All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [349]
The Canadians were still fighting hard. Again and again they faced fierce actions with enemy rearguards who sometimes fought to the last man. The rate of attrition in some armoured encounters was extraordinary: on the morning of 8 August, for instance, one 17-pounder ‘Firefly’ of the Northamptonshire Yeomanry knocked out three Tigers and a panzer Mk IV; but an hour later a single German Mk IV, posted hull down in a gully, knocked out seven tanks of the same regiment before itself being destroyed. The Canadians finally reached Falaise on 16 August, twenty hours after American and French troops launched the Anvil landings in southern France, against slight opposition. That day, as Patton’s army hastened westwards, meeting few Germans and hysterically rejoicing French crowds, Hitler authorised a strategic withdrawal from Normandy.
In the so-called Falaise pocket, 150,000 Germans suffered relentless Allied air and artillery bombardment. ‘The floor of the valley was seen to be alive,’ wrote an Allied officer near Trun, ‘… men marching, cycling and running, columns of horse-drawn transport, motor transport, and as the sun got up, so more targets came to light … It was a gunners’ paradise and everybody took advantage of it … Away on our left was the famous killing ground, and all day the roar of Typhoons went on and fresh columns of smoke obscured the horizon … the whole miniature picture of an army in rout. First a squad of men running, being overtaken by men on bicycles, followed by a limber at a gallop, and the whole being overtaken by a Panther tank crowded with men and doing well up to 30mph.’
On the evening of 19 August Polish and American troops met at Chambois, allegedly closing the ‘Falaise gap’. Allied fighter-bombers destroyed thousands of vehicles in the pocket. But for two more days German fugitives trickled through. The Germans lost 10,000 killed at Falaise, and five times that number taken prisoner. ‘My driver was burning,’ wrote SS panzergrenadier Herbert Walther. ‘I had a bullet through the arm. I jumped onto a railway track and ran.’ Hit again in the leg, he managed a further hundred yards before ‘I was hit in the back of the neck with a big hammer – a bullet had gone in beneath the ear and come out through the cheek. I was choking on blood. There were two Americans looking down at me and two French soldiers who wanted to finish me off.’ But a remarkable number of fugitives got away. It became a cliché of the historiography of the war to assert that the German armies in France were destroyed, but this was not entirely true. They suffered some 240,000 casualties during the campaign, and forty divisions were wrecked. It was nonetheless an extraordinary achievement, that a further 240,000 men and 25,000 vehicles crossed the Seine eastwards between 19 and 31 August.
On the river below Rouen, a five-mile-long queue of German armour and vehicles stood immobile but almost unscathed through an entire day and night, while German engineers laboured to repair a damaged railway bridge, the only feasible crossing; heavy rain kept the Allied air forces away until the passage was opened. Sporadic artillery fire inflicted some losses, but thousands of men and vehicles were soon on their way towards Germany. More got across the river on a ferry improvised from two barges by a naval unit at Elbeuf. If these were only fragments of an army, they proved invaluable to Hitler in the weeks that followed, forming the skeleton on which a western defence of the Reich was improvised. SS panzer officer Herbert Rink wrote: ‘We were shell-shocked and exhausted. Once behind the West Wall, we could join all the defeated, decimated German units, all those