Outside the mouth of the pocket on 20 August, II SS Panzer Corps finally attempted to reach the trapped remnants of 7th Army. Directing the attack from its HQ at Vimoutiers, the corps launched the operation at 0400 hours. To the south of Vimoutiers two kampfgruppen of the 2nd SS struck toward Neauphe-sur-Dive and St Lambert. The much weaker 9th SS, which had lost an entire battalion fighting the Poles, was launched along the Champeaux road toward Trun.
For the counterattack Will Fey and the last Tiger tank joined men from the 9th SS and 12th SS equipped with nothing heavier than panzer fausts, holding defensive blocking positions on the Vimoutiers-Trun road. He recalled how they bumped into the Polish 1st Armoured Division near Champosoult; knocking out two Shermans and forcing the rest to retreat, they pressed on. The kampfgruppe broke through almost to Chambois, reaching some of those trapped. Fey noted:
At full speed, we fired salvos from our MGs [machineguns] at the transport convoys of the enemy, joyfully welcomed by German soldiers who already had one foot in the prisoner of war camp. Our enemies stared at us with fearful faces as we broke into the encirclement of Falaise, a wild and daring chase. We experienced things we never had before, such as knocking out a Sherman that suddenly showed up from a side street, at a distance of eight metres! We had achieved our mission to open up the encirclement. The whole staff of our Panzer Army with its Commander-in-Chief, Hausser, which was still inside the encirclement, was able to escape being taken prisoner! But then we had to get back if we did not want to lose contact with the withdrawal operation!
The 2nd SS, with just twenty panzers, were unable to achieve much and the Polish 2nd Armoured Regiment halted the 9th SS. The counterattack came to a stop before a series of hills: 258, southwest of Les Champeaux; 240, east of Ecorches; 239, west of Champosoult and 262, northeast of Coudehard. The SS could get no further and at Hill 239 the 2nd SS were counterattacked by sixty enemy tanks and a bitter tank battle followed; 9th SS panzer grenadiers, lacking tank support, got as far as the heights of Les Cosniers.
Nevertheless, II SS Panzer Corps’ efforts were an unwelcome distraction for the Allies and eased the pressure on some of those inside the pocket. A gap was forced and 2,000 men streamed through as well as twenty-five tanks and fifty guns. Having completed its mission of briefly opening up the pocket, Fey’s Tiger, covered in panzer grenadiers, drove west toward the Seine.
In the meantime, General von Schwerin’s 116th Panzer, covering the rear of the XLVII Panzer Corps during the afternoon of the 20th, had got as far as Hill 168 without being molested. In St Lambert the 116th was greeted by abandoned and destroyed debris strewn everywhere. At dusk on 20 August the brave Canadian defenders in St Lambert-sur-Dives, calling down artillery fire, were able to destroy the gathering German forces before they could even mount their attack.
During the bitter two-day battle for the village the Germans suffered 300 dead, 500 wounded and 2,100 captured, including some of the officers and men from 2nd Panzer Division, who laid down their arms under the watchful eye of Canadian Sherman tanks. During the close-quarter fighting seven panzers, forty other vehicles and twelve 8.8cm guns were destroyed.
Clearing a way through the choked roads between 2300 and 0100 on the night of 20/21 August, the survivors of the 116th Panzer Division, with about fifty combat vehicles, broke through without notable loss. The division managed to escape with eleven Panthers, four Panzer IVs, three StuGs, and two Wespe and one Hummel self-propelled guns.
One group were not so fortunate. A kampfgruppe at Argentan found itself left behind and tried to fight its way through at Trun, but was not successful and surrendered. Elements of Panzer Lehr, supporting the 331st Infantry Division, also remained behind north of Grôce, defending the Gráce-Vimoutiers road.
The 9th SS vainly tried to break through again on 21 August, using two massive King Tiger tanks, but these were swiftly knocked out. The Allies now began to mop up the remaining Germans trapped west of the Dives and about 18,000 troops went into the ‘bag’ that day. The Allies found the surrounding countryside a charnel-house, the air fouled by the stench of rotting corpses, cattle and horses. Incredibly, despite the desperate situation, in less than a week between 14 August and 21 August, the German Army and Waffen-SS claimed to have destroyed 293 Allied tanks. Liquidating the pocket had come at a terrible cost in men and matériel.
Horrendous destruction
Second Lieutenant Stuart Hills, Nottinghamshire Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, 8th Armoured Brigade, followed the British 11th Armoured Division through the Falaise pocket via Chambois to L’Aigle. There he witnessed the devastation:
The scenes in the Falaise pocket, where Allied air power had wreaked such destruction, were horrendous. The various German divisions had a terrible pounding in the Normandy battle, Panzer Lehr, for instance lost all its tanks and infantry units, while about 50,000 of the enemy had been killed and some 20,000 taken prisoner. Thousands still lay unburied within the pocket: the roads and fields were littered with German dead in various stages of decomposition. Then there were the carcasses of cows and horses, the smashed vehicles and abandoned carts laden with loot. Many of the human and animal bodies had swelled grotesquely in the summer sun, and the stench was awful. ‘Who in God’s name will do what about this lot?’ asked Padre Skinner. It was a fair question.
Similarly, The Times’ war correspondent was aghast at the destruction wrought in the Falaise pocket. He recalled:
Nearly every yard of ground must have been pin pointed by batteries of all calibres: coming down from Trun there is hardly a yard of road, along which sporadic fighting was still going on yesterday, that does not tell its grim tale. The ditches are lined with destroyed enemy vehicles of every description…
For four days the rain of death poured down, and with the road blocked with blazing tanks and trucks little can have escaped it. Nothing can describe the horror of the sight in the village of St Lambert-sur-Dives, an enemy graveyard over which his troops were struggling yesterday in an effort to break through the cordon hedging them off from the seeming escape lanes to the Seine.
Lieutenant Hills was staggered by it all and recorded that the public back home were perhaps rightly spared the full reality of the butchery:
Press and news photographers certainly recorded the grisly scene, although I myself have never seen the results of their efforts: I can only surmise that the sheer horror of it all may have placed constraints on the publication of such material. For this was strong medicine, even for those of us who were more accustomed than those at home to the hideous visions of war. For my part, I was simply dazed and dumbfounded at what I had witnessed. If it had not been before my eyes, I would have felt it to be utterly unreal.
The Times reporter observed Hitler’s armoured forces were completely spent: ‘Within an area of about a square mile hundreds of tanks and armoured cars, great trucks and guns and horse-drawn wagons, lie burned and splintered in hideous disarray.’ Anything salvagable was quickly retrieved as the correspondent witnessed: ‘All manner of enemy vehicles that had escaped the destruction were being driven back to our own lines under white lags or hastily designed white stars.’
General de Guingand, like many senior Allied officers, went to view the scene at first hand:
The destruction caused to the enemy was terrific. I have never seen it equalled before or since. The tens of thousands of prisoners, the wounded and the dead. Thousands of tanks and vehicles lying all over the countryside. Some burnt out, some abandoned. The roads that were still open to them were packed with transport, nose to tail. Our aircraft had got to work and record bags had been obtained by our pilots. There were hundreds of dead horses rotting in the hot sun. Never have I seen such a scene of desolation. I flew over the area once or twice in a puddle jumper. It was an unforgettable sight, and the smell of decay was strong in the air above. It seemed difficult to imagine how any army could survive a defeat of this sort.
General Dwight Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander, was also taken
on a tour:
Forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap I was conducted through it on foot, to encounter scenes that could be described only by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.
He was rightly pleased with the crushing defeat of the Nazi war machine and recalled in his memoirs:
German commanders concentrated particularly on saving armoured elements, and while a disappointing portion of their panzer divisions did get back across the Seine, they did so at the cost of a great proportion of their equipment. Eight Infantry and two panzer divisions were captured almost in their entirety.
During this final battle the Wehrmacht lost approximately 10,000 killed and 50,000 captured, though Eberbach estimated the number killed during 10-22 August at about 20,000. The Americans counted in their zone of the pocket 380 tanks and 160 self-propelled guns as well as 5,000 vehicles. In the British, Canadian and Polish areas were littered 344 armoured vehicles. The 2nd Tactical Air Force claimed to have destroyed or damaged 190 tanks and 2,600 vehicles during its sorties over the battlefield.
Typhoon pilot Flight Lieutenant H Ambrose, 175 Squadron, was amazed by the coordination of the air attacks and disgusted by the smell of death:
[Wing Commander] Charles Green was absolutely brilliant about the Falaise Gap. He had sorted it all out. He saw what was going on and warned the AOC [Air Officer Commanding] and the Army that this was a situation that had to be arrested pretty quickly. Some of the German Army did escape, of course, but the Typhoons and some Spitfires, made mincemeat of the German Army at Falaise. They just blocked roads, stopped them moving and just clobbered them. You could smell Falaise from 6,000 feet in the cockpit. The decomposing corpses of horses and flesh – burning flesh, the carnage was terrible. Falaise was the heyday of the Typhoon.
The Germans claim that 40,000 troops escaped, although many of them were killed before they crossed the Seine and, crucially, they only took twenty-five panzers with them. Eberbach thought less than half this number of men escaped the pocket. The Germans had lost all their equipment and it was seen as their worst defeat since the Battle of Stalingrad.
Colonel David Belchem, Head of Montgomery’s Operations and Planning Staff succinctly summed up the desperate nature of the battle:
The stubborn Falaise pocket was finally closed on 19 August, when American troops driving from the south towards Chambois met 4th Canadian Armoured and the Polish Armoured Divisions converging on the town from the northwest and northeast. As the noose tightened, this tiny area of Normandy contained the shattered remnants of some eighteen German Army formations. The battle for Falaise lasted for nearly two weeks. Initially the beleaguered enemy retained some degree of organisation – the infantry units fighting in the west while the remnants of the panzer divisions battled desperately to keep open the narrow escape route at the neck: but by 16 August the situation was chaotic. For some time after 19 August, the Allied formations were fully occupied in rounding up the dispersed groups of confused enemy survivors – each group containing, perhaps, members of up to a dozen different units. The wreckage and confusion within the ‘pocket’ is difficult to describe: enemy transport vehicles, guns and tanks were found packed nose to tail in a landscape of total devastation.
In contrast, Colonel Ralph Ingersoll, historian of General Bradley’s 12th Army Group summed up Falaise with an air of deep regret:
The failure to close the Argentan-Falaise gap was the loss of the greatest single opportunity of the war. The news would have come hard on the heels of the attempted assassination of Hitler… and would have been accompanied by the news of the liberation of Paris [less than a week later]. But as long as any of the German Army escaped, Hitler had a chance to cover up the extent of the disaster.
This he would do in spectacular fashion.
Chapter 16
The Flawed Victory
Despite the Allies snapping at their heels all the way to the Seine, thousands of German troops would escape to fight another day. Gefechtsschreiber (headquarters clerk) Rolf Munninger, a 23 year old Swabian who had served Rommel, was one of the last to leave Army Group B’s HQ: ‘I was in La Roche [Guyon] with the rearguard, the main body of troops had left two days earlier. We realised that tanks were preparing to storm our HQ so we decided to leave during the night’. He found himself despatched on a fool’s errand to collect champagne from Reims, noting tartly: ‘under Rommel I would certainly not have been sent to organise champagne’.
The Rouen bridgehead
The Germans were fully aware that they had suffered a catastrophe at Falaise, St Lambert, Chambois and Trun, but there was no time to reflect as they had much more pressing matters. Once the Falaise gap was closed, British I Corps, under the command of the Canadian 1st Army, pushed along the coast to Honfleur, while on its flank the Canadian II Corps headed for Rouen and the Seine River.
Model, Dietrich and Eberbach knew they must hold the west bank stretching north from Paris, through Rouen to the coast and Le Havre, in order to allow their retreating forces to escape over the river. This would provide a new main line of resistance, or, if it came to the worst, as seemed likely, they could withdraw behind the Somme. Providing a fighting screen for the retiring forces meant no rest for the shattered panzer divisions, which Model described as little more than ‘torsos’.
While the destruction of the Falaise pocket seemed a deathblow from which the German Army could never recover, numerous units had not been caught. On the Allies’ immediate eastern flank were elements of the 85th, 272nd, 331st, 346th and 711th Infantry Divisions, numbering about 32,450 men. Behind them were another nine Infantry and parachute divisions, eight of which had come from von Salmuth’s 15th Army.
In fact there were an estimated 250,000 German troops and 250 panzers still west of the Seine, consisting of men outside the pocket, those who had escaped the pocket and units withdrawing from Army Group G’s area. In mid-August Hitler, finally grasping the gravity of the situation developing in Normandy, had ordered all non-combatant troops under Army Group G in western and southern France to commence withdrawing beyond the Seine.
The staff of 5th Panzer Army found that from each of the panzer divisions on average 3,000 men had escape the shambles of Falaise, while each of the infantry divisions could only muster up to 2,000 men. It took command of the entire sector west of the Seine, ordering that Elbeuf, laying on a huge west-facing loop in the river south of Rouen, should be held. This was the nearest crossing point for those troops fleeing from Falaise and represented their primary escape route. In the meantime, the exhausted staffs of 7th Army, no longer capable of directing anything, were ordered to collect all available infantry units beyond the Seine.
The Americans achieved a bridgehead over the river north of Paris at Mantes-Gassicourt, just south of Army Group B’s HQ at La Roche Guy on, on the 19th, posing a threat to 5th Panzer Army’s left wing. If Patton had been instructed to exploit this with a rapid thrust north along the east bank instead of the west, fewer Germans would have escaped.
Model instructed Dietrich to counterattack with four of his panzer divisions. Four days later a few weak panzergrenadier units and about thirty panzers were launched into a feeble attack that was swiftly halted. This was repeated on the 24th, with similar results.
Further north, the remnants of three panzer divisions, 2nd SS, 21st and 116th Panzer, were melded into Group Schwerin, with about twenty battle-worthy tanks and assault guns. On the night of 23rd/24th, 21st Panzer and 2nd SS moved to reinforce the eastern flank of 5th Panzer Army between the Seine and the Risle in an effort to protect the Seine crossings near Rouen. The 21st Panzer was subordinate to 116th Panzer, while 2nd SS were to hold blocking positions south and southeast of Elbeuf. By the evening of the 24th a line had been established between Elbeuf and the Risle north of Brionne. The withdrawing 9th SS were also ordered to join Group Schwerin.
The Germans did all they could to hold up the US 2nd Arm
ored Division attempting to cross the River Avre at Verneuil. Suffering heavy casualties, the Americans crossed upstream, swinging north toward Elbeuf. They penetrated the town on 24 August but were expelled by the 2nd SS the following morning. German resistance was so aggressive that one American column attacking from the southeast was cut off for two days and nights. Holding the high ground on the east bank opposite Elbeuf was the 17th Luftwaffe Field Division, blocking the crossing and the way to Rouen.
Further north, Kuntzen’s LXXXI Corps also soon found themselves at risk, necessitating moving the 9th SS to the Montfort area on the 25th. East of Rouen the British 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division crossed at Vernon and three days later the 11th Armoured Division was over and swinging northward toward Amiens and the Somme.
Withdrawal across the Seine now became an imperative and Model gave the order. Priority of crossing was armoured fighting vehicles, motorised transport and then horse-drawn. By 25 August, as the retreat got underway, 5th Panzer Army was able to muster just 18,000 men, forty-two tanks and assault guns and 314 guns, essentially a single panzer division. These forces were pulled back to the Seine bridgehead, formed by three large river loops, to protect the crossings at Caudebec-en-Caux, Duclair, Elbeuf and Rouen.
Those who escaped the Allied encirclement still had to get over the river. Now that the frontline had vanished, for the retreating troops there was a constant air of uncertainty, driving through villages unsure if they would bump into enemy patrols, hostile Maquis or simply in different locals, and with the ever-present fighter-bombers circling menacingly overhead. One anonymous German soldier writing home recalled that even after escaping the Falaise pocket his ordeal was far from over, as it became a case of everyman for himself:
Falaise: The Flawed Victory Page 24