Divided on D-Day

by Edward E. Gordon

  On August 11, Eisenhower wrote to Churchill in an attempt to appease him. Ike was worried about the possibilities of Churchill losing faith in SHAEF “because such lack of faith would quickly be reflected in discord in our field commands.”91

  Days later, Eisenhower, perhaps fearing that he might be perceived by the British as too domineering, refused to intervene and overrule Montgomery in order to close the gap at Falaise-Argentan. Montgomery, for his part, thought that he alone was qualified to be in sole command on this battle.

  Montgomery's diary entry on August 19 includes the following:

  The B.B.C. 9 P.M. news on 15 August contained a statement that Eisenhower had taken over personal command in France, and that he had under him two Army Groups…. This gave the impression that I had been deposed from command of the land battle under Eisenhower, and a good deal of comment took place.

  The B.B.C. 7 A.M. news on 16 August had a statement correcting the one of the night before, and saying that I was still in overall charge of the land operations….

  The whole affair…may have been done on purpose by someone at SHAEF.

  It will NOT do Ike any good; people will say that just as I am about to win a big victory, he tried to step in and scoop the reward.92

  This diary entry both confirms that Montgomery feared that the Americans and Eisenhower rather than the British and himself would be viewed as the primary determinants of the recent Allied victories as well as his perception that he had just won a great victory at Falaise.

  De Guingand, Montgomery's chief of staff, reflected in his memoirs, “I regret that some British soldiers never quite appreciated the extent of our Ally's [sic] contribution and it seemed to surprise them and sometimes annoy them, that she should wish to run her own affairs, and take the leadership in Allied policy.”93

  6. The Role of Personal Animosities

  By this stage of OVERLORD, Eisenhower disliked Montgomery and thought that Monty might ignore an order directed to him. Montgomery saw Ike as only a figurehead.

  In a letter to Brooke on August 14, he bitterly attacked Eisenhower:

  Ike is apt to get excited and to talk wildly at the top of his voice!!! He is now over here, which is a very great pity. His ignorance as to how to run a war is absolute and complete…. However, I manage to compete somehow. One thing I am very firm about; he is never allowed a meeting between me and my Army Commanders and Bradley!94

  This is an unbelievable statement that reveals Montgomery at his worst. Nigel Hamilton calls Monty's remarks “a savage indictment.”95

  Given the fact that Monty hated to attend group meetings, what if such a meeting had been held earlier in the Falaise operation? Might Eisenhower have exercised his political skills to facilitate the Allied commanders agreeing upon a faster closure of the Falaise Pocket? Could Eisenhower ever modify Montgomery's rude views on his total ignorance of warfare? Under what conditions would Monty ever change from competing to cooperating with Eisenhower as an Allied partner, rather than as an adversary? The enemy that needed to be defeated was the Germans, not Eisenhower. These are some of the problems that continued to compromise the effectiveness of the Allied command structure for the rest of the war in Europe.

  The lack of communication between Eisenhower and Montgomery and the jealous spite shown by the British general explains how they both contributed to the results of the Falaise follies and to the continued strategic errors that prolonged the war into 1945.96

  FALAISE—INCONCLUSIVE VICTORY

  As part of the military campaign that ended World War II in Europe, the Battle of the Falaise Pocket was a major Allied victory. Both the German Seventh and Fifth Panzer armies were effectively destroyed as operational units.

  But the Falaise Pocket operation by the Allies was also a major missed strategic opportunity. It was not until a week after Patton had reached Argentan (August 12–13), positioning US forces to close the gap, that the Falaise Pocket was finally snapped shut. We believe that due primarily to the bungling of the Allied high command, the Germans maintained their escape valve long enough to allow at least 200,000 soldiers, NCOs, and forty generals to slip through. As the old adage states, “Those who run away live to fight another day.” These forces were then able to contribute to the fight in Europe for an additional eight months. The battles during MARKET GARDEN and the Battle of the Bulge prolonged the war into 1945. Colonel Ralph Ingersoll, historian of Bradley's Twelfth Army Group, commented, “The failure to close the Argentan-Falaise gap was the loss of the greatest single opportunity of the war.”97 The official United States Army history of the operation concludes that “halting the XV Corps at Argentan [was] a tactical error, a failure to take full advantage of German vulnerability.”98

  The three senior Allied field commanders—Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Bradley—as Rick Atkinson put it, “had made a hash of things.”99 Personal indecision, caution and fear, lack of coordination between British, Canadian, and American armies, the clash of egos, inexperienced Canadians battling battle-hardened Germans, all contributed to a far less decisive victory. French general Philippe Leclerc, who commanded the French Second Armored Division in Patton's Third Army heading toward Falaise, seems to poignantly summarize the experience of those who saw the opportunity that was lost and its consequences: “I had the feel that it was 1940 in reverse—complete enemy confusion, surprised columns etc. The climax on the French front at Argentan-Falaise could have been splendid. The high command decided otherwise: history will condemn them.”100 Years later in retrospect, Eisenhower admitted that if he had ordered the Falaise gap closed at Argentan, it “might have won us a complete battle of annihilation.”101

  “I have never given a damn what the enemy was going to do or where he was…. I have always gotten to the place he expected me to come about three days before he got there.”

  —General George S. Patton1

  During the first two weeks of August, Patton's Third Army seized most of Brittany (except for the ports of Lorient and Brest). They also had gained the Loire River to Angers. The next phase of Patton's drive was to thrust beyond Le Mans to the northeast and Alencon.

  As these events unfolded across France, Bradley observed, “There was wild jubilation in the Allied Camp…. Nothing of consequence lay between us and Germany.”2 The Allies looked unstoppable. Could they rapidly cross eastern France into Belgium, Holland, then cross the Rhine to Berlin? Martin Blumenson observes that many of the commanders thought that the war might “be over by the end of September!”3

  “HAVING A HELL OF A WAR”

  On August 13, Patton was still impatiently sitting at Argentan considering what to do next. The other Allied top commanders were still engaged in fighting over where and how to finally seal the Falaise Pocket. With his agitation growing, Patton decided, “Since the XX Corps was hitting nothing, we had best send it northeast, east of Le Mans.”4 Patton's drive to the German border was about to begin.

  The next day Patton flew to Bradley's command post to “sell him the plan…. He consented…to move the XX Corps on Chartres, the XV Corps on Dreux, and the XII Corps on Orleans.”5 This maneuver would encircle Paris and capture more German forces.

  Patton was elated, and by 8:30 p.m. that evening he had his entire corps racing toward the Seine. The Third Army's relentless advance eastward toward Paris overran the Germans’ planned defensive strongpoints before they could be fully manned.6 (See Map 21.)

  By the evening of August 15, General Gilbert Cook's XI Corps had traveled ninety miles from Le Mans. They took a strongly fortified but virtually undefended large airport on the outskirts of Orleans. The next day, they entered the city after overcoming slight opposition. A separate column of the 320th Infantry marched to Chateaudun and took the town by noon on August 17.

  At Chartres, elements of the Seventh Armored Division along with the Fifth Infantry Division converged in two columns on the city and overcame determined opposition. During the evening of August 16, the last Germans withdrew.


  By the morning of August 16, the XV Corps advanced sixty miles from Argentan toward Dreux. The Fifth Armored Division met only light resistance. They encircled the town and occupied Dreux that afternoon.

  August 16 and 17 were big days for the Allies. Patton's Third Army had entered or captured the major towns of Dreux, Chartres, Chateaudun, and Orleans. (See Map 23.) Patton wrote his wife a few days earlier about the operation: “This is better and much bigger than Sicily…. This is probably the fastest and biggest pursuit in history.”7

  With Patton on the Seine, Eisenhower finally took him out of the doghouse. He lifted the blackout curtain, and suddenly Patton's name captured US and British newspaper headlines. His heavily armored columns had liberated Brittany and were barreling eastward toward Paris. Almost overnight he became America's most popular general. Patton was also promoted to the rank of major general, regular army. His name would become a legend.8

  In letters to his early mentors, General James G. Harbord and General Charles P. Summerall, Patton outlined the Third Army's innovative tactics and operational results:

  Our chief success was due to the fact that we cut the armored divisions loose and did not tie them to the infantry. However, we always kept one combat team of infantry motorized so that in the event of a serious situation, they would be available within a few hours to the armored divisions…. Our losses so far have been extremely small, and we have inflicted very heavy casualties on the enemy…. His loss of material is something unbelievable.9

  Eisenhower decided to take full advantage of the Wehrmacht's evident collapse in France. At a meeting with Eisenhower, Bradley pushed forward a plan that allowed Patton to make a lightning drive to Metz and the German border. Both the geography and the present weak German defenses favored a rapid mobile assault through Lorraine and into Germany. The Third Army was already charging forward because of favorable conditions. If Patton continued this momentum, the Third Army would be on track to breach the German West Wall and cross the Rhine. All of Germany would lie open before Patton. Eisenhower approved this plan on August 18.10

  At that same meeting, Eisenhower ordered a second attempt to close the Falaise gap with a long hook between Argentan and the lower Seine.11 As related in chapter 10, this gap was finally closed on August 21.

  By then the Third Army had advanced over four hundred miles in twenty-six days. It had killed, wounded, or captured over one hundred thousand Germans while eliminating more than five hundred tanks and approximately seven hundred artillery pieces. Patton's army suffered about sixteen thousand casualties, 13 percent of all US losses in Normandy. This low number was in large part owed to the initiative and daring of all ranks. They had been trained to make spectacular advances. Patton gave them the opportunity by strongly pushing against enemy opposition and using tactics that did not allow the enemy time to reorganize their defenses. Now on the lower Seine, the Third Army stood one hundred miles farther east than the rest of the Allied armies. The British major general Hubert Essame believed that this army was in a strong strategic position, making it “a veritable thunderbolt capable, if hurled in the right direction, of inflicting a blow which would end the war in 1944.”12

  A KING UNCROWNED

  Although part of Patton's Third Army crossed the Seine on August 19, Eisenhower hoped to delay occupying Paris. Patton's rapid advance had already outrun the Allied supply lines. Ike wanted to avoid the burden of providing the three thousand to four thousand tons of food a day needed to feed the Paris population. He also wanted to avoid intervening in a volatile political situation. However his hand was forced by the Paris resistance movement and the political maneuvers of General de Gaulle.13

  On August 18, a general strike was called in Paris. The unified Paris resistance force, which included de Gaulle's Free French, told the people to mobilize for resistance. At 7:00 a.m. the next day, two thousand striking Paris police seized the Prefecture de Police and raised the tricolor in its courtyard. The broad boulevards of Paris were blocked with trees and paving stones. An estimated fifteen thousand armed resistance fighters manned the Paris barricades.14

  The Wehrmacht defenses to the west of Paris numbered about twenty thousand soldiers. But many were not high-quality combat troops. Inside the City of Light were about five thousand German troops, fifty light and medium artillery pieces, ten tanks, and around sixty aircraft at the Le Bourget airport.15

  The Paris uprising had taken the new German military governor by surprise. Posted only two weeks earlier, General Dietrich von Choltitz was known for his great experience in defensive operations. Reportedly Hitler had ordered him to leave Paris a wasteland after conducting a ruthless fortress-styled defense: “[N]othing must be left standing, no church, no artistic monument.”16

  After gunfire had broken out across the city on August 20, the Swedish consul Raoul Nordling contacted Choltitz with the offer to arrange a truce. Choltitz agreed to this in principle, but he was wavering between obedience to Hitler's orders to destroy Paris, and leaving Paris intact while surrendering to the advancing Allies.17

  On August 20 General de Gaulle arrived at Eisenhower's SHELLBURST headquarters in Normandy. Eisenhower patiently listened to de Gaulle's haughty ultimatum demanding the immediate liberation of Paris. Eisenhower reluctantly decided that the Allies must take action to head off a potential civil war between the French Communists, who were demanding a general election across France to form a rainbow popular government, and de Gaulle and his Free French forces, who sought to reassert the authority of the prewar French state. Eisenhower ordered Bradley to send Gerow's V Corps to aid Leclerc's French Second Armored Division in freeing the city.18

  Martin Blumenson succinctly described the situation Eisenhower faced: “The only solution seemed to be that if the Germans were ready to quit the city without giving battle, the Allies ought to enter—for the prestige involved, to maintain order in the capital, to satisfy French requests, and also to secure the important Seine crossing sites there.”19

  However, before Eisenhower's orders reached Gerow, Leclerc had taken action on his own. He sent a 150-man detachment of French armor and infantry to carry out a detailed reconnaissance toward Versailles, a town near Paris. Leclerc and de Gaulle had decided that when Allied columns entered the capital, the Free French Army would be in the vanguard.20

  When Gerow discovered this deployment he was furious and ordered its return. Leclerc ignored those instructions. On August 22, orders reached the V Corps for the Paris deployment. Leclerc was alerted as part of this operation.21

  That evening a Citroen sedan carrying five civilians drove into the American lines. They told the local commander they had a message for General Eisenhower. This was a deputation from Paris consisting of representatives from the Swedish Consulate, a British agent, a de Gaulle representative, and a German officer in civilian clothes speaking for Choltitz. The next morning they were sent to Patton and informed him that they had come from Paris to arrange its surrender. Patton believed them but was irritated since he was under orders not to become involved in the liberation of Paris. He immediately sent this party by light aircraft to Bradley's headquarters at Laval.22

  On August 23, Choltitz in a telephone conversation with Speidel, Model's chief of staff at Army Group B, said that he had complied with Hitler's demands to leave Paris a field of ruins by placing tons of explosives in Notre Dame Cathedral, the Invalides (where Napoleon is buried), and the Palais Bourbon (the French Chamber of Deputies). The Paris Opera and the Madeleine Church were also scheduled for destruction. He was prepared to level the Arc de Triomphe to clear a field of fire down the Champs-Élysées. Choltitz also had plans to dynamite the Eiffel Tower and use it to block the Seine, though he found it impossible to blow up the seventy-odd bridges in Paris. (Speidel later claimed that he diplomatically and indirectly urged Choltitz not to ruin the City of Light.)

  Choltitz, however, ultimately decided not to destroy the French capital. He preferred to surrender and become an American POW,
rather than face war crime charges as the infamous destroyer of a great European cultural center.23

  Leclerc's division spent August 23 in a breakneck 120-mile dash toward Paris. He reached the suburbs by midafternoon, where he found de Gaulle in the suburban presidential residence awaiting his arrival.

  The next morning, Leclerc opened his final assault, running a gauntlet of isolated German fire until by 9:30 a.m. his tanks came to a halt outside the Hotel de Ville (city hall). The arrival of Leclerc's tanks brought the bells of Paris to life, and his troops were mobbed by joyful crowds celebrating the end of years of occupation.

  The same morning Leclerc contacted Choltitz, via the offices of the Swedish consul, and asked him to end all German fighting in the city. About 2:30 p.m. the first French soldiers reached the Meurice Hotel, the German army headquarters. They found Choltitz's office and invited him to surrender as the commander of “Gross-Paris.”

  A jeep took Choltitz to the Prefecture de Police. After conferring on the capitulation terms, Choltitz signed a typewritten document. An immediate ceasefire brought fighting to a halt by 7:00 p.m. Personnel was dispatched to defuse all the prepared demolitions and to relay the surrender message to outlying German defenses.24

  On August 26 de Gaulle led the famous victory parade down the Champs-Élysées. The uncrowned king was heralded by the people of Paris who celebrated the end of German occupation in the tens of thousands. Closely following de Gaulle were Leclerc, General Marie-Pierre Koenig, a commander of the Free French Forces, and leaders of the French resistance. They proceeded from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame Cathedral for a solemn Te Deum of national gratitude for deliverance from the Nazis.25

  General de Gaulle had elevated himself to a position of the uncrowned leader of Free French. He propagated the myth that although France was indebted to the Allies and some foreign resisters for their military assistance, the French had liberated themselves and restored national honor, confidence, and unity. His speech to the crowd outside the Hotel de Ville in Paris when he first arrived in Paris on August 25, 1944, encapsulates his assertions: “Paris liberated! Liberated by its own efforts, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the help of all of France, that is France in combat. The one France, the true France, eternal France.”26