Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [173]
The German reaction was still strong, but the Americans gambled that they were nearly through and pushed on boldly. Within five days the front had cracked; Allied armor, supported by rocket-firing tactical aircraft, began to shake loose. The Germans pulled out successfully along the coast to the west, then mistakenly turned east. Their troops ran into rampaging Allied forces and lost hundreds of vehicles, tanks, trucks, weapon carriers; virtually an entire corps was ruined.
On the British front the Canadians had put in a vicious spoiling attack past Caen that drew German reserves and cost heavy casualties. While the Canadians fought it out Montgomery slipped his British troops west to shore up his link with the now moving Americans. By the end of July, within a short week, the whole situation had changed. The Normandy invasion was over, the breakout was on, and the campaign of France about to begin.
The great Allied breakout was accompanied by a command shuffle. There were now too many troops ashore for Montgomery to command all of them effectively; he therefore became commander of 21st Army Group, with Crerar’s 1st Canadian and Dempsey’s 2nd British armies under him. General Bradley took over 12th Army Group with General Courtney Hodges’ 1st and George Patton’s 3rd U. S. armies under his direction. Patton had just come over from Britain, having spent the last two months ostentatiously parading about London and Dover as part of the plan to keep Hitler’s mind on the Pas de Calais.
The big break came as Patton pushed his two corps, the westernmost of the entire Allied armies, down the bottom of the Normandy Peninsula. The Cobra operation had already cracked the front here, at Avranches, and in the first three days of August, Patton’s tanks raced seventy-five miles. One corps split off to overrun the weakly held Brittany Peninsula. The whole area quickly fell, but the Germans holed up in the major ports, Brest, Lorient, and St. Nazaire, and had to be regularly besieged to get them out.
Patton’s other corps began the long-awaited left wheel, and within a week it was at Le Mans. Hodges’ people were extending the break eastward against much heavier resistance, and the British and Canadians were pushing due south, making much slower progress and still receiving the brunt of the German attention. Meanwhile, all along the Loire and the Seine, and the roads between Paris and the front, the Allied tactical air forces ranged at will, shooting up targets of opportunity. Medium bombers and fighter-bombers flew low-level strikes against roads, bridges, rail lines, crossroads, in an attempt to seal off the whole lodgment area.
By August 13 two American corps, one of Hodges’ and one of Patton’s, were pushing northward toward Argentan. The Canadians were driving south toward Falaise. West of them, inside a large pocket, were the largest part of three German armies. On the 7th they had launched a major tank attack at Mortain, designed to break through to the coast and isolate Patton’s advance. For three hectic days some of the American divisions were subjected to very heavy pounding, but Bradley diverted reserves that stabilized the situation, and by the time the Germans gave it up they suddenly realized they were in danger of being cut off themselves. There then began a confused scramble to get out of the shrinking pocket through the “Falaise gap.”
Hitler, still fiddling with maps in East Prussia, was days out of date and still ordering attacks here and there when Kluge finally convinced him that immediate retreat was the Germans’ only salvation. In fact, the retreat had already begun, and salvation, for the moment, came more from the Allies than from the Germans’ own efforts. Bradley, fearing mutual casualties if his troops from the south started shelling Canadians from the north, and