The Falaise pocket

Around midday on 14 August 1944 clouds of smoke hung over the plain north of Falaise in Normandy. Canadian artillery had laid them to screen the battlefield, and columns of tanks and armoured personnel carriers of the Canadian II Corps drove into the wall of smoke. So began Operation Tractable – the second attack on Falaise within a week by the First Canadian Army, in which a key role was to be played over the following days by the Polish 1st Armoured Division of Brigadier General Stanisław Maczek. The aim was to close from the north the pocket in which the German Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army were trapped. From the south, from Argentan, the Americans were closing in.

Under this date it is often said that the Allies failed to close the Falaise pocket, allowing the Germans fleeing east to slip out of the pincers. This simplification needs qualifying. On 14 August the pocket was still open, and the battle to close it was only entering its decisive phase. It was closed on 19–21 August at Chambois and on the heights of Mont-Ormel, largely by the Polish division. It is true that this was done too late and not tightly enough: according to various estimates, between 20,000 and 50,000 Germans managed to escape, most of them without their heavy equipment, and later rebuilt their units beyond the Seine. At the same time a large part of two German armies was destroyed in the pocket and on the roads of retreat, and many historians regard Falaise as the Wehrmacht’s greatest defeat in the West since 1940.

Armies in the sack

At the beginning of August the front in Normandy, almost static for seven weeks, suddenly fell apart. General Omar Bradley’s US First Army broke through the German positions near Saint-Lô on 25 July in Operation Cobra, and on 30 July took Avranches at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. Through this gateway poured south General George Patton’s newly activated Third Army: its corps set off west into Brittany, where Rennes was liberated on 4 August, and east and south-east into the interior of France, meeting almost no resistance. On 8 August the Americans took Le Mans, which had previously housed the headquarters of the German Seventh Army.

On the eastern flank of the beachhead the British and Canadians had for weeks been tying down most of the German panzer divisions. After bloody fighting they took Caen, and on the night of 7–8 August General Harry Crerar’s First Canadian Army struck along the Caen–Falaise road in Operation Totalize. The commander of the Canadian II Corps, who led the attack, General Guy Simonds, for the first time carried infantry in personnel carriers converted from self-propelled guns. On 8 August Maczek’s division, which had landed in Normandy at the turn of July and August, went into action for the first time. The attack, however, stalled a dozen or so kilometres short of Falaise against the defences of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, and the Polish and Canadian armoured regiments, advancing across open ground, lost many tanks.

The Germans themselves pushed deeper into the trap. Adolf Hitler refused to allow a withdrawal behind the Seine and ordered Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, in command in the West since July – after Rundstedt’s dismissal and Rommel’s wounding – to cut the American corridor at Avranches. On the night of 6–7 August four weakened panzer divisions attacked at Mortain in Operation Lüttich. Forewarned by signals intelligence, the Americans repulsed the attack with the support of Allied aircraft, but Hitler demanded that it be renewed. Each day of delay meant that the best German forces still left in the West – General Paul Hausser’s Seventh Army and General Josef “Sepp” Dietrich’s Fifth Panzer Army, as well as General Heinrich Eberbach’s panzer group – were stuck ever deeper in the elongated sack between Falaise, Mortain and Argentan.

The short envelopment and the halt at Argentan

The Allied commanders saw their chance. General Bernard Montgomery, in command of all ground forces in Normandy, had initially planned a “long envelopment” – a wide wheel towards the Seine that would cut off the Germans’ line of retreat further east. On 8 August, however, the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, backed an American proposal for shorter pincers: the Canadians were to strike south from the north towards Falaise, and the US XV Corps of Patton’s army north from the south towards Argentan. Montgomery agreed to this plan, with the proviso that the wider manoeuvre could be resumed if necessary.

From the south the Americans advanced rapidly. On 12 August XV Corps took Alençon, and on 13 August the US 5th Armored Division and General Philippe Leclerc’s French 2nd Armoured Division reached Argentan. Patton wanted to push on north towards Falaise. That same day, however, Bradley halted him at the boundary with the British-Canadian 21st Army Group and ordered XV Corps to concentrate for operations in another direction. According to an often quoted account, Patton asked whether he should continue and drive the British into the sea “for another Dunkirk”, but he complied. A gap some twenty-odd kilometres wide remained between Falaise and Argentan, which the Germans tried to hold open at all costs over the following days.

Bradley’s decision is among the most hotly debated of the campaign. Bradley himself wrote after the war that he feared a collision with the Canadians advancing from the opposite direction and friendly fire, but above all that a thin American cordon at Falaise would be trampled by nineteen fleeing German divisions: he preferred, as he put it, “a solid shoulder at Argentan” to “a broken neck at Falaise”. American critics, such as the journalist and Eisenhower staff officer Ralph Ingersoll, for years blamed Montgomery and the supposedly slow Canadians for the unclosed pocket. British historians, among them Chester Wilmot and Max Hastings, in turn criticised Montgomery for not reinforcing Simonds with experienced British divisions, and the Canadian attack for a lack of drive. Hastings also suggested that the real reason for Bradley’s decision may have been the awareness that the Americans lacked the strength to hold an advanced blocking line.

Tractable: 14–17 August

Simonds prepared the new attack within a few days, drawing on the experience of Totalize. This time it was to go in by day, under cover of a smokescreen intended to imitate the darkness of the night attack a week earlier. The Canadian 4th Armoured Division and 3rd Infantry Division with the 2nd Armoured Brigade were to cross the small Laison river and seize the heights north of Falaise. Surprise could not be maintained: on the night of 13–14 August a Canadian officer lost his way between headquarters, drove into German positions and was killed, and the Germans found on him a copy of Simonds’s orders.

On 14 August the attack went into the smoke, which also made it difficult for the attackers themselves to keep their bearings. That day several hundred heavy bombers of RAF Bomber Command went into action to destroy the German positions in the path of the attack. The Canadians marked their positions with yellow smoke – the same colour the air force used to mark targets – and some of the bombs fell on their own rear areas. Canadian and Polish soldiers were killed and wounded; the number of casualties is often given as around 400. Progress was slower than planned. On 15 August the Canadian 4th Armoured Division took Soulangy after heavy fighting, on 16 August the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division entered the ruins of Falaise, and by 17 August it had cleared the town of its last Waffen-SS defenders.

The Polish division was given the key task: to outflank the German defences from the east and close the pocket. After fighting for the crossings over the Dives, including at Jort, which were taken by the 10th Mounted Rifle Regiment and the 1st Armoured Regiment, Maczek divided the division into battle groups named after their commanders – Major Aleksander Stefanowicz (PL) and Władysław Zgorzelski – and on 17–18 August threw them into the breach behind the German lines, towards Trun and Chambois. Moving fast across country, the Poles overtook the 12th SS Panzer Division and drove deep into its rear.

On the other side of the front chaos was growing. On 15 August – the day the Allies landed in the south of France – Kluge’s car was pinned down by fire in the pocket, and the field marshal was out of contact for more than ten hours. Hitler suspected that Kluge was trying to negotiate with the Allies; after the defeat at Mortain and the 20 July plot, of which Kluge had known, he trusted him less and less. On 16 August Hitler finally agreed to a withdrawal from the pocket, and on 17 August he sent Field Marshal Walter Model to replace Kluge. Model at once ordered the Seventh Army and the Fifth Panzer Army to withdraw east, while the remnants of the panzer divisions held the walls of the corridor.

Chambois and the Mace: 19–21 August

On 18 August the Canadian 4th Armoured Division took Trun, and the Polish battle groups stood north of Chambois. The Germans’ last escape route now ran only along the narrow strip of the Dives valley between Trun, Saint-Lambert-sur-Dive and Chambois, under constant artillery fire and attacks by Allied fighter-bombers. On 19 August Zgorzelski’s group (the 10th Dragoons and the 24th Lancers) took Chambois, and in the evening linked up there with units of the US 90th Infantry Division advancing from the direction of Argentan. The pincers had formally closed, but the ring was thin and broken.

That same day Stefanowicz’s group (the 1st Armoured Regiment and the Podhale Rifle Battalion), later reinforced by Stanisław Koszutski’s group (the 2nd Armoured Regiment and the 8th Rifle Battalion) and the 9th Rifle Battalion, occupied the ridge above the village of Mont-Ormel. Hill 262, which the Poles called “Maczuga” (the Mace) because of the shape of its contour lines on the map, dominated the road from Chambois to Vimoutiers – the main exit route from the pocket. Two Polish armoured regiments and several rifle battalions thus found themselves between the Seventh Army fleeing the pocket and the SS divisions coming to its relief.

On 20 August Model threw against them from the east, from Vimoutiers, the remnants of General Wilhelm Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps – the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich and the 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen – while from the west retreating columns of the Seventh Army, paratroopers and the remnants of panzer divisions pressed against the Polish positions. Around midday the Germans managed to open a corridor past the Mace, and by the afternoon an estimated 10,000 soldiers had passed through it. Hausser, badly wounded in the face, got out of the pocket on a tank. The Poles, surrounded on the hill, directed artillery fire from there onto the columns in the valley, beat off one assault after another and held out while running short of ammunition, dressings and water; air drops were not enough. In the evening the two sides agreed a brief ceasefire to let a German ambulance convoy through.

On the morning of 21 August the Germans renewed their attacks, and around midday the last assault by SS units on the positions of the 9th Battalion was beaten off in hand-to-hand fighting. Shortly afterwards tanks of the Canadian Grenadier Guards of the 4th Armoured Division reached the Mace, and by evening the Canadians had closed the last crossings at Saint-Lambert, where a detachment under Major David Currie, later awarded the Victoria Cross, had been holding out for several days. The pocket was finally closed. After the battle Montgomery is said to have remarked – in words quoted in Polish literature – that the Germans had been as if in a bottle, and the Polish division was the cork that sealed them in.

The reckoning and the “killing field”

How many Germans were caught in the pocket is not known exactly. Most historians put the figure at 80,000–100,000; between 10,000 and 15,000 were killed, 40,000–50,000 taken prisoner, and between 20,000 and 50,000 managed to get out through gaps in the ring, mostly on foot and without heavy equipment. Among those who escaped were many experienced officers and NCOs, which allowed the Germans quickly to rebuild some of the shattered divisions. Thousands of burnt-out and abandoned vehicles, hundreds of tanks and guns, and thousands of dead horses – on which the German infantry still largely depended – were left on the roads of the pocket.

The Polish division paid a high price for its part in closing the pocket. According to figures given in some accounts, it lost 1,441 men in the whole battle, 466 of them killed; the fighting on the Mace alone cost it, according to British authors, 351 killed and wounded and 11 tanks. According to the same estimates, the Germans lost about 500 killed and 1,000 prisoners in their assaults on the hill. The division’s fallen were later buried at the Polish war cemetery at Grainville-Langannerie.

Kluge did not live to see the end of the battle. Summoned to Germany, on 19 August – the day the Poles entered Chambois – he took cyanide on the way, near Metz. In a farewell letter he assured Hitler of his loyalty while also urging him to end the war. He probably feared that he would be accused of complicity in the 20 July plot.

Two days after the pocket was closed, Eisenhower inspected the battlefield. In his memoirs, published in 1948, he described it as “unquestionably one of the greatest ‘killing fields’ of any of the war areas”, adding that one could literally walk for hundreds of yards stepping on nothing but dead and decaying bodies. In the August heat a stench hung over the Dives valley that pilots could smell in the air above it. Fearing an epidemic, the Allies declared the area of the pocket a danger zone; clearing away the bodies and carcasses went on until the autumn. The inhabitants of the surrounding villages and small towns were also victims of the fighting – Falaise, Trun and Chambois lay largely in ruins.

Place in the war

Falaise ended the Battle of Normandy with a heavy defeat for the Wehrmacht, although a smaller one than it might have been. The Seventh Army and the Fifth Panzer Army ceased to exist as effective fighting formations; of the dozens of divisions that had fought in Normandy, only fragments remained. In the last days of August the survivors crossed the Seine in haste and under air attack. Paris was liberated on 25 August, and at the end of the month the Allies crossed the Seine and set off in pursuit across northern France towards Belgium; the Polish division joined the pursuit too.

At the same time the escape of tens of thousands of soldiers, including many cadres of the SS panzer divisions, had its consequences: in the autumn of 1944 units rebuilt from them helped the Germans to halt the Allies on the borders of the Reich and in the Netherlands. The dispute over the halt at Argentan and the slowness of the Canadians became a permanent part of the historiography of the campaign and for years divided British, Canadian and American writers. For Poles, the Battle of Falaise, and especially the defence of the Mace, became one of the most important places of remembrance of the Polish Armed Forces in the West; on the hill above Mont-Ormel there now stands a memorial and museum commemorating the fighting of August 1944.