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trickled through. The Germans lost 10,000 killed at Falaise, and five times that number taken prisoner. “My driver was burning,” wrote the 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 who had made it through 600km of horrifying, crushing battle … We, who had come depleted and exhausted from the inferno of Caen, through the breakout from the pocket at Falaise, through the nerve-racking retreat across France and partisan-plagued Belgium—we had gathered our strength and rebuilt our confidence.” If Rink’s last assertion was an exaggeration, it was indisputable that von Rundstedt, who succeeded as C-in-C in the west after the suicide of von Kluge, was able to establish and defend a new line.

The Germans abandoned Paris without a fight. Gen. Philippe Leclerc’s Free French armoured division entered the capital on 25 August to find the Resistance claiming possession, a legend that launched the resurrection of France’s national self-respect. The Allied armies embarked on a dramatic pursuit which carried them into eastern Belgium and the liberation of Brussels. On 1 September, Eisenhower assumed operational command of the Anglo-American forces, relegating Montgomery to leadership of the Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group with the sop of promotion to field marshal. The Western Allies were convinced that by achieving victory in Normandy they had brought Germany to the verge of defeat. Most of France was free, at a cost of only 40,000 dead. At the beginning of September 1944, they anticipated final victory before the year’s end. In the event, their hopes took significantly longer to fulfil, but “the remainder of the war,” wrote Geyr von Schweppenburg, commanding Panzergroup West, “was only a prolonged epilogue.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

JAPAN: DEFYING FATE

WAR IS PRODIGIOUSLY WASTEFUL, because much of the effort made by rival combatants proves futile, and the price is paid in lives. It is easy for historians to identify not merely battles but entire campaigns which need not have been fought, because outcomes were already ordained in consequence of events elsewhere. Much effort and human sacrifice contribute little to final victory. But when great forces have been created and deployed, it is almost inevitable that they will be used. As long as the enemy refuses to acknowledge defeat, it is deemed intolerable for armies to stand idle, bombs to remain in their dumps. During 1944, the