D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [253]
As well as the large numbers of prisoners, there were also several thousand German wounded to look after. During the mopping up, a German field hospital with 250 wounded was discovered, hidden deep in the Forêt de Gouffern. Most of the injured left in the pocket had received no medical care at all.
British and American medical services were soon swamped. Their doctors were helped by hard-working German medical orderlies. ‘On the collapse of the Falaise pocket,’ wrote Lieutenant Colonel Snyder, ‘750 German wounded were brought in. Some of them were lightly wounded German officers, who complained that they had had to walk. One of the German orderlies, overhearing this, called back: “When I was in the German army, you officers told us we should march all day without grumbling”.’
Many Landser, however, were in a pitiful condition, including twenty-five cases of gas gangrene. Two surgical teams operated in separate tents to prevent contamination. They did nothing but amputate gangrenous limbs. They had to keep changing the teams round because the stench from the gas gangrene was so terrible. ‘Medical care during retreat is always difficult for any army,’ Colonel Snyder observed.
British doctors with 6 General Hospital also had to deal with gas gangrene. They were in addition concerned with an epidemic of enteritis and the threat of typhus, when they discovered how many German prisoners were covered in lice: ‘Their blankets have been segregated from the other patients and washed before being used on any other patient.’
The main fear of infection lay in the pocket itself. Dead horses and German corpses were covered in flies, and the plague of mosquitoes continued. The Americans brought in French workers to help deal with the problem. One of them recorded how he had to hold a handkerchief over his nose because of the pestilential stench as he surveyed the carbonized corpses and the grotesque grins of blackened skulls. They dragged bodies, both human and animal, to make funeral pyres, pouring gasoline over them. ‘The air became unbreathable,’ he wrote.
On 21 August, Montgomery issued a declaration to the 21st Army Group: ‘The victory has been definite, complete and decisive. “The Lord mighty in battle” has given us the victory.’ Many, however, did not agree that the victory had been ‘definite, complete and decisive’. General Eberbach estimated that perhaps some 20,000 men, twenty-five tanks and fifty self-propelled guns had escaped the encirclement. ‘The losses of tanks from lack of gasoline were greater than those due to all kinds of enemy armaments put together,’ he wrote later. Gersdorff believed that between 20,000 and 30,000 managed to cross the Seine.74 On the Allied side, Montgomery’s strongest critics were British.
‘One of Monty’s great errors was at Falaise,’ Air Chief Marshal Tedder said after the war. ‘There he imperiously told US troops to stop and leave the British area alone. He didn’t close the gap.’ Predictably, Air Chief Marshal Coningham, who loathed Montgomery, was even harsher: ‘Monty is supposed to have done a great job at Falaise. [But he] really helped the Germans get away. He still wanted to do the job by himself, and kept the Americans from coming up. We closed on Falaise too late.’ Coningham attributed his actions to jealousy of Patton, which is not entirely true.
According to Montgomery’s chief of staff, General Freddie de Guingand, Montgomery had been ‘too tidy’. He thought the Americans should have been allowed to join the Poles at Trun. Monty regarded Bradley as under his command. Monty, said Brigadier Williams of the 21st Army Group, was ‘the high cock on the dungheap’. When Montgomery told Bradley to hold back at Argentan, ‘Bradley was indignant. We were indignant on Bradley’s behalf.’ According to Williams, Montgomery ‘was fundamentally more interested in full envelopment than this inner envelopment. We fell between two stools.