It was only on 21 August that the Falaise Gap could properly be accounted closed, as tanks of the Canadian 4th Armoured Division linked with the Poles at Coudehard, and the Canadian 3rd and 4th Divisions secured St Lambert and the northern passage to Chambois. 344 tanks and self-propelled guns, 2,447 soft-skinned vehicles and 252 guns were counted abandoned or destroyed in the northern sector of the pocket alone. The battle for Normandy had cost the German army a total of 1,500 tanks, 3,500 guns and 20,000 vehicles. They had lost around 450,000 men, 240,000 of these killed or wounded. On 22/23 August, Army Group B reported the state of its eight surviving armoured divisions:
2 Pz: 1 infantry battalion, no tanks, no artillery
21 Pz: 4 weak infantry battalions, 10 tanks, artillery unknown
116 Pz: 1 infantry battalion, 12 tanks, approx. two artillery batteries
1st SS Pz: weak infantry elements, no tanks, no artillery
2nd SS Pz: 450 men, 15 tanks, 6 guns
9th SS Pz: 460 men, 20–25 tanks, 20 guns
10th SS Pz: 4 weak infantry battalions, no tanks, no artillery
12th SS Pz: 300 men, 10 tanks, no artillery.
Meyer’s division alone had driven into Normandy with over 20,000 men and 150 tanks. Panzer Lehr had ceased to exist as a formation after COBRA, 9th Panzer was wiped out in the Mortain battle. Of the 100,000 men of First Army, facing the Bay of Biscay, who had been ordered to retire east, some 65,000 crossed the Seine, having lost most of their equipment. Only what was left of Fifteenth Army in the Pas de Calais, and Nineteenth Army, retiring north in the face of the American landings in the south of France which began on 15 August, still possessed any semblance of organization and cohesion. More than 40 German divisions had been destroyed. The Allies had achieved this at a cost of 209,672 casualties, 36,976 of these killed. British and Canadian losses amounted to two-thirds those suffered by the Americans. Some 28,000 Allied aircrew were also lost either over Normandy, during the vast campaign of preparatory bombing of communications and coastal installations, or the execution during 1943–44 of the POINTBLANK programme designed to pave the way for OVERLORD.
Few episodes in the Normandy campaign have provoked such a torrent of words since the war as the Allied failure to close the gap south of Falaise more speedily,6 permitting the escape of a significant fragment of the German army which seemed doomed to absolute destruction, given the military situation around 7 August. Before considering the reasons for the Allied fumbling – if fumbling it was – it seems worth emphasizing that the portion of the German forces which got away was tiny by comparison with that which was destroyed. Only 24 tanks and 60 guns were ferried east across the Seine. Something over 20,000 Germans escaped the pocket, with only the clothes on their backs and personal weapons. Events around the Falaise Gap between the opening of TOTALIZE and 22 August became a source of anger and controversy much more because it appeared that Allied operations had been clumsily handled, than because any such failure cost Montgomery and Bradley important fruits of victory. The Americans were bitter because they considered that, once again, Montgomery had promised to achieve an objective on the battlefield, and failed: namely, to get the Canadians to Argentan before the Germans began to escape east. Montgomery himself implicitly acknowledged the importance of the Canadian failure to reach Falaise in time on 16 August, when he directed elements of the Canadian First Army to bend sharply south-east to Trun and Chambois, and asked Bradley to push American forces there to meet them. He hoped that by creating a wider noose the Germans could still be held within it.
A number of recent writers, including Martin Blumenson and Carlo D’Este, have noted the absurd over-simplification by critics who suggest that if Bradley’s men had been set free to push north to Falaise, they would have closed the gap days earlier.6 In reality, an American south–north line around 17 or 18 August would almost certainly have been broken by the Germans, fighting with the desperation they revealed everywhere at this period. The US division which finally closed the gap at Chambois, the 90th, had shown itself to be one of the least effective formations among the Allied armies in Normandy. Meindl’s paratroopers, and the survivors of 2nd SS and 12th SS Panzer, would almost certainly have cracked the 90th, inflicting an embarrassing and gratuitous setback upon the Americans. This prospect and danger must have occupied Bradley’s thoughts when he declined to allow the move north, and declared that he preferred ‘the strong shoulder’ at Argentan to ‘a broken neck at Falaise’.7 Bradley knew that the fleeing German army was already being devastated by air attack and pounded by artillery. His avowed reason for failing to close the gap – fear of a collision between the Allied armies – scarcely merits serious examination. It seems far more probable that he saw a situation in which the enemy was being mauled almost to death without significant risk to the Allied armies; to slam the trap precipitately shut with ground forces and to close for a death-grapple with the desperate men fighting eastwards, offered a risk of humiliation which could not be justified by any possible tactical or strategic gain. If the man outside the thicket knows that the wounded tiger within it is bleeding to death, he would be foolish to step inside merely to hasten collection of the trophy. If this was indeed Bradley’s reasoning, he was almost certainly correct.
Far too much of the controversy and criticism surrounding the Falaise Gap and other Normandy battles has focused solely upon the generals, as if their making of a decision ensured its effective execution.8 It seems equally important to consider whether a given option was feasible within the limits of the capabilities of the forces concerned. It has been the central theme of this book that the inescapable reality of the battle for Normandy was that when Allied troops met Germans on anything like equal terms, the Germans almost always prevailed. If the campaign is studied as an abstract military exercise, then all manner of possibilities become acceptable: the British could and should have got men into Caen on D-Day; they could and should have broken through at Villers-Bocage on 13 June; EPSOM and GOODWOOD should have led to decisive advances and the collapse of the German defences. As it happened, of course, nowhere did the Allies achieve decisive penetrations against high-quality German formations until these had been worn down by attrition and ruined by air attack. COBRA was a superb example of American dash and movement, but the vast American attacking force met only the shattered remains of Panzer Lehr and a few flanking battle-groups. Even these gave Collins’s men a hard time on the first day. The British began to make significant ground gains in August only when the Germans in front of them were greatly outnumbered and reduced to a few score tanks and guns. It may be argued that any Allied attempt at envelopment before the German forces had been brought to the brink of destruction by attrition would have cost the attackers dear. A British or American breakthrough southwards in June might have been very heavily punished by German counter-attack.
It has become commonplace to assert that the Allies’ basic difficulty was that they devoted too much thought and energy before the landings to the problems of getting ashore, not enough to what must happen thereafter. There is an element of truth in this, applicable to events on the afternoon of D-Day and on 7 and 8 June. Thereafter, however, the Allies’ difficulties lay not in any lack of planning, but in the difference in fighting ability between the opposing forces on the battlefield.
The Allies in Normandy faced the finest fighting army of the war, one of the greatest that the world has ever seen. This is a simple truth that some soldiers and writers have been reluctant to acknowledge, partly for reasons of nationalistic pride, partly because it is a painful concession when the Wehrmacht and SS were fighting for one of the most obnoxious regimes of all time. The quality of the Germans’ weapons – above all tanks – was of immense importance. Their tactics were masterly: stubborn defence; concentrated local firepower from mortars and machine-guns; quick counter-attacks to recover lost ground. Units often fought on even when cut off, which was not a mark of fanaticism, but of sound tactical discipline, when such resistance in t
he rear did much to reduce the momentum of Allied advances, as in GOODWOOD. German attacks were markedly less skilful, even clumsy. But they adapted at once to the need for infiltration in the bocage, a skill of which few Allied units proved capable, even at the end. Their junior leadership was much superior to that of the Americans, perhaps also to that of the British.
Few American infantry units arrived in Normandy with a grasp of basic tactics – a failure for which many men paid with their lives. The American airborne units showed what was possible on the battlefield, what the American soldier at his best could achieve. But only a handful of other formations proved capable of emulating the 82nd and 101st. The belief that firepower could ultimately save the infantry from the task of hard fighting underlay many difficulties and failures on the ground. It is interesting that Lieutenant Andrew Wilson, who fought as a British tank officer in north-west Europe and worked on occasion with American infantry, visited Vietnam a quarter of a century later as a correspondent, and noted the same carelessness on the battlefield that he had observed in 1944–45. Some more dedicated and skilful infantry fighting earlier in the Normandy campaign might, in the end, have saved a great many American lives. Both British and American commanders sometimes seemed to search for scapegoats rather than causes of poor performance by their men on the battlefield. Some of the generals sacked in Normandy (and elsewhere) were incompetent. But there was a limit to what a corps or divisional commander could achieve with the material he was given. It is striking that when Patton or Collins were given poor-quality divisions with which to gain an objective, they could extract no better performance from these than less competent commanders. The same was true of the British 7th Armoured – none of its successive commanders in north-west Europe could make anything of it. The problems, where there were problems, often descended to regimental and battalion level. There were not nearly sufficient able field officers for any solution to be found in wholesale sackings.
The British were superior to the Americans in regimental leadership and staffwork. But they proved unable to generate the weight of fighting power – combat power, as the Americans call it – to smash through unweakened German defences. Germans who fought in the desert often expressed their surprise at the willingness of the British soldier to do what he believed was expected of him, and then to stop – even to surrender – when ammunition ran low, petrol ran out or he found himself encircled or deprived of officer leadership. Again and again in Normandy, British units fought superbly, with great bravery, only to lack the last ounce of drive or follow-through necessary to carry an objective or withstand a counter-attack. The inexperience of American, British and Canadian formations must be measured against the performance of 12th SS Panzer. This, too, was a ‘green’ division, which had never fought a battle before 7 June. The Canadian official historian wrote: ‘One suspects that the Germans contrived to get more out of their training than we did. Perhaps their attitude towards such matters was less casual than ours.’9
An ethos, a mood, pervades all armies at all times about what is and is not acceptable, what is expected. Within the Allied armies in Normandy in 1944–45, the ethos was that of men committed to doing an unwelcome but necessary job for the cause of democracy. The ethos of the German army, profoundly influenced by the threat from the east, was of a society fighting to the last to escape Götterdämmerung. Lieutenant Langangke was perhaps not exaggerating when he said that as he sat in his Panther, knocking out Shermans one after the other, he felt like Siegfried. Mercifully for the future of western civilization, few men in the Allied armies ever believed for a moment that they were anyone other than Lindley Higgins from Riverdale in the Bronx, or Corporal Brown from Tonbridge. Montgomery wrote to Brooke from the desert: ‘The trouble with our British lads is that they are not killers by nature.’ Each man knew that he was a small cog in the great juggernaut of armed democracy, whose eventual victory was certain. Suicidal, sacrificial acts of courage were admired when performed by individuals and rewarded with decorations. But they were not demanded of whole Allied formations as they were of so many in Hitler’s armies. Even Corporal Hohenstein of that very moderate organization, the 276th Infantry, never allowed himself to be troubled by encirclement because this was an experience that he, like so many others, had often overcome in Russia: they were merely expected to break out of it. The attitude of most Allied soldiers was much influenced by the belief, conscious or unconscious, that they possessed the means to dispense with anything resembling personal fanaticism on the battlefield: their huge weight of firepower. This view was not unjustified. Artillery and air power accomplished much of the killing of Germans that had to be done sooner or later to make a breakthrough possible. But it could not do all of this. It is not that the Allied armies in Normandy were seriously incompetent; merely that the margin of German professional superiority was sufficient to cause the Allies very great difficulties.
All this Montgomery and Bradley understood perfectly well, and they shaped their plans and expectations accordingly. They had not been sent to Normandy to demonstrate the superiority of their fighting men to those of Hitler, but to win the war at tolerable cost – a subtly but importantly different objective. Their business and their difficulty, while acknowledging the difference in mood and spirit between their own soldiers and those of Hitler, was to persuade their armies to do enough – albeit, just enough – to prevail on a given battlefield and in a given action. This they were at last able to do, inflicting an absolute defeat upon their enemies. Overall, it may be said that Montgomery accomplished as much in Normandy as he could with the forces available to him. He is owed a greater debt for his performance than has been recognized in recent years, when his own untruths and boastfulness have been allowed to confuse the issue; and when the root problem of the limited abilities of his troops, and the dynamism of the Germans, has often been ignored.
Much of the criticism emanating from SHAEF, the airmen and Washington was based upon the inability of men lacking direct contact with the battlefield to grasp painful truths. The American and British public had been fed for years upon a necessary diet of propaganda about the superiority of their fighting men to those of the enemy. Even some senior service officers could not now understand the difficulty of fighting the German army. Brooke did, and his awareness lay at the heart of many of his fears about OVERLORD and about the course of the campaign on the continent. He was too big a man to continue to support Montgomery blindly, merely because the Commander-in-Chief of 21st Army Group was his protégé. He backed Montgomery and sympathized with his disappointments and failures because he understood, perhaps better than any man outside France, the difficulty of arranging matters so that British and American soldiers could defeat German soldiers on the ground. Brooke knew – as surely also did Montgomery in his secret thoughts – that it was the Allies’ superiority of matériel that enabled them to prevail at the last, assisted by competent generalship and a solid performance by most of their men on the battlefield. Patton’s headlong rush around western France was a far less impressive command achievement than the cool, professional response of Bradley and his corps commanders to the Mortain counter-attack. By that first week of August, the balance of psychological advantage had at last shifted decisively. The German thrust lacked conviction – even formations such as 2nd SS Panzer fought half-heartedly. Meanwhile, the Americans had gained a new confidence in their own powers. Isolated infantry units held their ground; headquarters staffs kept their nerve; the American forces dispatched to meet the Germans – with the possible exception of the 35th Division, which seemed slow to achieve the relief of the 30th – drove hard and sure to throw back the panzers.
Normandy was a campaign which perfectly exemplified the strengths and weaknesses of the democracies. The invasion was a product of dazzling organization and staffwork, and marvellous technical ingenuity. Once the armies were ashore, there was no firework display of military brilliance. Instead, for the armies, there was a steady, sometimes clumsy lear
ning process. Each operation profited from the mistakes of the last, used massed firepower to wear down the Germans, absorbed disappointments without trauma. This last was a true reflection of the nature of the struggle: most German commanders, amidst the insuperable difficulties of grappling both with Hitler and the Allies, declined towards a state bordering on hysteria. Among the Allied armies, however, there was sometimes gloom, but never real alarm or nervousness. These symptoms were more in evidence at SHAEF, where the role of impotent spectator taxed some men, even the highest, beyond endurance. Montgomery and Bradley and their staffs and corps commanders merely fought, reconsidered, and fought again until at last their resources granted them victory. Armchair strategists and military historians can find much to look back upon and criticize in Normandy. On 22 August 1944, it is doubtful whether many regrets troubled the Allied army commanders in France.
One lesson from the fighting in Normandy seems important for any future battle that the armies of democracy might be called upon to fight. If a Soviet invasion force swept across Europe from the east, it would be unhelpful if contemporary British or American soldiers were trained and conditioned to believe that the level of endurance and sacrifice displayed by the Allies in Normandy would suffice to defeat the invaders. For an example to follow in the event of a future European battle, it will be necessary to look to the German army; and to the extraordinary defence that its men conducted in Europe in the face of all the odds against them, and in spite of their own demented Führer.
Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Page 44