Inferno - Max Hastings [351]
Yet although senior German officers now recognised strategic retreat as essential, most of their line held. Hitler insisted on a new counterattack, disclosed to the Allies by Ultra: in darkness in the early hours of 7 August, Rommel’s successor, Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge, launched a major counteroffensive designed to separate the U.S. First and Third Armies. During the night the panzers retook Mortain and pushed forward seven miles. With the coming of daylight, however, disaster fell on them. Allied fighter-bombers quickly destroyed forty out of seventy attacking tanks. For four more days the Germans strove to regain momentum, but U.S. infantry held their positions supported by massive artillery fire.
On Montgomery’s front, progress remained slow. Late on 7 August Gen. Henry Crerar’s Second Canadian Army attacked south of Caen. In darkness, his tanks made some headway, before the assault ran out of steam soon after daybreak. Other Canadian and Polish armoured units took over, but their inexperience, and a bungled bomber strike which devastated several spearhead units, halted operations once more; inconclusive fighting continued on the road to Falaise until 10 August. Montgomery’s formations faced the bulk of the surviving German armour. It was nonetheless painful for them to progress so sluggishly, when the Americans in the west were sweeping forward in triumph.
With Patton’s forces moving so fast, Bradley saw an opportunity to trap an estimated twenty-one German formations—or, more accurately, their remains. If the Third Army swung north to Alençon and the Canadians could reach Falaise, only fourteen miles would separate them. Montgomery accepted the plan. One of Patton’s corps dashed for Alençon against negligible opposition and pushed through the town to reach the outskirts of Argentan on the evening of 12 August. At this point, Bradley made one of the most controversial decisions of the campaign, halting the advance. His professed reason—to avoid the risk of a collision with the advancing Canadians—does not merit serious examination. More plausibly, and probably prudently, he flinched from placing relatively weak forces in the path of the retreating Germans, wounded tigers.
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