Divided on D-Day

by Edward E. Gordon

  Before Kluge's reappearance, his chief of staff, Blumentritt, had insisted that the situation west of Argentan required an immediate withdrawal. Jodl's orders from Hitler were that such a decision should be made only if there was no option. He wanted Eberbach to launch an attack toward Sées to widen the corridor.

  When Kluge finally reappeared, he called Jodl at 2:00 a.m. on August 16. He gave him a frank assessment of the rapidly deteriorating situation. Later at 12:45 p.m. Kluge again telephoned Jodl and forcefully reiterated his views of the impending disaster. Kluge asserted that the signs of the army's disintegration were steadily increasing. An Army Group B staff officer compared the Wehrmacht's situation on the roads of Normandy to Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812.

  The region's roads were basically impassable. Units intermingled with long lines of stragglers. Divisions were reduced to a miserable handful of men. The panzers sat beside the roads immobilized by lack of fuel. The troops were hungry and dispirited since rations and even ammunition only arrived erratically. Command and control was almost nonexistent except for limited radio communication.57

  Kluge was blunt and insisted that Jodl tell Hitler, “No matter how many orders are issued…no power in this world [will see it carried out simply] through an order…. That is the situation.”58 The Germans were on the brink of a total disaster. As Alexander McKee suggests, “the question was—would it be decisive, a ‘Stalingrad’ in Normandy?”59

  The problems Kluge faced to achieve a successful withdrawal would not be easily solved. By August 16, the Falaise Pocket was tightening, but it was far from closed. General Rudolf Gersdorff, Seventh Army chief of staff, was still able to drive a staff car in both directions between Trun and Chambois. (See Map 21.) Another German general commented that the pocket had shrunk to about twenty-two miles long and eleven miles wide, and thus it had a disturbing resemblance to the battered German Sixth Army lozenge that had been destroyed at Stalingrad in 1943.

  Allied air dominance over the pocket was absolute. The entire enclave was within range of Allied artillery. The limited east-west road network was in disastrous condition, littered with dead and wounded soldiers and destroyed equipment. All the Allied armies were tightening the perimeter thus decreasing the size of the pocket hour by hour.

  By 2:30 p.m. Kluge felt he could wait no longer and told Speidel to issue the withdrawal order.60 By then Hitler had already written off Kluge as a traitor, though no such evidence was ever produced. When Hitler finally issued his new orders they only called for the Seventh Army to withdraw across the Orne.

  Hitler then ordered Field Marshal Walter Model, his “fireman,” to France. (He had often rescued German forces from dire situations on the Russian front.) Kluge was ordered to immediately leave the pocket for his La Roche-Guyon headquarters. Model arrived there on August 17. The two field marshals conferred for the next twenty-four hours in order to give Model the big picture.61

  Fig. 10.2. Field Marshal Walter Model. (© Imperial War Museums [MH 12850])

  Before his departure, Kluge wrote Hitler a final letter:

  My Fuhrer…I did everything within my power to equal the situation…. Both Rommel and I…foresaw the present development. We were not listened to. Our appreciations were NOT dictated by pessimism but from the sober knowledge of the facts. I do not know whether Field Marshal Model…will still master the situation…. Should it not be so…make up your mind to end the war. The German people have borne such untold suffering that it is time to put an end to this frightfulness.62

  Kluge left for home on August 19. He knew that the Gestapo was waiting for him in Germany. Near Metz, he swallowed a poison capsule. Many German generals on the eastern front had carried these capsules, fearing capture by the Russians, although most captured officers did not use them. Serving Hitler in Normandy could be a deadly experience for his field marshals.63

  The German withdrawal that began on August 16 started quietly, and the movement was orderly. The Allies offered little interference. This comparative calm changed rapidly on August 17, hastened by the rapid deterioration within the Wehrmacht units. The British/Canadian and American forces both made major thrusts from the north and south that day, threatening to close the pocket. By the evening of August 17, the Germans had successfully retreated across the Orne. However, many of their divisions had disintegrated into weak units unable to defend a front line.

  The survivors of fifteen shattered divisions, in all more than 250,000 men, were herded together into this compressing pocket. Sick with despair the troops were unceasingly pounded as they wandered eastward toward the remaining narrow gap between Trun and Chambois. Filled with dread, these German soldiers wondered how many would still be able to escape.64

  On August 18, Model held his first staff conference at the La Roche-Guyon headquarters. The shrinking pocket was now only six miles deep and seven miles wide. Halfway through the meeting a dispatch arrived with the news that the Canadians had taken Trun. (See Map 22.) By this date, Model's troops were a totally spent force. On that day alone, the US Ninth Air Force destroyed four hundred vehicles. The RAF claimed another 1,159 and damaged 1,700 more. Also 124 panzers were eliminated, and one hundred others damaged.65

  During the next two days however, a significant number of German troops were able to escape in the gap between Trun and Chambois. But on August 21, the Falaise Pocket was finally sealed. OVERLORD was officially concluded with the end of the Falaise operations.

  THE BALANCE SHEET

  The Normandy region itself had been devastated, some places as severely damaged as those on the western front during World War I. Two hundred thousand buildings had been demolished. Caen was a mountain of rubble with nine thousand of its fifteen thousand buildings flattened. Falaise, Argentan, St. Lo, Coutances, and other cities and small towns were in ruins. Most of devastated Normandy was not restored until 1951.66

  Fig. 10.3. A British soldier in Caen, after its liberation, gives a helping hand to an old lady among the scene of utter devastation. (© Imperial War Museums [B 6794])

  The Falaise Pocket area had become a military wasteland. Roads were completely blocked with burnt-out vehicle wreckage and the swollen bodies of both men and horses. Severely mutilated corpses lay everywhere on the roads and in the forests. The paraphernalia of the German military machine was scattered all over the terrain—radios, Engima coding machines, typewriters, the Feldpost mailbags of the German soldiers. Near Trun, 250 wounded soldiers were discovered at a German field hospital hidden deep in the Forest of Gouffern. Massive numbers of draft animals and cavalry horses were scattered across the landscape, including a whole squadron of Don Cossacks from Hitler's foreign legions lying dead beside their horses.67

  Fig. 10.4. Falaise Pocket destruction of German army. (Press services of First Polish Armoured Division)

  What were the German casualties for the Normandy campaign and the Falaise battles? Charles Stacy reports that 740,000 German soldiers were deployed in Normandy south of the Seine. Army Group B casualties from June 6 to August 12 were 158,930. He estimates that 400,000 German troops were inside the pocket.68 Total German losses at Falaise were ten thousand dead counted across the battlefield and fifty thousand prisoners.

  How many soldiers escaped remains a hotly contested issue. Estimates range widely among D-Day historians:69

  Historian National Origin Estimate

  Keegan UK 300,000

  Blumenson US 240,000

  Weidner US 200,000

  Romer Canadian 210,000

  McKee Canadian 50,000

  Carrell German 50,000

  D'Este US 20–40,000

  Beevor UK 20–30,000

  Hastings UK 20,000+

  A telling point in this debate is that all the German panzer divisions that fought in Normandy, save one, were quickly reconstituted and returned to action. These divisions included Panzer Lehr, Second Panzer, Ninth Panzer, 116th Panzer, First SS Panzer, Second SS Panzer, Ninth SS Panzer, Tenth SS Panzer, and Twelfth SS Pa
nzer. All of these panzer divisions fought in the Battle of the Bulge. The Twenty-First Panzer was also reconstituted and fought the Americans in the Saar region between September and December 1944.

  These units reformed rapidly because of the fifteen panzer/infantry divisional commanders inside the pocket, only three did not get away. Only one of the five German corps commanders did not escape. The large number of officers and NCOs who successfully broke out was a significant key to both increasing the numbers of soldiers who escaped and the rebirth of the Wehrmacht after the Falaise battle. As a result, the morale of German soldiers during this withdrawal and afterward remained higher than anyone expected. The practical and professional ability of these German officers and NCOs helped in repairing shattered units and creating order out of chaos.70 For all of these reasons, we believe that a higher estimated number of soldiers, in the range of 200,000, escaped from the Falaise encirclement to fight another day.

  It is a judgment by many historians that during the OVERLORD campaign, the Allies faced an enemy who produced the finest fighting army of the war and one of the greatest military forces in history. As Max Hastings conclusively states, “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.”71 The Allies only achieved decisive penetrations when their attacking forces met the scattered remains of German units or they had been worn down by attrition or decimated by air attack.

  The German defeat at Falaise was tactical and operational due to Hitler's bungling interference. The Allied victory was not strategic because the Germans were left with the capacity to continue the war into 1945. As Raymond Callahan has said, it was “as much a German success as an Anglo-American failure.”72

  The German military historian Percy Ernest Schramm considered the Falaise operation a triumph. In many ways the German withdrawal compares favorably to the British evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940.

  However, the Falaise Pocket battle basically destroyed Germany's Army Group B. The Allies captured an estimated 220 tanks, 130 antiaircraft guns, 160 assault guns, and 2,000 horse-drawn trucks. An additional 1,300 tanks, 20,000 vehicles, 500 assault guns, and 1,500 heavier and lighter field artillery pieces were captured or destroyed.73

  Of the 750,000 Germans deployed in Normandy south of the Seine, the Wehrmacht casualties during the whole campaign (June 6–August 21) were an estimated 500,000 soldiers, including 210,000 taken prisoner, 125,000 dead, and over 160,000 wounded.

  Allied losses since D-Day were significant. There were 209,000 casualties—126,000 American and 83,000 British/Canadian. This is an approximate ratio of two British/Canadian losses to three Americans. Over 36,000 Allied soldiers died.74

  FUMBLERS AT THE FOLLIES

  On August 21, Montgomery issued a ringing declaration to his Twenty-First Army Group: “The victory has been definite, complete and decisive.”75 A day earlier he even wrote in his diary, “The victory is going to be a very decisive one.”76

  Since that day, many historians and generals have debated whether the Falaise operation was a victory, as the final results were seriously flawed by the earlier failure to close the gap on August 12 to August 14. What decisions of the Allied commanders can be blamed for this debacle?77 A whole publishing industry has arisen looking for the ultimate scapegoat. There were multiple reasons for the Allied failure to totally encircle and destroy the entire Seventh Army and the German panzer forces on the Falaise battlefield. Let us spotlight some of the most important issues.

  1. Montgomery

  As we have already shown, on August 8 Montgomery seemed to agree that Patton could cross the Allied forces’ boundary line, yet from August 12 to August 14, he refused to change the boundary lines between the British/Canadian and American forces. He also seems to have been indecisive about making either a short or long envelopment.

  Moreover, Chester Wilmot and others have found that Montgomery's pincer drive from the north to close the gap “was not pressed with sufficient speed and strength.”78 He did not fully commit the Seventh Armored Division to reinforce the less battle-tested Canadian and Polish tank forces in their bogged-down drive to Falaise. If Montgomery had done so, there was a high probability the combined force would have had the punch to force their way through weak and badly battered German divisions to meet the Americans and close the Falaise-Argentan gap. Horace Edward Henderson calls this “one of his most serious and controversial blunders.”79

  William Weidner states that in large part the Falaise Pocket took too long to close because Montgomery “could not decide how to complete the encirclement.”80 Richard Lamb goes even further, ultimately concluding that this was Montgomery's “biggest error of generalship.”81

  Bradley wrote that during a dinner on August 14, he and Eisenhower had reached these conclusions: “Owing to Monty's wildly misplaced confidence in the Canadians, we thought we had missed an opportunity to annihilate the Germans and that they were escaping through the gap. Monty's plan for finally closing the gap was less than satisfactory.”82

  2. The Canadians

  Charles Perry Stacey, the official Canadian historian, is very blunt in his assessment of the First Canadian Army's participation in the Falaise follies:

  It is not difficult to put one's finger upon occasions in the Normandy campaign when Canadian formations failed to make the most of their opportunities. In particular the capture of Falaise was long delayed…. A German force far smaller than our own, taking advantage of strong ground and prepared positions, was able to slow our advance to the point where considerable German forces made their escape…an early closing of the Falaise Gap…might even, conceivably, have enabled us to end the war some months sooner.83

  General Charles Foulkes, commander of the Second Canadian Infantry Division, freely admitted that his officers and men were ill-prepared to fight this battle: “When we went into battle at Falaise and Caen we found that when we bumped into battle-experienced German troops we were no match for them. We would not have been successful had it not been for our air and artillery support.”84

  Yet in the end, it was Montgomery's decision to commit the inexperienced Canadian forces to this crucial role in the Falaise campaign. After gaining experience in this battle, the Canadian forces went on to perform well in later 1944 operations. However, the Allies paid too high a price for their poor performance at Falaise.

  3. Bradley

  A number of the reasons General Bradley gave for stopping Patton's offensive have already been reviewed. Early in August Bradley seemed to have been as enthusiastic as Patton about encircling the German forces. Hitler had placed his Seventh Army in a strategic noose with the Mortain counteroffensive. Yet a week later, it appears that Bradley's optimism had been replaced by his more characteristic caution and doubt. Years later he wrote, “I have often asked myself, if I should not have done Monty's work, and if we should not have closed the gap ourselves. Montgomery was so scared that he made the push from the west; as Eisenhower said, he squeezed the tube of toothpaste and made it go out the hole instead of closing the opening.”85

  On August 15 Bradley went to visit Patton at his headquarters. Patton recorded in his diary the state of his commander: “Bradley came down to see me suffering from nerves…. His motto seems to be, ‘In case of doubt halt.’”86

  4. Eisenhower

  Eisenhower, as supreme commander of OVERLORD, was far from blameless. He was at Bradley's headquarters the night the decision was made not to allow Patton to close on Falaise. There is no doubt that this decision had Eisenhower's approval.

  By his very presence in France, Eisenhower had in fact assumed command of the land forces. He had planned to take actual command on August 1 but had postponed Montgomery's demotion for exactly one month to September. This delay would create even more command problems on the battlefield. Falaise was only the first.

  If Eisenhower had been a more outspoken and astute supreme commander he would have insisted o
n the consensus reached by him, Bradley, and Montgomery on August 8 to lift the army group boundary lines. From August 12 to August 13 he would have forced Monty's hand and made him stick to this agreement.

  Since D-Day, Ike had issued no direct orders to his commanders. He had reduced himself to more of a spectator and cheerleader than supreme commander. Yet Eisenhower still bore the ultimate high command responsibility for the prosecution of OVERLORD and the final victory in Europe.

  On the evening of August 12 at Bradley's headquarters, he still refrained from direct intervention at a decisive moment in the OVERLORD operation. It was obvious that a golden opportunity to encircle the entire German army in Normandy was at hand. Why did Ike take no action?87

  5. The Role of National Rivalries

  National rivalries were a significant factor in many decisions during the Normandy campaign and certainly played a role in Eisenhower's decision making on August 12 to August 14. There was increasing British resentment over the growing American dominance in the European campaign.

  On August 9, Eisenhower had been summoned by Churchill to 10 Downing Street. The British had long been opposed to DRAGOON, the invasion of southern France. The assault was to begin on August 15, only six days away. Churchill did his best to bully and intimidate Eisenhower to cancel this operation at the last minute. Churchill even threatened to go to the king or resign as prime minister. He blustered that America had become a “big strong and dominating partner.”88

  Eisenhower told him it was too late to cancel the operation. He left the prime minister still raging and weeping in frustration. Stephen Ambrose recounts that Eisenhower later described the meeting “as one of the most difficult of the entire war.”89

  Earlier on August 7, Churchill also had argued with Bradley about the invasion: “Why break down the back door when the front door has already been opened by your magnificent American army?”90