mortain. During a press briefing near Colombières, Ernest Hemingway asked Bradley about a rumor that he had wagered Patton $100 on who would reach Paris first. A startled Bradley replied, “I am General Patton’s commanding officer and I don’t think it would be very sporting for me to make such a bet. Besides you can surely understand that we are not talking in terms of Paris yet.”

  Certainly they were thinking of it. Allied forces now occupied one-tenth of France’s landmass and straddled the main roads to the French capital from the west. The longer the Germans “obstinated” at Mortain, in Churchill’s expression, the greater the chance to encircle two German field armies comprising more than 100,000 troops. From his left wing on August 7, Montgomery had launched the Canadian First Army in a drive southeast toward Falaise with a strike force that included fifteen hundred bombers and half as many tanks. Bofors gun tracers marked the axis of attack through dust and smoke, and searchlights bouncing off the low clouds created artificial moonlight. The attack purchased nine miles before stalling in confusion halfway to Falaise—“the blind leading the blind,” in one colonel’s assessment. Fifty 88mm antitank guns punished the attacking tanks; more air fratricide inflicted three hundred Allied casualties, many in the new Polish 1st Armored Division. SS troops encouraged German defenders at pistol point with cries of, “Push on, you dogs!”

  As this unspooled, Bradley was once again poring over the maps in his trailer, now with mounting excitement. On August 8, during a roadside K-ration lunch near Coutances with Eisenhower, who was touring the battlefield in a Packard Clipper driven by Kay Summersby, Bradley proposed curtailing Patton’s wide envelopment. Instead, both First and Third Armies would wheel to the north; Patton would make a sharp left turn at Le Mans, driving sixty miles through Alençon to Sées. The Canadians would press on for twenty-two miles through Falaise and Argentan to meet their American cousins, cinch the sack, and trap more than twenty German divisions.

  An exuberant Eisenhower followed Bradley back to his command post, where a quick telephone call enlisted Montgomery’s support. Patton was dubious, halfheartedly arguing on the phone for continuing east in a more audacious envelopment that would bag the enemy between the rivers Seine at Paris and Loire at Orléans. When Bradley persisted, Patton capitulated, ordering his XV Corps to pivot north from Le Mans. “If I were on my own,” he wrote Bea, “I would take bigger chances than I am now permitted to take.”

  Montgomery issued a formal directive, ordering the Canadians to secure Falaise. “This is a first priority, and it should be done quickly.” In a message to inspirit “the United Armies in France,” he asked that the Almighty “make us ministers of Thy chastisement.”

  Bradley continued to chortle at German obduracy in Mortain, the “greatest tactical blunder I’ve heard of.” To a visitor he said: “This is an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century. We’re about to destroy an entire hostile army.”

  * * *

  Rarely does a battle follow the tidy arrows that have been sketched on a map or limned in a commander’s imagination. The mighty struggle for the Falaise Pocket was no exception. Several factors prevented the enemy annihilation envisioned by the Allied high command, including miscalculation, confusion, and dull generalship. Not least among the variables was a German reluctance to be annihilated.

  In the south, Third Army’s drive began well enough under Major General Wade Haislip’s XV Corps. Two armored divisions abreast led two infantry divisions against fitful resistance. The French 2nd Armored Division, kitted out with U.S. Army tanks, captured intact the bridges at Alençon on August 12. With Argentan as the day’s objective, although it lay a dozen miles inside the British 21st Army Group sector, Haislip ordered the French commander, Major General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, to bend west. That would f
ree the highway north from Sées for the U.S. 5th Armored Division, giving greater heft to the Allied attack. Evincing an attitude of je m’en foutisme—I don’t give a fuck—Leclerc instead fanned out on all available roads, blocking passage of 5th Armored fuel trucks and giving the Germans six hours to rally sixty panzers from Mortain into a sector previously held by a rearguard bakery company.

  Patton was peeved but undeterred. With XV Corps sporting three hundred tanks, twenty-two artillery battalions, and complete air domination, he ordered Haislip to bowl through the German blockade, then “push on slowly until you contact our allies” near Falaise. Patton phoned Bradley early Sunday afternoon, August 13, to report his progress. “Shall we continue,” he said with coarse humor, “and drive the British into the sea for another Dunkirk?”

  But Bradley had heard things go bump in the night. He now issued the most controversial order of his long career. “Nothing doing,” he told Patton. “Don’t go beyond Argentan. Stop where you are and build up on that shoulder.” The Canadian pincer from the north had made no headway, and Bradley wrongly believed—on the basis of sketchy Ultra reports and faulty intuition—that at least nineteen German divisions had begun stampeding eastward to escape the Allied trap. If that was true, then Haislip’s corps risked destruction by pushing north with an exposed left flank. Montgomery also felt perturbations at the American vulnerability, but as Bradley later wrote, “I did not consult with Montgomery. The decision to stop Patton was mine alone.” Patton argued to no avail, then told his diary that Haislip could “easily advance to Falaise and completely close the gap.… This halt is a great mistake.” A Third Army staff officer noted, “The General is beside himself.”

  Canadian difficulties further unstitched the Allied master plan. Not until August 14 did the Canadian First Army finally gather its four divisions for an attack toward Falaise. Montgomery’s contempt for the Canadian army commander, General Harry D. G. Crerar, a chain-smoker with a hacking cough and recurrent dysentery, had only intensified in recent weeks. “I fear he thinks he is a great soldier,” Montgomery had recently written Brooke. “He took over command at 1200 hours on 23 July. He made his first mistake at 1205 hours, and his second after lunch.”

  Worse yet, the Germans on August 13 had found detailed battle plans on the body of a Canadian officer killed after blundering into their lines; forewarned, the enemy shifted dozens of antitank guns to the avenue of attack. By Tuesday afternoon, August 15, the assault on Falaise had become “a molten fire bath of battle,” as the Canadian Scottish Regiment war diary recorded. Fratricide once again shredded the ranks: only belatedly did anyone realize that the yellow smoke used by Canadian soldiers to signify friendly positions was the same color used by British Bomber Command to mark targets. “The more the troops burnt yellow flares to show their positions,” the British official history recorded, “the more the errant aircraft bombed them.” The consequent four hundred casualties, plus washboard terrain and “dust like I’ve never seen before,” as one commander lamented, meant the Canadians would not reach Falaise until Wednesday. Even then, thirteen miles separated them from the Americans.

  Bradley now made another momentous decision. Perhaps to mollify the restless, sulking Patton, and without consulting Montgomery, he agreed to dispatch more than half of Haislip’s combat power—two divisions and fifteen artillery battalions—toward Dreux, sixty-five miles to the east. In his August 15 order, Bradley wrote:

  Due to the delay in closing the gap between Argentan and Falaise, it is believed that many of the German divisions which were in the pocket have now escaped.… In order to take advantage of the confusion existing, the Third Army will now initiate a movement towards the east.

  In fact, no German divisions had yet tried to escape; Hitler still would not permit it. To reinforce a wide envelopment toward Paris—Patton’s original proposal—Bradley weakened the shorter envelopment that he personally had designed. Nor was he confident in his course. “For the first and only time during the war,” he later confessed, “I went to bed that evening worrying over a decision I had already made.”

  The two most senior Allied field commanders, Montgomery and Bradley, had made a hash of things. Neither recognized that German forces facing the callow Canadians and Poles were more formidable than those facing the Americans, because the latter had been weakened by COBRA and at Mortain. Montgomery failed to reinforce Crerar with the veteran British legions at his disposal; he also made little effort to confirm that he and Bradley fully understood each other. From his command-post menagerie near Vire, atwitter with “squeaking and scuffling” canaries in their cages, Montgomery evinced his usual sangfroid without imparting either urgency or command omniscience. “These are great days,” he wrote a friend on August 14. “Some [Germans] will of course escape, but I do not see how they can stand and fight seriously again this side of the Seine.”

  Bradley was quick to fault Montgomery for various sins, including failure to move the army group boundary north of Argentan, as well as neglect in requesting American help to seal the pocket. Yet he had been niggardly in offering that help and slippery in not disclosing his diversion of XV Corps to the east. Having recently read Douglas Southall Freeman’s masterful Lee’s Lieutenants, Bradley professed that “the one quality all the great generals had in common was their understanding.” But such battlefield clairvoyance, which he had occasionally displayed as a corps commander in Tunisia and Sicily, often eluded him as an army group commander. The historian Russell F. Weigley later would lament “the absence of sustained operational forethought and planning on the part of both the principal allies.”

  Nor was Eisenhower much help. The supreme commander had proved an indifferent field marshal in Tunisia, on Sicily, and during the planning for Anzio; now at Falaise he continued in that deficiency, watching passively for more than a week without recognizing or rectifying the command shortcomings of his two chief lieutenants. Four armies—British Second, Canadian First, and U.S. First and Third—seemed only loosely hinged together. “Ike [was] fashionably garbed in suntans with Egyptian suede shoes and Kay was similarly dressed, making the rest of us look dull and dirty in comparison,” an officer in Bradley’s headquarters wrote after one mid-August visit. A British general later concluded, with more regret than censure, “He never really got the feel of the battle.”

  * * *

  Whatever shortcomings vexed the Allied high command, they paled when stacked against the German fiasco. Dozens of tanks, assault guns, and artillery pieces stood immobile for lack of fuel. General Eberbach told Kluge on August 14 that three of his panzer divisions totaled only seventy tanks and that the 9th Panzer Division “has the strength of a company.” Even SS troops were straggling. “Such tiredness,” a German commander said later. “It caused hallucinations.” For every five German casualties in the west since June 6, only one replacement had arrived. Kluge’s headquarters warned the high command: “It is five minutes before midnight.”

  Then Kluge vanished. After a conference with Sepp Dietrich near Bernay, the field marshal left in his Horch at ten A.M. on August 15 to meet Eberbach and other field commanders at Nécy, six miles south of Falaise. He never arrived. “Ascertain whereabouts Kluge,” Hitler’s headquarters demanded. “Report results hourly.” Berlin indelicately asked whether the field marshal might have defected.

  Shortly before midnight he appeared at Eberbach’s command post west of Argentan, disheveled and filthy. Fighter-bombers had strafed the Horch and two radio cars that morning, leaving him to cower in a ditch until sunset, then wend his way through snarled traffic. Eberbach told him that Hitler wanted another counterattack, a preposterous pipe dream. “The people there live in another world without any idea of the actual situation,” Kluge said, gesturing vaguely toward Berlin. He returned to La Roche–Guyon in a borrowed car and at 2:40 P.M. on Wednesday, August 16, directed Army Group B to begin the retreat from Normandy. Hitler affirmed the decision two hours later.

  The order would be K
luge’s last. On Thursday, without warning, a short, jowly officer with a keen tactical eye framed by a monocle arrived at La Roche–Guyon with a letter from Hitler authorizing him to replace Kluge. Field Marshal Walter Model, son of a Royal Prussian music director, fancied himself “Hitler’s fireman”: during three years of service on the Eastern Front he had built a reputation as a soldier who could stabilize the field after defeats and retreats. A caustic, devout Lutheran with an adhesive memory, a taste for French red wine, and a belief in the prodigal use of firing squads for shirkers, Model was bold enough to have once asked a meddler from Berlin, “Who commands the Ninth Army, my Führer, you or I?” His bullying of subordinates led Rundstedt to observe that he had “the makings of a good sergeant.” Even Hitler had muttered, “Did you see those eyes? I wouldn’t like to serve under him.”

  Now Model was in command, and no Wehrmacht officer doubted it. His favorite maxims were: “Can’t that be done faster?” and a line from Goethe’s Faust: “Den lieb’ ich, der Unmögliches begehrt”—I love the one who craves the impossible. In a conference at Fifth Panzer Army headquarters in Fontaine-l’Abbé, Model told his commanders, “My intention is to withdraw behind the Seine.” As the retreat accelerated across the Norman front, two SS panzer divisions would swing southwest from the river to shore up an escape corridor near Trun for forces threatened with encirclement at Falaise. Already under blistering artillery and air attack, much of the German host in the west was at risk. For those who craved the impossible, the hour was ripe.

  * * *

  Legend had it that upon returning from the hunt on a fateful morning in 1027, the seventeen-year-old heir to the Norman duchy, Robert the Magnificent, also known as Robert the Devil, spied a tanner’s beautiful daughter with her skirts hiked as she washed linen in a creek below the castle wall at Falaise. The subsequent assignation produced a son, William the Bastard, who survived various assassination plots to rule Normandy for more than half a century, to extend his reign into England in 1066, and to earn a new sobriquet.