How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

22 THE LIBERATION OF FRANCE

ALL THE DISASTERS PREDICTED BY ERWIN ROMMEL FOR FAILURE TO MOVE UP forces in advance now came to pass. Practically every unit ordered to the battlefront suffered heavy damage. Reinforcements had to be thrown in as soon as they arrived, and their strength eroded rapidly. Battle losses ran 2,500 to 3,000 a day. Tank losses were immense, replacements few.

Allied aircraft destroyed the railway system serving Normandy and smashed anything moving on the roads in daytime. The supply system was so damaged that only the barest essentials reached the front.

As Hitler repeated his familiar order to hold every square yard, Rundstedt and Rommel went to Berchtesgaden on June 29 to talk with the Fuehrer.

Hitler’s ideas for stopping the western Allies were utterly unrealistic. The navy was to attack the Allied battleships, but Admiral Dönitz pointed out only a few small torpedo and other light boats were available, and they could accomplish little. A thousand of the new Me-262 twin-engine, jet-propelled fighters were to wrest control of the air over Normandy. However, Anglo-American air attacks in the winter and spring of 1944 had virtually wiped out the pool of skilled German pilots. The Luftwaffe could produce only 500 crews, most of them ill-trained. Consequently, very few Me-262s, with a speed (540 mph) and armament (four 30-millimeter cannons) exceeding any Allied fighter, ever flew against the Allies.

Rundstedt and Rommel told Hitler the situation was impossible. How, Rommel asked, did Hitler imagine the war could still be won? A chaotic argument followed, and Rundstedt and Rommel expected to be ousted from their jobs.

Back at Paris on July 1, Rundstedt got Hitler’s order that “present positions are to be held.” He called Hitler’s headquarters and told a staff officer he couldn’t fulfill this demand. What shall we do? the officer asked. Rundstedt replied: “Make peace, you fools.”

The next day an emissary from Hitler presented Rundstedt with an Oak Leaf to the Knight’s Cross and a handwritten note relieving him of his post because of “age and poor health.” Hitler replaced Rundstedt with Günther von Kluge, who at first thought the situation was better than it was. He changed his mind the moment he visited the front.

Rommel, to his surprise, remained at his post. About this time Rommel and his chief of staff, Hans Speidel, concluded that the Germans should commence independent peace negotiations with the western Allies. Their idea was to open the west to an unopposed “march in” by the British and American armies, with the aim of keeping the Russians out of Germany. Everything had been prepared and Kluge and others won over, when fate intervened on July 17: Rommel was severely wounded by a low-flying Allied aircraft near Livarot.

Three days later, on July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a leader of the secret opposition to Hitler, placed a bomb under a table where Hitler was meeting in his headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia. The bomb exploded, but Hitler survived. Immediately afterward, he replaced the army chief of staff, Kurt Zeitzler, with Heinz Guderian, who reported to Hitler at noon on July 21.

“He seemed to be in rather poor shape,” Guderian wrote. “One ear was bleeding; his right arm, which had been badly bruised and was almost unusable, hung in a sling. But his manner was one of astonishing calm.”

Hitler quickly recovered from the physical effects of the bomb. An existing malady, which caused his left hand and left leg to tremble, had no connection with the explosion. The attempt on his life had a profound effect on his behavior, however. Guderian wrote that “the deep distrust he already felt for mankind in general … now became profound hatred…. What had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation…. He believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him; it now became torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent.”

Hitler commenced a wave of terror against anyone suspected of a role in the bombing plot. This led to numerous executions. On October 14, 1944, Rommel, recovering from his wounds at his home in Ulm, received the option of a People’s Court trial, which would have meant execution, or taking poison and getting a state funeral—and no persecution of his wife and son. Rommel chose poison.

By June 27, the Americans had pushed the Germans out of the Cotentin peninsula and seized Cherbourg (though the Germans damaged the port and it took weeks to get it operating). Meanwhile, Montgomery’s British forces on the east had been unable to budge the Germans from Caen. Danger arose that the Allies would be boxed into Normandy, especially as a Channel storm June 19–23 severely damaged the Mulberries on the Norman coast and drove 800 vessels up on the beaches.

Omar Bradley, commanding the U.S. 1st Army, began moving his forces south to carry out the original plan of Overlord: breaking out to Avranches at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, thereby opening the door to capture of Brittany and the ports there by George Patton’s 3rd Army, to be committed at this time. These advances in addition would give the Allies space for a massive turning movement that could sweep across France to the German frontier.

Bradley lined up twelve divisions in four corps to crack through in a massive frontal assault. Troy H. Middleton’s 8th Corps and J. Lawton Collins’s 7th Corps on the west were to drive full speed down the west coast of the peninsula to Avranches. Meanwhile Charles H. Corlett’s 19th Corps would seize St. Lô in the center, and Leonard T. Gerow’s 5th Corps at Caumont would “hold the hub of the wheel,” in Bradley’s words, protecting the right flank of the British 2nd Army.

Middleton’s corps, on the extreme west, opened the attack on July 3. But it failed completely. Collins’s 7th Corps had no better luck the next day, while 19th Corps made only meager gains around St. Lô.

To Bradley and his corps commanders the fault lay with the leadership within the American divisions, which in numerous cases was inadequate. Bradley replaced several commanders, but the great problem the Americans faced was the bocage—the hedgerow country of Normandy— which caught the Americans by complete surprise. Planners, solving problems of the landings, had paid little or no attention to the terrain just behind the beaches. No troops were taught how to deal with it.

Virtually the entire American sector—from the coast of the Cotentin to the line Caumont-Bayeux—was bocage country. In the British sector to the east the land was part bocage and part rolling countryside punctuated by hamlets and small woods. For centuries Norman farmers had enclosed their land in small fields by raising embankments three or four feet high. These banks were overgrown with dense shrubbery, brambles, hawthorn, and small trees. The hedgerows were intended as fences to hold livestock, mark boundaries, and protect animals and crops from sea winds. Each field had a gate to admit animals and equipment. Dirt tracks or sunken lanes ran between these hedgerows, permitting troops and weapons to move free from observation from the air or on the ground. The effect was to divide the terrain into thousands of walled enclosures.

The bocage proved to be ideal country for the Germans to defend. Antitank weapons—Panzerfäuste, or bazooka rocket tubes—and machine guns posted in the hedgerows could remain hidden until a tank was within fifty yards, destroy all but the heaviest tank with one shot, and stop the advance of infantry. In addition, tanks, assault guns, and 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns concealed in the bocage or villages could knock out any Allied tank up to 2,000 yards distant.

The Germans organized each field (mostly seven to fifteen acres) as a defensive stronghold, posting machine guns in the corners to pin down Americans advancing across in the open. They placed other automatic weapons in the hedgerows on the front and flanks of the attackers. Once they had stopped the attack, the Germans brought down preregistered mortar rounds on the field. Mortars caused three-quarters of American casualties in Normandy.

American artillery fire could not be used often, since the range was so close that rounds might land on Americans. This undermined the standard American method of fighting. Infantry habitually maneuvered to locate the enemy, then called on artillery to finish him off. Green infantry tended not to move at all under fire, but to seek the nearest cover or hug the ground.

The hedgerows also nullified the tanks’ greatest advantages, mobility and firepower. Tankers were reluctant to operate within the confined spaces of the bocage, yet if they stayed on the main roads or lanes they made excellent targets. Commanders realized tanks had to get off the roads, but this forced them into the hedgerows.

Some way had to be found to break the impasse. Normal American practice had been for tanks and infantry to advance in separate echelons. In Normandy, astute commanders realized the two had to work together (thus recognizing at long last the Kampfgruppe system the Germans had perfected since 1940).

The 29th Infantry Division’s method was one of the best. Developed in June and tested on July 11 east of St.-Lô, the 29th’s system consisted of a four-phase operation. First, a Sherman M4A3 medium tank broke through enough vegetation in the center of a hedgerow to allow its cannon and machine gun to open up against the enemy-held hedgerow on the opposite side of the field. Meanwhile a 60-millimeter mortar crew lobbed shells behind the enemy hedgerow. Under intense covering fire of the tank’s machine gun, a squad of infantry advanced in open formation across the field. As they closed on the enemy, the infantry tossed hand grenades over the hedgerow to kill or confuse the German defenders. Meanwhile, the Sherman tank backed away from its firing position, and an engineer team blew a hole in the hedgerow for the tank to drive through. The tank then rushed forward to assist the infantry in flushing any remaining enemy soldiers out of the hedgerow.

Although this and similar systems worked, the process was slow. Others were thinking of a faster and safer way to get Shermans through the hedgerows—since crashing through exposed the thin underside of the tanks to enemy fire.

Shermans equipped with bulldozer blades could do the job, but there were few such equipped tanks in the theater. Using explosives to break a hole in the hedgerow gave away the attack and served as an aiming point for German weapons. At last, individual soldiers came up with welded devices on the front of Shermans that could crack through the thickest hedgerow. In a prodigious effort, 1st Army welding teams produced 500 hedgerow cutters between July 14 and 25. By late July 60 percent of the army’s Shermans were equipped with the device.

Bradley, stymied by fierce German defense of the hedgerows, conceived a new plan of attack, which he named Cobra. He decided to focus the breakout around St.-Lô, spearheaded by Lawton Collins’s 7th Corps. The key feature would be a massive air attack on the narrow front. When Collins broke through, the whole weight of 1st Army, now fifteen divisions, would be thrown into the assault.

Meanwhile Montgomery drew up plans for an offensive at Caen, code-named Goodwood, to support Cobra. Montgomery launched Goodwood on July 18, preceded by a massive air attack by 1,700 heavy and 400 medium bombers. At first the British attack went well. Tanks advanced against the stunned German defenders. But bomb craters slowed the armor, and the Germans pulled themselves together and launched a counterattack. It gained no ground, but inflicted heavy losses on the British. On July 20, Montgomery called off the attack, having moved six miles south of Caen, but having lost 4,000 men and 500 tanks.

Bradley’s Cobra plan was risky because aviators were not skilled in pinpoint strikes, and the operation called for saturation bombing of a rectangle three miles wide and one mile deep south of the east-west St.-Lô–Périers road. An error would bring bombs down on American troops.

Bradley did not want the aircraft to fly over American lines, and proposed that the planes approach on a course parallel to the St.-Lô–Périers road. On July 19 Bradley flew back to England to discuss the operation with top air commanders. They opposed a parallel approach, saying aircraft would be exposed longer to enemy antiaircraft fire and the approach would require hitting a one-mile-wide target, whereas a perpendicular approach would present a three-mile-wide target. But by the time he left, Bradley thought he had got their agreement. To minimize the chances of American troops being hit, Bradley withdrew them 1,500 yards north of the road.

Heavy rains caused postponement of Cobra until July 24. Cloud cover forced cancellation this day as well, but not before 400 bombers reached France and let go their bombs. To Bradley’s horror, the bombers approached perpendicular to the American lines, not parallel. Many bombs fell on American positions, killing 25 and wounding 131. When Bradley complained, the air force brass claimed they had never agreed to a parallel approach. And they told Bradley they would not mount a second attack except in the same direction.

Bradley, having no choice, agreed, and the air assault went in on July 25: 1,500 heavy bombers, 380 medium bombers, and 550 fighter-bombers dropped 4,000 tons of bombs and napalm. Once more “shorts” caused American casualties, 111 dead, 490 wounded.

Collins threw 7th Corps’s three divisions into the blasted terrain that the bombers had created. The Americans expected the Germans to be dazed and unable to fight. Instead, they met heavy resistance. Eisenhower, who had observed the bombings, flew back to England dejected, determined never again to use heavy bombers to support ground forces.

Despite the bitter resistance of a few Germans, the bombing had done great damage. Fritz Bayerlein, commanding Panzer Lehr Division, which received the brunt of the attack, wrote: “Units holding the front were almost completely wiped out.” Tanks were overturned, artillery shattered, infantry positions flattened, and all roads destroyed. By midday the landscape resembled the moon. “There was no hope of getting out any of our weapons,” Bayerlein wrote. “The shock effect was indescribable. Several of the men went mad and rushed dementedly around in the open until they were cut down by splinters.”

Martin Blumenson wrote in his official history that one-third of the German combat effectives were killed or wounded, only a dozen tanks or tank destroyers remained in operation, and a parachute regiment attached to Panzer Lehr virtually vanished.

The difficulty of Collins’s advance after the bombing was due to spirited response of the Germans, a matter of habit, and to the caution and hesitation of the Americans, accustomed to the slow-moving battle of the hedgerows.

But German opposition melted away. By the end of July 26 American armor had penetrated ten miles, and the next day went farther. “This thing has busted wide open,” Leland Hobbs, commander of the 30th Infantry Division, exulted.

Collins enlarged the rupture, and kept moving south. On his right, Middleton’s 8th Corps broke through, and Middleton cut loose his armor. Once Middleton turned the corner at Avranches and headed into Brittany, George Patton’s 3rd Army was to be activated. Meanwhile Bradley asked Patton to supervise 8th Corps. A Patton trademark appeared almost at once: two armored divisions pushed forward through the infantry, emerged at the head, and dashed rapidly to Avranches, 35 miles away. Eisenhower’s judgment of Patton was being manifested: “an extraordinary and ruthless driving power at critical moments.” The Germans retreated or surrendered.

The bocage had been bypassed. The German left flank had collapsed. Montgomery announced the only German hope was a staged withdrawal to the Seine River, and to disrupt it the Allies should swing their right flank “round toward Paris.” This seemed to be turning into the kind of war that suited most Americans—wide open, hell-for-leather, with the horizon as the destination. George Patton, just the sort of general to lead such a campaign, was coming onto the scene. But Patton had to obey Omar Bradley, who was not at all a damn-the-torpedoes type. And no one was able to guess how Adolf Hitler would react.

On August 1, Patton’s 3rd Army was formally activated. Bradley moved up to command the 12th Army Group, and Courtney Hodges took over command of 1st Army. Altogether, the Americans had twenty-one divisions, five armored, sixteen infantry, nearly 400,000 men. Overwhelming power now faced the battered and outnumbered Germans.

Originally, Patton’s army had been intended to clear Brittany. But the Germans had stripped this region of most troops, and Bradley told Patton to send only Middleton’s 8th Corps to secure it. Middleton blazed through Brittany but failed to achieve the primary objectives—the major ports. The Germans withdrew into them. By the time the Americans had seized them, suffering huge losses, the need had long since passed.

Patton was by far the most inventive, venturesome, and action-oriented general on the Allied side. Shortly after he took command of 3rd Army, he recognized that a gigantic victory might be in the offing. The Americans were well south of Normandy, and the way was open for a massive strike east to the region or “gap” between Orléans and Paris, then to Paris, and from Paris down the right bank of the Seine to the sea, cutting off all German forces in Normandy.

But Patton had no authority to order such an offensive, and Montgomery, still in charge of land operations, believed the Germans would build a temporary new defensive line running generally south from Caen, through Mayenne, to Laval, possibly as far south as Angers, near the junction of the Loire and Mayenne rivers. He told Bradley to move up to this expected line on the south. On the north he ordered the Canadian 1st Army under Henry Crerar to strike south from Caen eighteen miles to Falaise on August 8, with the aim of cutting off the Germans,

Bradley directed Patton—who had only a two-division corps (the 15th) under Wade Haislip—to build a sixty-mile front along the Mayenne and take the towns of Mayenne, Laval, and Angers.

Patton instructed Haislip to seize Mayenne and Laval. And, since he still hoped to strike for the Orléans-Paris gap, told Haislip to be prepared to continue to Le Mans, a major town forty-five miles east of the Mayenne River. Haislip, whose policy was to “push all personnel to the limit of human endurance,” captured Mayenne and Laval on August 5–6, and Patton got Bradley’s permission to drive on to Le Mans.

Adolf Hitler saw the Cobra breakout to Avranches in an entirely different fashion than either Montgomery or the German generals on the spot. They, too, favored withdrawal from Normandy, and from France.

Hitler had been fixed on holding all positions since Stalingrad. But in Normandy there was the additional concern that—if the Germans withdrew—the motorized Allied armies could swiftly outrun the Germans’ horse-drawn transport. Also, where could the Germans retreat to? The Seine’s meandering course offered no sound defensive line. The best line was the German West Wall along the frontier. But it had been neglected since 1940 and would require six to ten weeks to repair. Hitler ordered work to start at once, reasoning that the Germans should remain in Normandy at least till the West Wall was defensible. Finally convinced the Allies would not invade the Pas de Calais, he ordered forces there to Normandy.

Also, Hitler saw the possibility of a riposte. The German western flank now rested just east of the town of Mortain, twenty miles from Avranches, in the wooded highlands of “Norman Switzerland.” On August 1, he ordered Kluge to strike from Mortain to recapture Avranches. This would anchor the German line on the Cotentin coast, and divide Patton’s 3rd Army south of Avranches from Hodges’s 1st Army north of it.

Kluge assembled four weak panzer divisions. Three were to roll through Mortain and the Americans defending it, and drive as far as possible. Once they lost their momentum, the fourth division was to go to the front and strike for Avranches.

Ultra intercepts of German messages informed Bradley of the intended attack shortly before it struck. He already had nearly five divisions in the area, and alerted them to the attack.

The blow hit Mortain in the early minutes of August 7. The U.S. 30th Division had occupied the town only hours before. Key to Mortain was Hill 317 just to the east. While German infantry struck at the hill, seventy panzers went around it, drove through the town, and headed west. By midday they had advanced six miles. But Allied aircraft forced the panzers into the woods. Fighting continued, but the Germans had no chance to break through the iron ring of defenses. Meanwhile the 700 Americans on Hill 317 stood their ground, helped by artillery concentrations and RAF Hurricanes and Typhoon fighter-bombers equipped with rockets.

Hitler charged Kluge with poor judgment, haste, and carelessness, and ordered the attack to continue with a larger force. Kluge was to transfer three panzer divisions from the British-Canadian front to thrust into the deep flank of the American advance (Patton’s move toward Le Mans).

Kluge, who saw the situation far more clearly than Hitler, knew his attack had bogged down, and the best move was to retreat. He also saw something that terrified him: the German front now extended as a deep salient into the Allied line. Montgomery’s two armies (British 2nd, Canadian 1st) and Hodges’s 1st Army were on the north, while Patton’s 3rd Army was sweeping toward Le Mans on the south. If it continued through the Orléans-Paris gap and beyond, it could encircle all German forces west of the Seine.

But Hitler’s orders were unequivocal, and Kluge directed the three panzer divisions to pull out of the British-Canadian sector and head for Mortain during the night of August 7. At 11 P.M., Kluge learned of an immense aerial bombardment along the road from Caen to Falaise— heralding a major attack by the Canadian army. One of the three panzer divisions had already left the Falaise sector, but Kluge canceled orders for the other two. The Germans could not afford to lose Falaise.

The Canadian attack, made with two armored brigades, followed by infantry in armored personnel carriers (APCs), advanced three miles during the darkness, and by dawn August 8 had passed through the German lines. But here the advance came to a halt, though the way to Falaise lay open.

To get the attack started again, General Guy Simonds, 2nd Canadian Corps commander, brought forward his two armored divisions, one Canadian, the other Polish, and ordered them to advance on a narrow front to Falaise. The two divisions were inexperienced and were distracted by Allied bombers that dropped bombs short, killing 65, wounding 250. Meanwhile the Germans recovered, rebuilt a defensive line, and barred the way. The effort pushed forward a few miles, but collapsed on August 10—though the Allies had 600 tanks against 60 German tanks and tank destroyers. George Kitching, commander of the Canadian division (the 4th), blamed the Poles, who, he said, scarcely moved.

Adolf Hitler, having lost confidence in Kluge, was directing the battles from his headquarters in East Prussia. On August 9 he ordered tanks and antitank guns from the Pas de Calais to Falaise. This, he figured, would take care of the Canadian threat. Next he turned to the effort to capture Avranches. He wanted another attack, this time by six panzer divisions, while two other divisions were to bolster them.

German commanders called Hitler’s order “pure utopia.” Kluge could muster only 120 tanks at Mortain, half those in a single American armored division.

Because of Hitler’s insistence, the German army remained fixed from Mortain on the west to the front facing the Canadians on the east. Conditions were ripe for a colossal encirclement and caldron battle. Haislip’s troops were about to seize Le Mans. They then would be only seventy-five miles from the Paris-Orléans gap. Patton tried to convince Bradley to let Haislip go all out for the gap, and carry out his plan to liberate Paris and drive down the right bank of the Seine, surrounding all Germans west of the river. If successful—and there were few Germans to stop it—Patton’s plan would end Germany’s capacity to resist in the west in a matter of days.

But Bradley did not have the vision of Patton. And he was unwilling to take chances. He saw a lesser opportunity, with lesser potential gains. At Le Mans, Haislip was to turn north toward Alençon and Sées, and link up with the Canadians coming down through Falaise and Argentan— thereby cutting off the Germans to the west. This move might not destroy all the Germans in Normandy but it could dispose of many.

Haislip captured Le Mans on August 8 and prepared to move north. He had received two new divisions, a green American infantry outfit (80th) that was to guard the town, and the French 2nd Armored Division, whose commander, Jacques Leclerc, was primarily interested in liberating Paris. But he snapped up Patton’s offer to take part in the drive toward Argentan alongside the U.S. 5th Armored Division under Lunsford Oliver.

These two armored divisions, followed by two infantry divisions (79th and 90th), advanced halfway to Alençon on August 10, meeting virtually no resistance. On Haislip’s left, however, there was a wide gap with no American forces—since Bradley did not want to move troops into it while the Germans still threatened around Mortain. This void offered an opportunity for a German counterattack into Haislip’s flank.

Early on August 11, Kluge determined to pull back from Mortain and strike this flank. He had inflicted 4,000 casualties on the Americans, but had lost many men of his own and a hundred tanks. Hitler approved, and Kluge drew his troops away from Mortain.

Meanwhile Haislip reached the outskirts of Alençon on August 11 and designated Argentan, twenty-three miles north by road, as the next objective. Argentan was eight miles inside the British-Canadian sector, but that seemed no problem.

Early on August 12 Leclerc’s armored division captured Alençon, while Oliver’s 5th U.S. Armored Division pushed ahead to Sées, twelve miles along the road to Argentan. Ahead Argentan was defended only by a German bakery company, which was digging in at the southern edge of town.

Oliver’s American tanks could have rushed down the Alençon-Argentan highway and seized the town quickly, except that Leclerc, in defiance of orders, usurped the road for some of his own troops. When the Americans finally got to Argentan, it no longer was guarded by bakers but by three panzer divisions and at least seventy tanks, moved over by Kluge from Mortain.

Kluge’s intended strike against Haislip’s flank never came off because the Germans lost stocks of gasoline and other supplies near Alençon, but the panzers’ possession of Argentan left open an important east-west highway. If the Germans lost Falaise and Argentan, only a narrow thirteen-mile gap without good roads would remain.

Haislip informed Patton on the evening of August 12 that he intended to strike at Argentan the next morning. But he pointed out that the farther he advanced the more extended he became, with few troops guarding his flank. If he captured Argentan, he was certain to stir up a fierce German response. Should he go on or not?

Patton opted for audacity. In a letter to his wife, Patton quoted Napoleon: “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.” The game was worth the candle. After taking Argentan, Patton told Haislip, proceed to Falaise, make contact with the Canadians, and close the pocket.

But when Patton informed Bradley, he told Patton: “Nothing doing. You are not to go beyond Argentan.”

Bradley’s reasons were in part that Haislip’s corps was strung out on a forty-mile line, and that Lawton Collins’s 7th Corps, which he had ordered to shore up Haislip’s left, could not arrive for a couple days.

But Bradley’s principal aim was to avoid offending his Allies.

“Falaise was a long-sought British objective,” he wrote, “and, for them, a matter of immense prestige. If Patton’s patrols grabbed Falaise, it would be an arrogant slap in the face at a time when we clearly needed to build confidence in the Canadian army.”

Montgomery instructed his chief of staff, Francis de Guingand, to “tell Bradley they [Haislip’s corps] ought to go back.” De Guingand wrote after the war that if Montgomery had invited the Americans to cross the army group boundary, they would have closed the Germans in a trap. But Bradley and Eisenhower didn’t ask, either.

As Haislip reached the edge of Argentan, Germans reinforced the shoulders there and at Falaise, and nonessential elements began escaping through the gap. The field divisions were still in the pocket.

Montgomery ordered the Canadians to push on and take Falaise on August 14. But the effort got nowhere. To assist, he directed Dempsey’s British 2nd Army to attack at the same time from the northwest—a move Bradley and Eisenhower likened to squeezing a tube of toothpaste from the bottom with no cap on. The effect could only press the Germans out of the pocket, not hem them inside where they could be destroyed.

Meanwhile, Bradley planned a new turning movement to block the Germans who had already escaped. He ordered an advance by 3rd Army to the northeast—Haislip’s 15th Corps (cut to two divisions) to Dreux, fifty miles west of Paris; Walton Walker’s 20th Corps to Chartres, fifty miles southwest of Paris; and Gilbert R. Cook’s 12th Corps to Orléans, seventy miles south of Paris. The idea was to wheel around the supposedly retreating Germans. The operation got under way on August 14.

Bradley’s shifting of Patton’s entire army away from the pocket weakened the Argentan shoulder and made it easier for the Germans to keep the gap open. Bradley recognized his error on August 15, and he rushed to Patton’s headquarters to call off the wheeling movement. But it was too late. Patton’s three corps were almost at their destinations. Even so, on Bradley’s orders, Patton stopped at the three cities.

The next day, August 16, German panzers hit 90th Infantry Division, now guarding the Argentan shoulder, a severe blow, but the division— which had performed poorly so far—held. On the same day the Canadian army finally captured Falaise, despite heavy aerial bombardment by Allied planes that inflicted 500 casualties on the Canadians and Poles.

But there was still a thirteen-mile gap between Falaise and Argentan, and it was swarming with Germans trying to get out. Montgomery suggested a new place to close the gap: Chambois, eight miles northeast of Argentan, and thirteen miles southeast of Falaise. Montgomery ordered Crerar to turn the Canadians through Trun to Chambois. The only forces Bradley had were in a provisional corps he set up to guard Argentan—90th Division, Leclerc’s French armored division, and the untried 80th Infantry Division. Bradley called Leonard T. Gerow, from 1st Army, to command it.

The Falaise pocket now stretched east-west about forty miles, and was from eleven to fifteen miles wide. About fourteen divisions, at least 100,000 men, were inside. Roads were clogged, Allied aircraft struck at anything that moved, Allied artillery could reach any objective observers could point out. There was a desperate shortage of fuel, units were mixed up, communications erratic.

On the morning of August 15, Field Marshal von Kluge traveled toward the front. Four hours later he vanished. Search parties could not find him. No messages came in. Hitler was suspicious. Kluge had associated with some of the conspirators of the July 20 putsch, and the timing was incriminating. Just that day Americans and French (6th Army Group under Jacob L. Devers) had invaded the French Riviera on the Mediterranean (Operation Dragoon), and were moving quickly north against minuscule opposition. Hitler suspected Kluge was trying to surrender German forces in Normandy, or might be trying to negotiate a deal.

Around 10 P.M., Kluge turned up at the headquarters of Josef (Sepp) Dietrich of the 5th Panzer Army. Where had he been? He had spent the day in a ditch. An Allied plane had struck his auto and knocked out his radio. So many aircraft were about he had to remain where he was. This explanation, though truthful, did not allay Hitler’s suspicions.

At 2 A.M., August 16, Kluge sent a message to Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s operations chief, recommending evacuation at once. Only at 4:40 P.M. did Hitler authorize full withdrawal.

His decision stemmed from the invasion of southern France. Only skeleton German elements were now in this region, and were too weak even to smash French Resistance forces. Hitler decided to abandon southern France and Normandy. He hoped to mass forces in the Vosges Mountains west of the Rhine, and form a new line. The decision meant that 100,000 Germans around the Bay of Biscay in southwestern France had to start moving, mostly on foot, through the French interior toward Dijon. Harassed by Resistance groups and by Allied aircraft, many of these soldiers finally crossed the Loire and surrendered to the Americans.

Kluge sent out instructions for partial withdrawal. Starting that night, westernmost units pulled back to the Orne River (about ten miles west of Falaise). On the following night they were to cross to the eastern bank. Since the Germans had to move through the three-mile space between Le Bourg-St.-Léonard and Chambois, Kluge ordered the Americans driven off the ridge at Le Bourg, which gave observation over the route. After a back-and-forth struggle with 90th Division, the Germans seized the ridge on the morning of August 17.

Meanwhile Bradley met with Hodges and Patton to plan future movements. Bradley removed Patton’s halt order and directed the two American armies to establish a line from Argentan, through Chambois and Dreux to the Seine.

Hodges’s army was to seize Chambois and Trun and make contact with the British and Canadians. As divisions disengaged on the west with the retreat of the Germans, they were to swing around to the east between Argentan and Dreux. Meanwhile Patton’s army was to seize Mantes, thirty miles downstream from Paris, and prevent the Germans from escaping.

Patton wanted to implement his old idea of blocking the German retreat: a broad sweep by three corps down the Seine to the sea. Patton’s plan was by far the best proposed, and it would have eliminated the most capable and experienced German force in the west. Units still in the Pas de Calais, the Low Countries, and the south of France were less powerful altogether than the two German armies in Normandy. With these gone, the Allies could have rolled into Germany against feeble opposition.

But it was not to be. Martin Blumenson wrote: “Although the battle of Normandy remained unfinished, the two leading Allied commanders, Montgomery and Bradley, were already ignoring the main chance of ending the war. Prematurely, they looked ahead to a triumphal march to Germany.”

Since Gerow decided he couldn’t move on Chambois till August 18, Montgomery told Crerar it was essential to take Trun and go on four miles to Chambois. Both of Crerar’s armored divisions, Canadian and Polish, jumped off on the afternoon of August 17, but met bitter resistance. By day’s end they were still two miles from Trun.

Field Marshal Walther Model, who had achieved much success in Russia, arrived in Normandy early on August 17 to replace Kluge. That night the Germans in the pocket withdrew across the Orne. The operation went smoothly. During the early morning of August 18, forty-five cargo aircraft delivered gasoline to the forces in the pocket. The Germans planned to move the night of August 18 from the Orne across the Argentan-Falaise highway.

When Gerow’s advance on Chambois commenced, he asked little of the French 2nd Armored Division, only using its artillery to help 80th Division seize the town of Argentan. Leclerc had already loudly signified to anyone who would listen that he wanted to liberate Paris, little else. The 80th, in its first fight, made no progress. The 90th Division and the Canadians both got within a couple miles of Chambois against desperate German resistance to keep the exit open.

That night the Germans renewed their withdrawal. Allied artillery fire rained down, but most got away to high ground just east of the Argentan-Falaise highway. The German pocket now occupied an area six by seven miles. A bolt hole about three or four miles wide remained open.

At midnight August 18 Model took command of the theater. Kluge, returning to Germany by automobile and, afraid he had been implicated in the July 20 murder plot, swallowed poison and died. Meanwhile the Germans in the pocket strained all their efforts to get out.

At last at 7:20 P.M., August 19, a company of the 90th Division met a Polish detachment in the midst of the burning village of Chambois. The gap had finally been closed. But the barrier was porous, and the Germans continued to flow through for two more days. Most got out.

On August 20, 5th Armored Division from Haislip’s 15th Corps commenced a slow push through fog and rain from Mantes down the left or near bank of the Seine, assisted on the west by two divisions of 19th Corps. This was not Patton’s sweep to the sea, but a laborious process aimed at clearing the river of the enemy. The Americans hit solid resistance and made little progress.

The next day, Montgomery and RAF Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, in charge of Allied air support of the invasion, came to an astonishing conclusion: the Seine bridges had all been destroyed, the Germans were unable to cross, so the Allies didn’t need to make any more aerial attacks on the river—despite the fact that the Germans had been moving back and forth across the Seine throughout the Normandy campaign. Thus, as the Germans streamed toward the Seine crossings, they were not harassed by Allied aircraft. Virtually all the Germans got across the river—it was not impassable after all. Using back roads and traveling at night, most of the Germans reached the frontier and began preparing a new defensive line.

Meanwhile on August 20, George Patton, aggravated at Bradley and Montgomery for letting the Germans slip through their fingers, turned his sights eastward—toward the final liberation of France and the invasion of Germany. He ordered an immediate, open-throttled advance on Melun, Montereau, and Sens, all towns a few miles southeast of Paris, using 20th Corps under Walton Walker, and 12th Corps, now under Manton Eddy (Gilbert Cook had high blood pressure). He told Eddy to forget about his flanks and advance fifty miles a day.

Walker’s tanks got to Melun, Montereau, and Fontainebleau on the upper Seine on August 21, and kept going. Eddy liberated Sens and quickly moved on forty miles and captured Troyes. Everywhere the bridges were still intact, opposition nil.

In his diary, Patton wrote: “We have, at this time, the greatest chance to win the war ever presented. If they will let me move on with three corps, two up and one back, on the line of Metz-Nancy-Épinal, we can be in Germany in ten days…. It is such a sure thing that I fear these blind moles [Montgomery, Bradley] don’t see it.”

Actually, Bradley did accept Patton’s plan, on August 25, and told him he could go east toward Metz and Strasbourg. The problem was not Bradley but availability of gasoline.

With the Germans withdrawing from the lower Seine and Manton Eddy’s corps already eighty-five miles southeast of Paris at Troyes, the French capital was ripe for the picking. However important the liberation of the City of Light was to the world, it was virtually empty of German combat troops, and Bradley wanted to bypass it. But on August 19 the Resistance rose in Paris, and challenged the German commander, Dietrich von Choltitz, who had received orders from Hitler to defend the city to the end, then destroy it. Immense pressure developed to get Allied troops into the city, and Bradley succumbed, sending in Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division, followed by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. When Hitler learned that Allied troops were entering the capital, he asked his staff: “Brennt Paris?” Is Paris burning? Choltitz did not burn Paris but signed an armistice with the Resistance.

The movement of the Frenchmen to the city set off wild celebrations, and, as Bradley remembered it, “Leclerc’s men, nearly overwhelmed with wine and women, rolled and reeled into Paris on August 25.” Two days later, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Gerow met Charles de Gaulle at Paris police headquarters, where de Gaulle had already set up his base. Eisenhower allowed Leclerc’s division to remain in Paris to give de Gaulle a show of political strength, but when de Gaulle demanded a victory parade, Eisenhower resolved to make it clear that de Gaulle had received Paris by the force of Allied arms. He ordered the U.S. 28th Infantry Division to parade down the Champs-Elysées on August 29—and keep right on going eastward into action. Bradley remembered it a bit differently. He had refused to let Leclerc’s division take part, he wrote, because Leclerc’s men “had disappeared into the back alleys, brothels, and bistros.”

The senior Allied commanders had been talking about how to defeat Germany as fast as possible. Montgomery wanted both army groups to advance northeast in a “solid mass” of forty divisions toward Antwerp, Brussels, Aachen, and the Ruhr—with himself in command.

Bradley favored a twofold advance, Montgomery’s army group northward and his army group northeastward through Nancy and Metz toward the Saar industrial region and central Germany. This was better tank country than Montgomery’s route, which led over many rivers and canals. However, Montgomery’s route lay through the Pas de Calais, where the V-1s were being fired on London, and the rumor was that the V-2s were about to be launched from there. Much of Allied airpower was challenging the V-1s instead of striking at German synthetic oil production, which was a major factor in Hitler’s ability to continue the war. Also, Antwerp and Rotterdam, two great ports, were in this direction, and the Allies badly needed ship berths.

As a consequence, Eisenhower decided—over Patton’s bitter opposition—that Hodges’s 1st Army with nine divisions, plus a new airborne corps of three divisions under Matthew Ridgway, be allocated to Montgomery, giving him twenty-five divisions, leaving Patton with fifteen divisions to advance toward the Saar.

Divisions were not the whole issue. A severe shortage of supplies was developing, since few ports were open, and, as the armies rushed toward Germany, distances increased by the day. Eisenhower allocated the lion’s share to Montgomery. Hodges, for example, got 5,000 tons of supplies a day, Patton 2,000 tons.

Both the northern and the eastern thrusts commenced at once. By August 31 spearheads of Patton’s army crossed the Meuse River at Verdun, and the next day patrols pushed unopposed to the Moselle River near Metz, thirty-five miles farther east. They were barely thirty miles from the Saar on the German frontier, and fewer than a hundred miles from the Rhine River. But Patton’s main body had run out of gasoline, and did not move up to the Moselle till September 5. By that time the Germans had scraped together five weak divisions to hold the river line. Patton became stuck in an attack on the fortified city of Metz and nearby points, and got no farther.

Meantime the spearhead of Montgomery’s British 2nd Army swept into Brussels on September 3, and the next day another armored force raced on to Antwerp and captured the docks undamaged. Antwerp also was fewer than a hundred miles from the Rhine and entry into the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland.

At this moment, the Germans had nothing to oppose Montgomery. As Basil H. Liddell Hart wrote: “Rarely in any war has there been such an opportunity.” But here Montgomery failed. His spearhead paused to “refit, refuel, and rest,” resumed its advance on September 7, but pushed only eighteen miles farther, to the Meuse-Escaut Canal, where the desperate defense of a few German parachute troops halted it.

By mid-September the Germans had thickened their defenses all along the front but were not strong anywhere. Montgomery, instead of intensifying a direct drive eastward through Belgium and southern Holland, now mounted a huge fourteen-division thrust northward (Operation Market-Garden) on September 17 to get over the Rhine at Arnhem, Holland, using the recently formed 1st Allied Airborne Army to clear the path. His aim, not approved by Eisenhower, was an end run around the Ruhr and a direct strike at Berlin.

But the massive rivers running through Holland imposed severe barriers, and British tanks had to follow a single causeway from Antwerp to Arnhem. The Germans checked the thrust before it reached its goal. A large part of the British 1st Airborne Division dropped at Arnhem—“a bridge too far” for the rest of the Allies to reach, as described in Cornelius Ryan’s book of the same name. Here the British paras were cut off and forced to surrender, a struggle that became legendary for its heroism.

The failure of both Montgomery and Patton to breach the West Wall and get into the heart of Germany in September 1944 has been the center of a controversy that has raged ever since. Both sides claimed they could have won the war if only the other had not got the necessary gasoline.

Patton, when his fuel supplies were petering out, rushed into Bradley’s headquarters “bellowing like a bull” and roared: “To hell with Hodges and Monty. We’ll win your goddam war if you’ll keep 3rd Army moving.” Montgomery opposed any diversion of supplies to Patton, and his complaints became stronger after his thrust at Arnhem miscarried.

The truth is messier. German General Siegfried Westphal, who took over as chief of staff for the western front on September 5, wrote that the entire German line “was so full of gaps that it did not deserve this name. Until the middle of October, the enemy could have broken through at any point he liked with ease, and would then have been able to cross the Rhine and thrust deep into Germany almost unhindered.”

A number of mistakes occurred. Patton attacked Metz and Nancy, when they should have been bypassed, and his forces should have swung north to Luxembourg and Bitburg, where there were few Germans. This, General Günther Blumentritt reported, would have resulted in the collapse of German forces on the front.

Montgomery’s greatest single failure was his pause from September 4 to 7 after reaching Brussels and Antwerp, giving German paratroopers just enough time to organize a defense. The fault, wrote John North, official historian of the 21st Army Group, was a “war-is-won” attitude. Little sense of urgency prevailed among commanders during a vital two-week period in mid-September, and among the troops there was a strong inclination to go slow and avoid being killed.

Montgomery’s lack of drive at this critical point illustrates that the best chance to finish the war quickly was lost when Patton’s gasoline was shut off at the end of August, and he was a hundred miles closer to the Rhine than the British. He, far more than Montgomery, was capable of exploiting opportunity. Yet, as Westphal pointed out, a breakthrough almost anywhere still could have succeeded till mid-October, and neither Patton, Bradley, nor Montgomery saw it.

Meanwhile on the eastern front, the Germans had experienced nothing but disaster. By January 1944, the Red Army had twice the men and tanks as the German army. The only possibility for Germany to avoid total defeat was immediate withdrawal to the 1941 frontier and construction of a deep mine-strewn defensive line studded with antitank guns, advocated by Erwin Rommel. Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein recommended a similar approach, but Adolf Hitler rejected any retreat not actually forced on him by the Red Army, and on March 30 ousted Manstein. Consequently, throughout 1944, German forces in the east conducted one pointless defensive stand and one retreat after another.

By the end of the year, the Soviets were on the Vistula River opposite Warsaw, had surrounded Budapest, driven the Germans out of southeastern Europe and all but a small part of the Baltic states, and forced Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary out of the war. The Germans had lost a million men. As 1945 began, the Soviets were poised for the final assault on the Third Reich.