The Allies on the Marne and in Rouen

On the afternoon of 30 August 1944 patrols of the Canadian 9th Infantry Brigade drove into Rouen, the capital of Normandy and one of France’s largest ports. The first to reach the city’s main square was the brigade commander himself, Brigadier John Rockingham, who exchanged fire from his armoured car with a German detachment, which was broken up moments later by a patrol of the Highland Light Infantry of Canada. Soon afterwards his vehicle, as the Canadian official historian noted, was so covered in flowers that it looked more like a float in a May Day parade than a weapon of war. There were hardly any Germans left in the city: in the last days of August they had crossed the Seine, leaving hundreds of burnt-out vehicles on its southern bank.

Two days earlier, on 28 August, more than 250 kilometres further east, the tanks of General George Patton’s Third Army had crossed the Marne – the river on which the fate of France had been decided in 1914 and 1918. Both events, recorded in war chronologies under 28 and 30 August, are borne out by the facts. The Allies who entered Rouen were Canadians of Lieutenant General Guy Simonds’s II Corps: the first to reach the city were sub-units of the 3rd Infantry Division, while the 2nd Division, which is often credited with taking Rouen, had only just emerged from the heaviest fighting in the woods south of the city. Together these events mark the end of the Battle of Normandy and the beginning of the pursuit across northern France.

After Falaise: the race to the Seine

Three weeks earlier, when the Americans were entering Rennes, the German front in Normandy was still holding. Instead of ordering a retreat, Hitler ordered a counter-attack at Mortain, thereby pushing his own armies into a sack that the Allies closed in the second half of August. In the Falaise pocket – sealed by the Poles, Canadians and Americans on 19–21 August – the German Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army lost most of their heavy equipment, and tens of thousands of men were taken prisoner. The commander of the Seventh Army, Paul Hausser, was severely wounded, and his duties were taken over by General Heinrich Eberbach.

As early as 19 August General Dwight Eisenhower agreed that, rather than halting on the Seine to rest and build up their rear services as the pre-invasion plans had envisaged, the Allied armies should cross the river on the move. That same night the American 79th Infantry Division crossed at Mantes-la-Jolie, north-west of Paris. Further American corps reached the river at Melun, Fontainebleau and Montereau, south-east of the capital, and on 25 August Paris was liberated.

The new German commander in the west, Field Marshal Walter Model, had no illusions about holding the line of the Seine. His main concern was to get as many men and as much equipment as possible across to the far bank, and then to stop the Allies on the next defensive line – along the Somme and the Marne – which the German military commander in France had been building since the beginning of August. There were almost no bridges left on the lower Seine: Allied aircraft had destroyed them earlier. The Germans therefore crossed at night on ferries, barges, pontoons and boats. According to the war diary of the Fifth Panzer Army, some 25,000 vehicles were ferried across in this way between 20 and 24 August, and in all – according to some estimates – more than 200,000 men escaped across the Seine. It was a relief for the Wehrmacht, but not salvation: most of the tanks and heavy weapons were left on the western bank.

Patton’s tanks on the Marne

Once the Seine bridgeheads had been secured, General Omar Bradley sent the Third Army due east, towards Lorraine and the Rhine. In front of it lay a series of rivers: the Marne, with Château-Thierry, Épernay, Châlons-sur-Marne and Vitry-le-François; then the Vesle with the cathedral city of Reims; the Aisne; and the Meuse. The Germans had little here: the remnants of shattered divisions, security units, anti-aircraft batteries and a rabble of stragglers. Patton ordered General Walton Walker’s XX Corps to advance from Melun and Montereau on Reims, and XII Corps from Troyes on Châlons.

Troyes had been taken on 25 August by Combat Command A of the 4th Armored Division – the same division that had fought at Rennes at the beginning of the month. On 28 August its columns drove some 80 kilometres from Troyes to Vitry-le-François without much hindrance and crossed the Marne. The tanks then pushed north along the east bank of the river while the 80th Infantry Division advanced along the west bank; at midday on 29 August the pincers closed on Châlons.

On the same day, 28 August, General Lindsay Silvester’s 7th Armored Division of XX Corps struck towards Reims in six columns, in the hope that at least one of them would capture an intact bridge. At Dormans two platoons of armoured infantry managed to run across the bridge before the Germans blew it, and during the night engineers threw treadway bridges across the river. Other combat groups of the division drove into Épernay and Château-Thierry and seized several bridges over the Marne. On 30 August the 5th Infantry Division took Reims without a fight. On the left wing, in the sector of General Courtney Hodges’s American First Army, the 3rd Armored Division drove through Château-Thierry and Soissons on 28 August and two days later reached Laon.

The names of these places meant something to many Americans. At Château-Thierry and in nearby Belleau Wood in June 1918 American soldiers and marines had helped the French halt the German offensive on Paris, and in the Second Battle of the Marne in July and August that year French, American and British troops had driven the Germans back from Paris. In 1914, on the same river, the French and British had stopped the German march on the capital in the First Battle of the Marne. Patton himself had fought in France in 1918 as commander of a tank brigade. This time the Marne was crossed in a single day, without much fighting: the German Somme–Marne defence line on which Model had been counting was broken before anyone had had time to man it.

Running out of fuel

Distance proved a more dangerous enemy than the Germans. Supplies were still arriving mainly over the Normandy beaches and through Cherbourg, while the Breton ports on which the planners had counted before the invasion remained in German hands or had been destroyed. Every gallon of petrol had to be trucked hundreds of kilometres; on 25 August the Red Ball Express convoys began running day and night along reserved roads. According to the American official history, XII Corps, which used 200,000–300,000 gallons of petrol to advance 50 miles, had only 31,000 gallons in hand on 24 August. It was able to move on only thanks to captured German stocks – 37 wagonloads of fuel at Sens and more than 100,000 gallons at Châlons.

On top of this came a strategic decision. On 23 August Eisenhower, after talking to General Bernard Montgomery, gave priority to the drive north: along the Channel coast towards Belgium, the V-1 launch sites and the port of Antwerp. It was to be supported by the American First Army, which received most of 12th Army Group’s fuel. Patton, who wanted to go straight through Lorraine to the Saar basin and the Rhine, had to make do with what was left. His divisions reached the Meuse at Verdun and Commercy on 31 August, but there, in the first days of September, they came to a halt with empty tanks. The remark attributed to him in his officers’ memoirs – that his men could eat their belts, but his tanks had to have gas – became one of the most frequently quoted sayings of the campaign.

The Forêt de la Londe and the entry into Rouen

On the Allied left wing, General Harry Crerar’s First Canadian Army, which also included General Stanisław Maczek’s Polish 1st Armoured Division, was to cross the lower Seine, clear the peninsula with the port of Le Havre and press on along the coast. The task was harder than on the upper Seine: here the river is wide, and the Germans, pushed downstream by the Americans advancing along its western bank, were desperately defending the last crossings. On 26–28 August the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division and 4th Armoured Division crossed the Seine in the area of Elbeuf and Pont-de-l’Arche, where engineers had built pontoon bridges.

The heaviest fighting fell to the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division. The approaches to Rouen from the south were barred by a loop of the Seine, and the narrow neck at its base was covered by the dense, hilly Forêt de la Londe. Canadian intelligence judged the German units on the south bank to be “local rearguards”. In reality the Germans, who had to cover the crossings at Rouen, held the forest in strength, with tanks and self-propelled guns. From 27 to 29 August the Canadian battalions attacked through the thickets using maps which – as the official history later admitted – were unsuitable for fighting in such terrain, and were repulsed again and again. According to Charles Stacey, the Canadian official historian, the six battalions of the 4th and 6th Brigades lost 577 men killed, wounded and missing in those three days; the hardest hit was the South Saskatchewan Regiment, with 185 casualties, 44 of them killed. Only on the morning of 29 August did it become clear that the Germans had begun to withdraw during the night.

Meanwhile, on 29 August, the Canadian 3rd Division moved north from the Elbeuf bridgehead along the right bank of the river, and on the afternoon of 30 August its 9th Brigade entered Rouen. That same day reconnaissance units of the British I Corps crossed the Seine further downstream, at Duclair and Caudebec-en-Caux, and found no more Germans. On the south bank opposite Rouen lay the largest graveyard of German equipment in the area: British investigators counted 20 armoured vehicles, 48 guns and 660 other vehicles there, and in the whole sector from Lisieux to the Seine more than 3,600 vehicles and guns.

Rouen, which had suffered heavily from Allied bombing in April and at the turn of May and June 1944 – hundreds of its inhabitants had been killed and the Gothic cathedral damaged – gave the Canadians an enthusiastic welcome. The Canadians did not stop in the city. On 31 August they moved on to the north and north-east, and the 2nd Division headed for Dieppe.

Place in the war

The advance to the Marne and the capture of Rouen brought the Battle of Normandy to a close. In less than three months since the landings, the German armies in the west had lost – according to various estimates – anywhere from more than 200,000 to 400,000–500,000 killed, wounded and captured, together with almost all their heavy equipment, and the remnants of their divisions were retreating in disorder towards the frontiers of the Reich. At the same time, from the south, the forces that had landed in Provence on 15 August in Operation Dragoon were advancing up the Rhône valley from the Mediterranean.

On 1 September Eisenhower assumed direct command of all ground forces in France, and Montgomery, who had directed them until then, received a field marshal’s baton in compensation. That same day the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division entered Dieppe without a fight – the town where two years earlier, in the failed raid of 19 August 1942, 3,367 of nearly 5,000 Canadians had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The British entered Brussels on 3 September and on 4 September captured the almost undamaged port of Antwerp, which, however, could not be used for months to come because of the German positions on the Scheldt estuary.

In the east Patton’s pursuit, which in August had carried him from Avranches through Brittany, Le Mans and across the Seine to the Meuse, ground to a halt at the beginning of September for lack of fuel. By the time supplies resumed, the Germans had manned the line of the Moselle, and the fighting for Metz dragged on until late autumn. The debate over whether in the last days of August the Allies should have concentrated all their resources on a single thrust – in the north, as Montgomery wanted, or through Lorraine, as Patton wanted – instead of advancing on a broad front, as Eisenhower decided, continues among historians to this day. What is certain is that in the summer of 1944 the pace of the advance across France outran the capacity to supply it, and hopes of ending the war by Christmas proved vain.