Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (57 page)

Yet the pocket at Falaise was being closed too late to prevent the escape of a formidable cadre of the German army, including some of its most skilled and dedicated officers, who lived to lead men through many more battles. It was only the most determined who still possessed the will to try the gap. Few, even within the Canadians’ own ranks, disputed that the principal cause of this Allied failure was the feeble performance of First Canadian Army. Characteristically, the British official history describes the advance to Falaise in terms of hard fighting, ‘a gruelling day for the Canadians . . . Germans fighting strongly . . . dogged resistance.’ All this is perfectly true, but it evades the central fact that the ragged remains of two German divisions and a handful of tanks held all Crerar’s army for 13 days, from the opening of TOTALIZE to the closing of the gap at Chambois, a distance of barely 30 miles. The Canadian official historian is far more frank than his British counterpart: ‘A German force far smaller than our own, taking advantage of strong ground and prepared positions, was able to slow our advance to the point where considerable German forces made their escape.’
¹²
General Foulkes of the Canadian 2nd Division said: ‘When we went into battle at Falaise and Caen, we found that when we bumped into battle-experienced German troops, we were no match for them. We would not have been successful had it not been for our air and artillery support.’
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The Canadians had already recognized their difficulties by replacing a long succession of officers commanding brigades and battalions since 6 June. On 21 August, Crerar sacked the commander of his 4th Armoured Division, Major-General Kitching, a ritual sacrifice to his formation’s failure.

The focus of the struggle now concentrated upon a few square miles of fields and little villages in which the wreckage of a
half-million-strong army was fighting for survival. Command and control by signal had been almost entirely lost. Such direction as existed was provided by German officers to whatever men they chanced to find around them. Blackened vehicles, blackened corpses, blackened buildings and hedgerows scarred every acre over which the fighter-bombers had passed. The wounded were merely gathered where they might be tended by their captors when the Allies reached them – there were no more drugs and few enough doctors. Men ate what they could find in shattered vehicles or farmhouses – every surviving building was crowded with stragglers hunting food or seeking shelter from the shelling and bombing, or merely rest from the interminable march among the dead. The Allied cordon was a swollen, bulging sac against the walls of which thousands of men were pressing and forcing their bodies in a hundred places, seeking escape and often dying to find it. Amongst a vast mass of despondent Germans who sought only to surrender, there were still some thousands who fought at Falaise with desperate courage, hurling themselves again and again against Allied positions despite ferocious artillery fire and concentrated machine-guns.

Montgomery issued a directive on 20 August urging his forces to greater efforts: ‘There is no time to relax, or to sit back and congratulate ourselves. I call on all commanders for a great effort. Let us finish the business in record time . . . The first task of Canadian army is to keep the Normandy “bottle” securely corked.’
¹⁴
On the 22nd, it was concluded that all significant German forces west of the Allied lines were dead or in captivity. The ‘cork’, it was concluded, could be removed from the empty bottle. The Allied armies could make free with the ruins of St Lambert and Coudehard, Chambois and Trun, the ghastly killing ground of the Falaise Gap.

Some men had already been fortunate enough to achieve their
Heim ins Reich
before the collapse in Normandy came. Corporal Schickner of 2nd Panzer was in hospital in Germany recovering from a head wound inflicted by an American sniper in July. Lieutenant Schaaf and his gunners of the 1716th Artillery had been sent back to re-equip with new guns when those which they had fired since 6 June were worn out from ceaseless use. Corporal Kortenhaus of 21st Panzer was still in hospital after catching his foot in his tank track. Captain Wagemann of 21st Panzer staff had been posted back to Germany at the end of July. But the mass of the German army in Normandy remained, to endure one of the great nightmares of military history in the Falaise Gap. Pounded by shells from north and south and fighter-bomber strikes from first light to dusk, the long columns of men, horse-drawn carts and the few surviving tanks and vehicles struggled slowly eastwards, past their unburied dead by the roads and in the fields, the stinking carcasses of countless hundreds of horses and cattle, the ruins of Panthers and half-tracks, field cars and trucks, the last hopes of Hitler’s armies in France.

20 August was a beautiful summer’s day. To the straggling clusters and columns of Germans moving painfully eastwards, the weather mocked them as shells searched the roads and tracks, and tore open the meadows in which so many sought safety. The detested Piper Cubs droned busily overhead, directing their destruction. Colonel Heinz-Gunther Guderian sent two officers forward to St Lambert to reconnoitre a route for the vestiges of his division. With the coming of darkness, at the head of a column of
300 men, 50 vehicles and a battery of guns, they edged cautiously forward beneath the Allied positions, moving 100 yards at a time, then halting in silence to listen, then slipping forward again. At last, after hours of desperate tension, they met panzergrenadiers of 2nd SS Panzer holding the eastern line. Guderian and his men sank wearily into oblivion by the roadside, and slept all through the day that followed. Yet his glimpse of safety was illusory. The next morning, he was ordered to take the remnants of the formation south, to stiffen the tenuous line against American pressure. On the road in his Volkswagen field car, he was caught by an Allied fighter-bomber diving out of the sun. Guderian, hit in the shoulder, was still in the vehicle when the petrol tank exploded. He never fought again in France.

Lieutenant Walter Kruger, signals officer of 12th SS Panzer, was wounded by shrapnel as he sat in his truck in a great unmoving press of transport on the Falaise road. ‘Then I saw that the whole column was on fire. Everybody was running.’ He walked for three days, then sat by the roadside near Breteuil among the endless lines of filthy, bloody, exhausted men passing east, looking for survivors of his own unit and collecting them to continue the retreat. His divisional commander, Kurt ‘Panzer’ Meyer, outstanding combat commander and fanatical Nazi, escaped according to his own account ‘guided by a French civilian’. It is not difficult to picture the means of persuasion Meyer brought to bear. Yet even the iron Meyer described later how he climbed out of his vehicle amid the shambles of the Gap, ‘my knees trembling, the sweat pouring down my face, my clothes soaked in perspiration’.
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He and his men represented, at one level, the utmost perversion of national socialism. Yet at another, they command reluctant respect. No formation caused the Allies such deep trouble in Normandy until the end as 12th SS Panzer.

Sergeant Hans Stober of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers encountered no difficulties driving east until he and his handful of surviving men reached the Dives. There they became entangled in the chaos of the retreat. By ruthless determination they forced a way through
and found a track north of Mont Ormel that remained open, and slipped past the silent Canadian army positions in darkness, with the men and even a few vehicles. ‘The Poles never closed that pocket for anybody who really wanted to get through,’ claimed Stober scornfully. Eventually they reached a reporting station near Paris, which had been set up to gather and reorganize men arriving from the west. Ten days after passing Mont Ormel they reached the Saar area, where they spent three days resting and regrouping. Then they were sent back into action with the remains of 116th Panzer in
Kampfengruppe Fick
.

General Eugene Meindl of II Parachute Corps spent two hours hidden beneath a wrecked Polish Sherman within yards of the Allied lines, waiting for a moment to make his escape from the pocket. Like so many men in those days of turmoil, he had a succession of extraordinary personal encounters: with his own son; with a general named Eric Straube whom he was disgusted to find bivouacked in comfort with his staff, well supplied with food and wine; with a corps commander whom he did not identify, sitting weeping alone by the roadside. Meindl finally fought his way out at the head of a few score paratroopers and three tanks of 2nd SS Panzer.
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General Hausser of Seventh Army was wounded by shrapnel as he marched amongst his men, and was carried out upon the back of a tank of 1st SS Panzer.

Lieutenant Fritz Langangke of 2nd SS Panzer had been driving since the beginning of August in a hastily-repaired tank with chronic overheating problems. Its collapse on the start-line for the Mortain counter-attack probably saved his life, and the same Panther carried him eastwards as the line crumbled, sustained by petrol drained into a canvas bucket from abandoned vehicles. In the final days of the pocket, the Panther’s engine caught fire for the last time. The crew blew it up and started walking: ‘We just kept going along with the rest of the German army.’ They rejoined the remains of the division around Mont Ormel, finding their tank regiment now under the command of Major Enzerling. Their old commander, the bullet-headed Colonel Tyschen, an officer in the
mould of ‘Panzer’ Meyer, had died in the Mortain battle. The spirit of absolute doom was abroad. Enzerling solemnly visited his tank crews to say farewell to each man personally. Just west of the Seine, they were finally compelled to abandon all their vehicles, and each man to seek salvation as best he might. Langangke and eight others reached the river at Elbeuf to find French resistants already all over the town, waving tricolours and shooting at German stragglers. The lieutenant and his group hid in a house, considering their next move. There was no choice open to them save to cross the river. Neither his gunner nor his loader could swim, but they had to try. They drowned. Langangke himself reached the eastern bank clinging to the bloated body of a dead cow which was floating downriver amidst a host of other hapless animals and debris from the battlefield. He rejoined his unit at Huy-on-the-Maas, whence they were withdrawn to retrain and re-equip.

The SS and those men of the German army still determined to fight on were enraged by the wholesale collapse of will that they saw around them in those days. Lieutenant Ernst Krag of 2nd SS Panzer’s assault gun battalion came upon a group of Wehrmacht armoured crews intent upon blowing up a company of new Panthers which they had just brought forward from Germany as replacements. The furious Krag ordered them to hand over the tanks intact to his own men, and they salvaged five. ‘What do you do,’ he demanded bitterly, ‘if even your commanders have begun to work according to the principle of
Heim ins Reich
?’ Colonel Kurt Kauffmann, the operations officer of Panzer Lehr, who had contributed so much to the recapture of Villers-Bocage in June, walked out of the pocket in the clothes he stood up in, the entire divisional headquarters and its documents having been lost in the American breakthrough. He was posted to the eastern front for speaking openly about the hopelessness of the military situation.

Corporal Adolf Hohenstein of 276th Infantry marched eastward out of the pocket with a handful of men, having lost all contact with his unit. A general passed along the column of slow-moving soldiers, telling them that it was every man for himself – they were now encircled. Hohenstein said that this did not trouble him as much as it might, ‘for in Russia we had been surrounded again and again’. He was one of the few who had escaped from the Sixth Army’s disaster at Stalingrad, clinging to the hull of a tank. Now they came upon a château, where they paused to gaze sadly upon the wonderful library, torn open to the elements by shellfire. Around noon on 20 August, they were lying in a field wondering desperately how to cross the flat ground ahead, littered with dead horses, burning vehicles, wounded men, and still under furious shellfire. Suddenly the firing stopped. There was a rumour,
probably unfounded, that a local truce had been declared while a German hospital was handed over to the Allies. They seized their moment, and hastened through the smoking chaos, wading the Dives to reach St Lambert. Many men, said Hohenstein, were no longer seeking to escape, but merely lingering in the hope of making a safe surrender. The houses of St Lambert were crowded with Wehrmacht fugitives who had abandoned their weapons and clutched only sheets to assist their efforts to give themselves up. Men said that it was no longer possible to get through to the east.