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By Root 1056 0

wreaked upon their towns and countryside. An American doctor described the forests stripped of their leaves by artillery fire, livestock carcasses rotting in the fields and towns reduced to a mass of rubble, ‘with occasionally a cynical touch such as an advertisement for Singer sewing machines stuck to a wall which had not been demolished, or a house whose façade has been blown away in front of the dining room, exposing like a theatre set, with the table and the chairs carefully positioned round it’. When French refugees from the fighting returned to their wrecked homes, some were traumatized by the unrecognizable scene, while others were bitterly resigned to the futile waste. Sometimes a tiny detail brought home to Allied troops the suffering of the French. For one British soldier, it was seeing a little house called ‘Mon Repos’ destroyed by shellfire.

Mines and unexploded shells, despite work by Allied and French teams, would continue to maim farmers and children for several years to come. Any work of reconstruction concentrated on improving supply facilities for the Allied armies. In Caen, 15,000 troops were put to work reopening the inland port at the head of the canal, but few could be spared to re-establish essential services for civilians.

Normandy had indeed been martyred, but its sacrifice saved the rest of France. Paradoxically, as a leading French historian has pointed out, the slowness of the Allied advance in the first two months, grinding down the German army, worked in favour of the French, ‘whose liberation was more rapid and less destructive, outside the Normandy battlefields, than one might have feared’.

The battle for Normandy was reaching its climax. On 14 August, Kluge decided that his troops had to break out in a north-easterly direction, ‘otherwise they must expect the loss of all their forces’. Artillery units lined up their guns and fired off all their remaining shells before retreating. On 16 August, Kluge ordered an immediate withdrawal to the line of the River Orne and the crossing began that night. Flak units were brought in to guard the bridges, but Allied air activity appears to have presented little threat over the next two vital days. No troops were allowed to stop or rest in the area. Vehicles were pushed off the road if they broke down and the Feldgendarmerie exerted a strict traffic discipline. Nothing was allowed to slow the withdrawal. Panzer troops aroused anger among the Landser of the infantry by the way they simply drove over corpses, crushing them flat with their tracks.

On 16 August, the Canadians fought their way into the ruined city of Falaise, where William the Conqueror had been born in the great castle. Again they faced their fanatical opponents in the Hitler Jugend. Sixty of these battle-hardened teenagers held out for three days. The only two taken alive were wounded.69

To the east of Falaise, the Polish 10th Mounted Rifles reconnaissance regiment, supported by the 12th Dragoons in Cromwell tanks, had secured crossings over the Dives on 15 August. Their success was a fitting celebration on the anniversary of their victory over the Red Army in the Battle of the Vistula in 1920. That night the Poles in their bridgehead fought off counter-attacks, while the reconnaissance troops pushed down the road towards Trun. On 16 August, Simonds wanted to send his 4th Armoured Division towards Trun as well, but the whole of the following day was lost as they pulled out and reorganized. Their divisional commander showed little initiative or drive. The consequent lack of support to the exposed Polish armoured division forced it to halt less than eight miles from Trun.

Ultra was still reporting that the Germans intended to counter-attack against the Americans in the south and break through between Argentan and Sées. This confirmed Montgomery in his view that they should revert to an envelopment on the Seine, rather than cut off the Germans south of Trun. As a result he made the mistake of failing to reinforce the Poles with the 7th Armoured Division, which he had ordered to advance