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the incident as ‘unfortunate support given by own aircraft’. But the blow to morale and the confusion were to slow the second phase of Simonds’s offensive, with fatal effect. The bombing itself had achieved nothing save to handicap the subsequent advance. With the benefit of hindsight, Simonds should have done without it altogether so as to have maintained momentum. He should have sent in his two armoured divisions in the morning, while the Germans were still reeling from the night attack, rather than halting them to wait for the bombers.

Despite the destruction of Wittmann’s group of Tigers, the counterattack by Meyer’s two Kampfgruppen took the two new Allied armoured divisions aback. Their subsequent performance was hesitant to say the least. After one disastrous cavalry charge in tanks, the Poles were cautious because they were very short of men. Most of their men had fought against the German invasion of Poland in 1939, then escaped across Europe in 1940 to defend France, and finally reached England to continue the battle. German soldiers called these exile volunteers ‘the Sikorski tourists’, after their commander-in-chief and their astonishing journeys.

Polish recruiting teams had even been scouring prisoner of war camps to find Wehrmacht soldiers of Polish origin to make up their numbers. Quite a few served as a result on both sides during the Normandy campaign. The Canadians were also short of men, after their very heavy losses south of Caen, especially around Verrières and on the Bourguébus ridge. Unlike the British, they could not produce reinforcements by disbanding a division.

It became clear during the afternoon of 8 August that the immense possibilities opened up by Totalize were rapidly lost. The Canadians to the west of the Falaise road suffered from bad communications and bad map-reading. Simonds became frantic at the lack of drive shown by the 4th Armoured Division, yet despite all his urging, few columns obtained any momentum. He ordered them to continue the advance during the night, but many units simply retired to all-round defence positions to await the next dawn.

The Germans, however, did not yet know how effective Meyer’s counter-attack had been. Eberbach had been out of touch with Meyer since noon. At 21.10 hours that evening, Kluge, already desperate about the failure at Mortain, stated that the situation on the Falaise front was ‘becoming very serious’. He thought that the 89th Infanterie-Division and the Hitler Jugend were ‘practically destroyed’ and that the bulk of the artillery was lost. He warned that a further Allied advance south towards Falaise would mean that their ‘own attack towards Avranches would lose its purpose’. Kluge promised to send a Panther battalion of the 9th Panzer-Division and one from the SS Hohenstaufen, but neither was able to disengage from their own battles.

During the next day, 9 August, the panzergrenadiers of the Hitler Jugend continued to resist fiercely in small groups, holding off vastly superior Allied forces. But the greatest obstacle to the advance of the armoured divisions, as during Goodwood, remained the 88 mm guns, of both the SS and the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe’s III Flak Corps had just moved another forty of them forward to the Falaise front.63

Before dawn, Simonds ordered one column, known as Worthington Force, to advance south beside the Falaise road and seize Hill 195, north-east of Fontaine-le-Pin. This column, consisting of the British Columbia armoured regiment and two companies from the Algonquins, became hopelessly lost. They crossed the Falaise road south of Cintheaux and, instead of switching back to the west side, carried on and occupied Hill 140 instead of their real objective, four miles to the south-west. Convinced that they had seized the right hill, they reported back and waited.

Meyer’s new observation post was just three miles to the south on another hill at La Brèche-au-Diable. As soon as the SS spotted this isolated detachment, Kampfgruppe Waldmüller prepared an attack. Worthington Force was surrounded for the rest of