Breakout: Cobra, Mortain, Falaise and Paris

Crowds line the Champs-Élysées to see Free French tanks and half-tracks on 26 August 1944, the day after the German garrison of Paris surrendered. U.S. government photograph, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

D-Day and Normandy · Chapter 8 of 9

Breakout: Cobra, Mortain, Falaise and Paris

In thirty days the Allies broke the German line west of Saint-Lô, turned back the counterattack at Mortain, trapped two German armies between Falaise and Argentan and reached Paris, though tens of thousands of Germans escaped through the gap.

25 July – 25 August 1944Saint-Lô · Avranches · Mortain · Falaise · Chambois · Hill 262 · Paris~25 min read

On the morning of 25 July 1944 the first of more than 1,500 American heavy bombers began unloading over a narrow strip of Norman farmland south of the road from Périers to Saint-Lô. Over the next hours, by the count in the U.S. Army’s official history, the B-17s and B-24s of the Eighth Air Force dropped more than 3,300 tons of bombs, medium bombers another 650 tons and fighter-bombers some 200 tons and a quantity of napalm. The German division underneath, Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr, had already been badly hurt by a botched first attempt the day before. The second bombardment smashed its forward positions, and on the morning of 26 July American armor began to move through the hole. Operation Cobra, the plan Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley had built to end seven weeks of hedgerow attrition, had begun.

It began with a disaster of its own. Bombs fell short on both days into the American lines, killing more than 130 American soldiers and wounding over 600, and among the dead on 25 July was Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, the commander of Army Ground Forces and the officer responsible for organizing and training the Army’s ground combat divisions. He was the highest-ranking American soldier killed in the Normandy campaign.

What followed over the next thirty days was the most dramatic reversal of the war in the West. The American breakthrough turned into a breakout at Avranches on 30 and 31 July; Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr.’s Third Army poured through a single road and bridge into Brittany and then turned east; Hitler ordered a counterattack at Mortain that ran into the 30th Infantry Division and Allied fighter-bombers; and while the Canadians and Poles fought south toward Falaise in Operations Totalize and Tractable, the Americans swung north toward Argentan. Between them lay most of two German armies. The neck of the resulting pocket, between Trun, Saint-Lambert-sur-Dives and Chambois, was finally closed on 21 August after the 1st Polish Armoured Division held a ridge the Poles called the Maczuga, the Mace, against Germans trying to break out from inside and break in from outside. Four days later, French tanks of the 2e Division Blindée were in Paris.

This chapter follows that sequence, from the Cobra bombing to the surrender of the German garrison of Paris on 25 August. It relies chiefly on the two official histories that cover it in most detail: Martin Blumenson’s Breakout and Pursuit (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1961) and C. P. Stacey’s The Victory Campaign (the Canadian official history, 1960). Where those histories, the Polish accounts and later historians disagree, especially over how many Germans died, surrendered or escaped in the Falaise pocket, the disagreement is set out rather than smoothed over. The chapter before this one, The Battle of the Hedgerows, carries the story up to the fall of Saint-Lô on 18–19 July.

The Breakthrough Idea

By the middle of July 1944 the Allied armies in Normandy were well behind the pre-invasion timetable, and the hedgerow fighting had produced heavy infantry losses. The capture of Saint-Lô on 18–19 July by the 29th and 35th Divisions gave Bradley the start line he wanted, a firm hold on the road from Saint-Lô west to Périers.

Bradley’s idea, which Blumenson traces in a chapter titled “The Breakthrough Idea,” was to stop attacking all along the front and instead concentrate. A short, intense attack on a narrow front, preceded by an air bombardment heavy enough to paralyze the defenders, would be made by Major General J. Lawton Collins’s VII Corps. Three infantry divisions, the 9th, 4th and 30th, were to break into the German position just south of the Périers–Saint-Lô highway. Behind them waited two armored divisions, the 2d and 3d, and the motorized 1st Infantry Division, which would drive through the gap toward Marigny and Saint-Gilles and then turn southwest toward Coutances, trapping the German forces facing VIII Corps on the coast.

Montgomery’s Operation Goodwood, east of Caen on 18–20 July, had drawn the strongest German armored formations toward the British sector, and the German command continued to regard the Caen front as the most dangerous. Opposite VII Corps stood the weakened Panzer Lehr Division, with remnants of other formations and parachute troops to the west. The weather delayed Cobra for days. It was finally set for 24 July, and on that day it went wrong.

With clouds over the target, the air commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, postponed the attack shortly before the bombers arrived. The recall did not reach everyone. Of the fighter-bomber groups already airborne, three bombed. Of roughly 1,600 Eighth Air Force heavy bombers launched, the first formation found no attack made, the second had only 35 aircraft release their loads, and more than 300 bombers of the third dropped about 550 tons of high explosive and 135 tons of fragmentation bombs. Some of those bombs landed on the 30th Division. Blumenson gives the losses as 25 killed and 131 wounded.

One feature of the bombing became a lasting dispute. Bradley had wanted the heavy bombers to fly parallel to the road, so that early releases would fall on the Germans; the air planners, worried about funneling 1,500 aircraft down a narrow corridor under antiaircraft fire, sent them in perpendicular to it. Bradley later insisted he had understood the approach would be parallel; the air commanders maintained it had been settled otherwise. Both bombings used the perpendicular approach.

25 July: The Bombs on the Périers–Saint-Lô Road

The second attempt went ahead on the morning of 25 July in better weather. Blumenson’s totals are the standard ones. More than 1,500 B-17s and B-24s dropped more than 3,300 tons of bombs; more than 380 medium bombers dropped over 650 tons of high explosive and fragmentation bombs; over 550 fighter-bombers dropped more than 200 tons of bombs and napalm. The American infantry had pulled back from the road to give a safety margin, but dust and smoke from the first bombs drifted north over the American positions, and the bombardiers who came later aimed at the smoke.

Short bombing on 25 July killed 111 Americans and wounded 490, according to Blumenson, who counts nearly 900 American casualties from the two days of bombing in all. The 30th Division again suffered most, along with units of the 9th Division. Lieutenant General McNair, who had come forward to watch the attack, was killed in a forward position. McNair had been in Britain as the nominal commander of the First U.S. Army Group, the imaginary army of the Fortitude deception (see Chapter 1), a role that had been filled by Patton until Patton went to Normandy to take over Third Army. McNair’s death was kept quiet so as not to compromise the deception, and he was buried with little ceremony.

The bombing had a terrible effect on Panzer Lehr. Blumenson estimates that perhaps a third of the combat effectives on the division’s main line and immediate reserve line were killed or wounded on 25 July, and that perhaps only a dozen of its tanks and tank destroyers remained operational. It had already lost about 350 men and perhaps 10 armored vehicles on 24 July. Yet the American infantry that went forward at 1100 found that the defense had not collapsed. Small groups of Germans fought from craters and wrecked positions, and the three assault divisions gained little more than a mile or two on 25 July. In Blumenson’s words, Panzer Lehr “had flinched under the weight of the bombardment, but it had not given way.”

What Collins noticed that afternoon was not strength but the absence of a coordinated defense. There were no large counterattacks and no organized second line. He decided, before he could be sure the breach was complete, to commit his armor the following morning. It was the key decision of the operation. On 26 July the 2d Armored Division and the 1st Infantry Division, with a combat command of the 3d Armored, moved south and southwest, and by the evening of 27 July Marigny and Saint-Gilles were in American hands and the German left wing was coming apart.

Breakthrough Becomes Breakout

On 28 July Bradley widened the attack. Major General Troy H. Middleton’s VIII Corps on the coast, which had been pushing south against German forces now threatened from the flank, was given two armored divisions, the 4th and the 6th, to lead its advance. Combat Command B of the 4th Armored Division, under Brigadier General Holmes E. Dager, cleared Coutances, and by the end of 28 July VIII Corps held the town.

Major General John S. Wood’s 4th Armored Division then drove south along the coast. Troops of Combat Command B entered Avranches early on the evening of 30 July, at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, where the roads into Brittany and the interior of France converge. On the late afternoon of 31 July a task force of Combat Command A crossed the bridge over the Sélune at Pontaubault, a few miles farther south, and found it intact. Prisoners came in by the thousand. Blumenson records about 1,200 taken on 30 July and more than 4,000 by the 4th and 6th Armored Divisions on 31 July, with about 3,000 more processed by the 79th and 8th Infantry Divisions. The German command, in a phrase Blumenson quotes from its records, found its forces “completely disorganized with no sign of co-ordinated resistance.”

The breakthrough Bradley had planned as a limited operation had become, in Blumenson’s chapter title, a breakout. The German Seventh Army’s left wing had been destroyed or scattered, and Field Marshal von Kluge, who had taken over Army Group B as well as OB West after Rommel was wounded on 17 July, had nothing to plug the gap at Avranches. On 1 August Third Army became operational under Patton, with Bradley moving up to the new 12th Army Group and Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges taking over First Army.

Patton Through the Bottleneck

For several days every unit going south had to pass through Avranches and over the Pontaubault bridge, a single corridor a few miles wide, with the Germans still holding ground to the east around Mortain. Patton’s staff fed divisions through the bottleneck almost without regard to normal march order; the figure most often cited is seven divisions in about seventy-two hours.

The pre-invasion plan had given Brittany and its ports a high priority, and Patton’s first move followed it. Middleton’s VIII Corps sent the 4th Armored Division toward Rennes and the 6th Armored Division on a dash of about 200 miles toward Brest. Brest was strongly held and did not fall until 19 September, its port wrecked; Lorient and Saint-Nazaire were contained and stayed in German hands until the end of the war.

The decision that mattered more was taken in the first days of August. With German resistance in the south almost gone, Bradley and Montgomery agreed to leave a minimum force in Brittany and turn the bulk of Third Army east toward the Seine and Paris. Major General Wade H. Haislip’s XV Corps moved on Laval and Le Mans, which fell on 8 August, while Major General Walton H. Walker’s XX Corps covered its southern flank along the Loire.

Lüttich: The Counterattack at Mortain

Kluge and his commanders wanted to withdraw. Hitler wanted to attack. On 2 August he ordered a counterattack westward from the Mortain area to Avranches and the sea, to cut the corridor through which Patton’s army was being supplied and to restore the front. The operation was code-named Lüttich (the German name for Liège). Kluge assembled what armor he could pull out of the line: the 2d Panzer Division, the 116th Panzer Division, the 2d SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” and part of the 1st SS Panzer Division “Leibstandarte,” with the remnants of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division. Blumenson gives 120 to 190 tanks as the number concentrated for the attack, a far smaller force than Hitler had imagined.

Hausser’s Seventh Army set H-Hour for 2200 on 6 August but delayed the jump-off to midnight, and the attack began shortly after midnight on 7 August without an artillery preparation. The 2d SS Panzer Division attacked on both sides of Mortain, the 2d Panzer Division made the main effort in the center, and the 116th Panzer Division on the right flank did not attack on time. The 1st SS Panzer Division was to exploit. On 7 August, after the attack was under way, Hitler ordered it pressed, in Blumenson’s translation, “daringly and recklessly to the sea,” and committed the II SS Panzer Corps with the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions to it.

The main weight fell on Major General Leland S. Hobbs’s 30th Infantry Division, which had relieved the 1st Division around Mortain only the day before, and which had been one of the divisions hit by the Cobra short bombing. The Germans took Mortain and overran forward positions. One battalion of the 117th Infantry lost 350 men on 7 August; the division as a whole lost more than 600.

East of the town the 2d Battalion of the 120th Infantry, reinforced by a company of the 3d Battalion, held the high ground that Blumenson calls Hill 317 (it is usually called Hill 314 in the division’s own accounts and in most later histories). Surrounded, with artillery observers who could see the German approach routes for miles, the battalion directed American artillery onto the German columns throughout the battle. It was supplied in part by air drops and by artillery shells packed with medical supplies, and held out until the 35th Division drove the Germans from the southwestern outskirts of Mortain. Accounts usually give the relief as 12 August, after about six days of encirclement.

The morning fog of 7 August lifted before noon, and Allied aircraft found the German columns on the roads. Blumenson records that ten squadrons of Typhoons of the RAF’s 2d Tactical Air Force flew 294 sorties over the Mortain area that day, firing rockets into the armored columns, while American fighters engaged the German fighter units that tried to come up from the Paris area. In his words, “not a single German plane reached Mortain that day.” Of the roughly 70 tanks estimated to have made the original penetration, only 30 were judged operational at the close of 7 August.

Hitler insisted the attack be renewed, and the German armor stayed around Mortain for several more days, committed farther west and deeper into the developing trap just as Patton’s XV Corps was moving north from Le Mans behind it. Bradley saw the opportunity on 8 August, and with Eisenhower’s support and Montgomery’s agreement the Allied plan changed from a wide sweep to the Seine to a shorter envelopment: the Americans would swing north toward Argentan and the Canadians drive south to Falaise.

Totalize and Tractable: The Canadians and Poles on the Falaise Road

The northern jaw of the trap was Lieutenant General H. D. G. Crerar’s First Canadian Army, which had taken over the front south of Caen. Its spearhead was Lieutenant General Guy Simonds’s II Canadian Corps, which included the 2nd and 3rd Canadian Infantry Divisions, the 4th Canadian Armoured Division, the British 51st (Highland) Division and the newly arrived 1st Polish Armoured Division. The road from Caen to Falaise ran south across open, rising country, with German defenses arranged in depth along it, including elements of the 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend” (see Chapter 6 and the 12th SS record page).

Simonds’s plan for Operation Totalize was unusual. Stacey describes three phases: a night attack by two infantry divisions and two armored brigades, without a preliminary artillery bombardment that would warn the defenders; a second phase on 8 August by the 4th Canadian and 1st Polish Armoured Divisions behind a heavy daylight air attack; and exploitation toward the high ground dominating Falaise. To carry the infantry forward with the tanks at night, Simonds had self-propelled Priest guns stripped of their guns and converted into armored personnel carriers. A 250-strong workshop detachment had converted 76 of these “Kangaroos” by the morning of 6 August, and Stacey calls them the first such vehicles to appear on a battlefield.

H-Hour for the first phase was 2300 on 7 August. RAF Bomber Command sent 1,020 bombers, which dropped 3,462 tons on the flanks of the attack corridor; no bombs fell among Allied troops, and ten aircraft were lost. The armored columns, steering by radio beams, tracer and searchlights reflected off the clouds, crossed the start line at 2330, and by dawn had broken through the first German line. The second phase was less fortunate. On the afternoon of 8 August the Eighth Air Force sent 678 bombers, of which 492 attacked, and two twelve-plane groups made errors; bombs fell on the Polish division’s assembly area near Cormelles and on the approach routes of the 3rd Canadian Division. Stacey estimates about 65 killed and 250 wounded, including Polish losses. Major General R. F. L. Keller of the 3rd Division was among the wounded.

The two inexperienced armored divisions, on a narrow frontage and facing the remnants of the 12th SS, advanced cautiously on 8 August. On 9 August a force of the British Columbia Regiment and two companies of the Algonquin Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel D. G. Worthington, ordered to seize Point 195, lost its way in the dark, ended up on the wrong side of the Falaise road east of Estrées, and was destroyed by German armor during the day. Worthington was killed. Stacey gives the regiment’s tank losses as 47, noting that other sources give lower figures. An attack on Quesnay Wood on the night of 10 August failed, and on 11 August Simonds cancelled further attacks, about nine miles from the start line and still short of Falaise.

The next attack, Operation Tractable, went in at midday on 14 August. Instead of a night attack it was made in daylight under a thick smoke screen, with columns of tanks and Kangaroos moving across the valley of the Laison. The columns moved off at 1142. Later that afternoon RAF Bomber Command again attacked targets on the flanks, and again some of the bombs fell short. Stacey’s figures are precise: 77 aircraft bombed short, 44 of them from No. 6 (R.C.A.F.) Bomber Group, and the return of 15 August showed 65 killed, 241 wounded and 91 missing, many of the missing certainly dead. The Poles reported 42 killed and 51 missing by 15 August.

Falaise itself, the birthplace of William the Conqueror, was a ruin by the time the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division fought into it. The attack on the town by Brigadier H. A. Young’s 6th Brigade went in at 1500 on 16 August; the South Saskatchewan Regiment reached the railway east of the town by the morning of 17 August; and the last resistance, by a small group of 12th SS soldiers in the École Supérieure, ended about 0200 on 18 August. By then, however, attention had shifted east, to the gap between Falaise and Argentan through which the German armies were trying to escape.

The Halt at Argentan

Haislip’s XV Corps, with the 5th Armored Division, the French 2e Division Blindée and the 79th and 90th Infantry Divisions, had turned north from Le Mans on 10 August, taken Alençon and reached the area of Argentan by 12 August. Argentan lay just south of the boundary between Bradley’s 12th Army Group and Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, and the Canadians were still well north of Falaise. Between the two jaws was a gap of roughly fifteen to twenty miles.

Early on 13 August Haislip received an order from Patton to push on slowly toward Falaise. Early that afternoon, Blumenson writes, the XV Corps attack “came to an abrupt and surprising halt.” Bradley had stopped any further movement north. Patton told Haislip not to go beyond Argentan and to recall any elements near Falaise or north of Argentan.

Bradley’s own explanation, given after the war and quoted by Blumenson, rested on several points. He feared that a head-on meeting between American and Canadian forces converging from opposite directions could become a dangerous and uncontrollable maneuver, with the risk of the two Allied armies firing on each other. He thought XV Corps, already exposed on both flanks and especially on its left, could not hold a thin line across the escape route against Germans fleeing east. And he believed, wrongly, that many of the German divisions had already escaped. His summary of the choice became famous.

“a solid shoulder at Argentan to a broken neck at Falaise.”

— Omar N. Bradley, on why he halted XV Corps on 13 August 1944 (A Soldier’s Story, 1951, as quoted in Blumenson, Breakout and Pursuit, p. 507)

Blumenson weighs the decision carefully. Argentan lay across the army group boundary, and Montgomery, as the ground force commander, would have had to consent to a further American advance; Bradley did not ask, and Montgomery did not offer. Blumenson lists five considerations behind the halt: Montgomery’s apparent unwillingness to move the boundary, doubt about whether the Americans could advance farther, the exposed position of the corps, faulty intelligence that most of the Germans had gone, and the expectation that the Canadian attack would soon reach Falaise. Blumenson points out that on 13 August the Germans were not yet streaming east, so a thin American line north of Argentan might have faced the full weight of the retreating panzer divisions. Eisenhower did not intervene, though he later suggested that closing the gap might have produced a complete battle of annihilation.

Closing the Gap: Trun, Saint-Lambert and Chambois

Inside the pocket the German command had at last been allowed to retreat. On 13 August Generaloberst Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, commanding Fifth Panzer Army, warned that his army and Seventh Army had to withdraw immediately or be written off, and Hitler authorized a withdrawal on 16 August. Kluge had been out of contact with his headquarters for much of 15 August, trapped in the pocket under air attack, and Hitler, who suspected him of trying to negotiate with the Allies, replaced him with Field Marshal Walter Model on 17 August. Kluge took poison on his way back to Germany on 19 August. The German forces streamed east by night along the few roads and tracks that crossed the little River Dives between Trun and Chambois.

On 16 August, after the German counterattack at Le Bourg-Saint-Léonard showed how much remained inside the pocket, Montgomery telephoned Bradley to propose that the two army groups meet near Trun and Chambois. The American force at Argentan, reorganized under Major General Leonard T. Gerow’s V Corps headquarters after a brief period as a provisional corps under Major General Hugh J. Gaffey, attacked northeast toward Chambois on 18 August. From the north, the 4th Canadian Armoured Division drove for Trun and the 1st Polish Armoured Division swung wide to the east, toward Chambois and the high ground of Mont-Ormel beyond it.

At Saint-Lambert-sur-Dives, midway between Trun and Chambois, a small Canadian force of the South Alberta Regiment with infantry of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada under Major David V. Currie fought its way into the village from the morning of 19 August. It took six hours to get halfway through it, and the force held on there for three days while German columns tried to force their way across the Dives bridge and the fords. Currie was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Chambois was taken on the evening of 19 August. Blumenson’s account is that Company G of the 359th Infantry, 90th Division, entered the town from the southwest and met a Polish armored detachment that had come in from the northeast. The 359th’s report, quoted by Stacey, puts the clearing of Chambois by its 2d Battalion at 2013 and the meeting with “Canadian” elements, in fact Poles, about 2030. Both the Poles and the Americans claim the town. Blumenson calls the closing of the pocket “of the most tenuous sort”: Trun and Chambois were in Allied hands, but the line of the Dives between them was held only by outposts and patrols, and on the night of 19–20 August the Germans made their great effort to break out.

That night General der Fallschirmtruppen Eugen Meindl’s II Parachute Corps left its start line at La Londe at 2230 and reached the vicinity of Hill 262 by dawn. The XLVII Panzer Corps broke out in the Saint-Lambert–Chambois area. From outside the pocket, the II SS Panzer Corps attacked back toward Trun and Chambois to hold the door open. Blumenson considers its contribution less decisive than Army Group B believed at the time, but it fell on the one Allied formation that stood squarely in the way: the Poles on the ridge at Mont-Ormel.

The Mace: The Poles on Hill 262

The 1st Polish Armoured Division had been formed in Scotland in 1942 from Polish soldiers who had escaped through Romania, Hungary and France after the defeats of 1939 and 1940. It came to Normandy at the end of July, entered battle in Totalize on 8 August, and suffered from the short bombing that day and again in Tractable. On 18 August it was ordered to swing southeast to Chambois and seize the high ground of Mont-Ormel, a ridge rising to 262 meters at its northern summit and overlooking the Chambois–Vimoutiers road along which the Germans were escaping. Looking at the contours of the ridge on his map, Maczek compared its shape to a mace, and the Poles called it the Maczuga.

Two Polish battlegroups reached the ridge on 19 August. Battlegroup Zgorzelski, with the 1st Armoured Regiment and the 9th Infantry Battalion, attacked shortly after noon and took the northern summit; Battlegroup Koszutski, with the 2nd Armoured Regiment and the 8th Infantry Battalion, had lost its way after its French guide disappeared and arrived later in the afternoon. That day Polish tanks destroyed a long German column on the Chambois–Vimoutiers road. By the night of 19–20 August, according to Blumenson, about 1,500 Polish infantry and 80 tanks were on and around the hill, with some 20 antitank guns.

The Polish position on Hill 262 sat directly across the German escape route and was itself cut off from the rest of First Canadian Army. Hausser, commanding Seventh Army, ordered it eliminated. Through 20 August the Poles were attacked by Germans breaking out from the west, including Meindl’s paratroopers and remnants of panzer divisions, and from the east by the 2d SS Panzer Division, which attacked the perimeter at about 1500. The Poles were short of fuel, ammunition and medical supplies; the wounded could not be evacuated; and German prisoners, about 800 of them by the night of 20–21 August according to HistoryNet’s account, had to be held inside the perimeter.

A further German attack around 1100 on 21 August failed. Shortly after noon a Polish patrol met the Canadian vanguard, and the Canadian Grenadier Guards of the 4th Canadian Armoured Division reached the ridge about 1300, after more than five hours of fighting. By 1400 the first supply column had arrived. That evening, with Canadian tanks linked up with the Poles at Coudehard, the gap was regarded as closed. Stacey dates the final closing of the Gap to that firm contact with the Poles on the afternoon of 21 August. Afterward Canadian engineers put up a sign on the hill reading “A Polish Battlefield.”

The casualty figures for the Polish stand vary with what they cover. Blumenson says the Poles on the hill lost about 350 men and had 11 tanks damaged or destroyed, while capturing about 1,000 Germans; Reynolds and McGilvray, as summarized in the secondary literature, give 351 killed and wounded and 11 tanks. Terry Copp, quoting the division’s operational report, gives 1,441 casualties, including 466 killed, for the whole pocket-closing operation, not only the ridge. Another frequently repeated figure, 325 killed, 1,002 wounded and 114 missing, attributed to Roman Jarymowycz, also covers the division’s wider August fighting. Estimates of German losses at Hill 262 range from about 500 dead and 1,000 captured (McGilvray) upward. A monument on the hill was unveiled in 1965 for the twentieth anniversary, and the Mémorial de Montormel museum opened on the site in 1994.

The Corridor of Death

The stretch of country between Saint-Lambert, Chambois and Mont-Ormel became known as the Corridor of Death. For several days it was swept by Allied artillery from the ridges on both sides, by fighter-bombers whenever the weather allowed, and by the fire of the Canadian, Polish and American forces holding the edges of the gap. Columns of vehicles and horse-drawn wagons (the German infantry divisions still depended heavily on horses) were caught on the narrow roads and in the sunken lanes near the Dives.

British operational research teams went over the area after the battle, and their counts, which Stacey reproduces, are the most careful figures available. In the area of the Gap itself they counted 187 tanks and self-propelled guns, 157 lightly armored vehicles, 1,778 trucks, 669 cars and 252 guns, a total of 3,043 guns and vehicles. A separate, admittedly incomplete count in the wider pocket found another 1,270 vehicles, including 90 tanks, 31 self-propelled guns and 60 other guns.

The human cost inside the pocket was terrible, though the exact number of German dead has never been established. Eisenhower, who went through the area soon after the fighting, wrote in his memoir Crusade in Europe (1948) that the battlefield was one of the greatest killing grounds of the war, describing roads, fields and lanes so choked with the dead that one could walk a long way stepping on nothing else. An observer quoted by Stacey saw hundreds of dead lying almost touching each other near Saint-Lambert on 22 August, and the investigators reported that the smell of dead horses was so overpowering that the worst areas had to be crossed quickly. The dead also included French civilians caught in their farms and villages, a subject treated in Chapter 9.

How many Germans got away is the most disputed figure of the campaign. Army Group B estimated on 20 August that “approximately from 40 to 50 percent” of the encircled forces had escaped, a figure Blumenson calls optimistic. Blumenson himself says later estimates of those who escaped ranged from 20,000 to 40,000 men, of whom combat troops were a much smaller share; about 50,000 were captured, roughly half by the Americans and half by the British and Canadians, and about 10,000 dead were found. Six of seven armored divisions that escaped mustered, by German count, no more than 2,000 men, 62 tanks and 26 artillery pieces among them. Later historians have moved the figures in both directions, as the table and chart below show.

Dragoon and the Drive to the Seine

While the Falaise pocket was being closed, a second Allied invasion of France took place. On 15 August, in Operation Dragoon, the U.S. Seventh Army under Lieutenant General Alexander M. Patch landed on the coast of Provence between Toulon and Cannes, followed by French divisions under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. German resistance in the south was thin, Toulon and Marseille were in French hands by the end of the month, and Marseille became one of the main Allied supply ports for the rest of the war. The Italian background is told in the site’s Salerno and Sicily collections.

In the north, the wider envelopment that Bradley had begun on 14 August moved fast. Part of XV Corps reached the Seine at Mantes-Gassicourt, where elements of the 79th Division crossed on 19–20 August, while the British and Canadians followed the retreating Germans to the river below Rouen. The Germans who had escaped the pocket crossed the Seine on ferries, pontoon bridges and boats under air attack, losing much of what equipment they had brought out.

Paris, 19–25 August

The Allied plan did not call for an early liberation of Paris. Eisenhower wanted to bypass the city, both to avoid street fighting and because feeding its population would have cost supplies needed for the pursuit. The Parisians forced the issue. On 19 August, after the city’s police had gone on strike, groups of the French Forces of the Interior seized police stations, town halls, ministries, newspaper offices and the Hôtel de Ville. Blumenson describes the early stages as the work of small local groups without central direction. That night the Swedish consul general, Raoul Nordling, helped arrange a truce between the German commander, General der Infanterie Dietrich von Choltitz, and the Resistance; meant at first to last a few hours, it was extended indefinitely, though it was not observed everywhere.

Hitler’s orders were explicit. In Blumenson’s translation, his order stated that “Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy except as a field of ruins.” Choltitz had bridges and buildings prepared for demolition but did not carry out the destruction; his later claim, shared by Speidel, to have deliberately hampered the order remains disputed. The story that Hitler asked “Is Paris burning?” (Brennt Paris?) is recorded by Blumenson as part of the German command’s reaction once Allied troops were entering the city.

General Charles de Gaulle and Leclerc had pressed for months for French troops to liberate the capital. On 22 August, after conferring with Bradley, Eisenhower decided to send the 2e DB to Paris at once, supported by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division under V Corps. Leclerc’s attack began at dawn on 24 August in heavy rain. Colonel Paul de Langlade’s combat command reached Sèvres, found the bridge intact and established a bridgehead across the Seine; Colonel Pierre Billotte’s, advancing from Arpajon, had costly fighting and was still about five miles from the Porte d’Orléans by evening. Leclerc sent Captain Raymond Dronne with a small detachment of tanks and half-tracks into the city by side roads, and it reached the Hôtel de Ville shortly before midnight on 24 August, as the bells of the city’s churches began to ring.

On 25 August the rest of the 2e DB entered Paris from the south and west, and the 4th Division’s 12th Infantry reached Notre-Dame before noon and occupied the Austerlitz, Lyon and Vincennes railway stations. German strongpoints held out at several places. Shortly after noon French tanks surrounded the Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli, Choltitz’s headquarters, and Choltitz was taken prisoner. Blumenson’s account is that he was taken not to the Gare Montparnasse, where Leclerc had his command post, but to the Prefecture of Police, where he signed a formal act of capitulation in the presence of Leclerc and the Paris FFI commander, in the name of the Provisional Government of the French Republic.

De Gaulle arrived that afternoon. On 26 August he walked down the Champs-Élysées at the head of an enormous crowd, while scattered shooting by snipers, or by nervous men firing at rooftops, sent people diving for cover in the place de la Concorde and outside Notre-Dame. In Blumenson’s figures, the battle toward and in Paris cost the 2e DB 71 killed, 225 wounded and 21 missing, and 35 tanks, 6 self-propelled guns and 111 vehicles destroyed; V Corps took about 10,000 prisoners in the city, and on 26 August 2,600 Germans came out of the Bois de Boulogne with their hands up. Blumenson gives no figure for the FFI and civilian dead of the uprising, which French tallies put considerably higher than the losses of Leclerc’s regulars.

What the Campaign Cost

The fall of Paris and the crossing of the Seine mark the usual end of the Normandy campaign, on 25 August or at the end of the month. Max Hastings gives Allied ground force casualties from 6 June to the end of August as 209,672, including 36,976 killed and 19,221 missing. Allied air forces lost a further 16,714 airmen killed or missing in operations connected with Overlord, according to Tamelander and Zetterling. German losses are less precisely known; Andrew Williams and others give about 450,000 men lost, including about 240,000 killed or wounded, with more than forty divisions destroyed or wrecked.

For the Falaise fighting itself, Stacey gives First Canadian Army’s losses from 8 to 21 August as 1,479 killed or died of wounds, 4,023 wounded or injured and 177 captured, figures that include the British and Polish formations under Canadian command. The Polish division’s own operational report, as cited by Copp, counted 1,441 casualties for the pocket-closing battle, 466 of them killed. American losses for the Mortain and Argentan fighting are folded into the First and Third Army totals and are not broken out in the official history in a comparable way.

The results were out of proportion even to these losses. In a month the Allied armies had gone from a front a few miles from the beaches to the Seine and beyond. The German Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army had lost most of their heavy equipment and a large part of their men, but the escape of perhaps 20,000 to 50,000 men through the gap meant that the staffs and cadres of many divisions survived to be rebuilt, and some of them fought again at Arnhem and in the Ardennes (see the Battle of the Bulge collection). McNair lies in the Normandy American Cemetery above Omaha Beach; many of the Polish dead of Hill 262 rest in the Polish War Cemetery at Grainville-Langannerie on the Caen–Falaise road. The last chapter, The Human Cost, the Civilians and Normandy Today, turns to the civilians who lived through the campaign and to how it is remembered.