America in WWII - (Page 29) Two months after D-Day, the Allies were poised to capture two German armies near Falaise, France— if they could just cut through British-American red tape. by Brian John Murphy TRAPwith a GAP G DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER had never seen combat. But this day in Normandy, the effects of combat and the results of the arduous Normandy campaign were plain to see. The ground was covered with dead German soldiers. They lay in the roads, charred in the burned-out hulks of their vehicles, in ditches, in fields, some bloated and blackened in the August sun. Parts of German soldiers, blasted to pieces by artillery and aerial bombs, lay everywhere. Some hung in macabre fashion from tree limbs. There were even dead horses, hundreds of them, a testimony to the German army’s inferior technology compared to that of the motor-obsessed Americans. Many of these fallen beasts of burden lay in the traces of the wagons and guns they had pulled, contorted by their death agonies. In the final days of the Normandy battle, the pocket of survivors of the German Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army was jammed with men, vehicles, and equipment of all kinds. Beside horse-drawn wagons and artillery, there were Panthers, Panzer IVs, and Tiger tanks in shambles, and weapons and vehicles that lay deserted, burned, or blown to bits. Everywhere, permeating the air for miles around, was the sweet-sick stench of putrefying corpses. Artillery spotter pilots and airmen on low-level reconnaissance flights 2,000 feet above the fields of slaughter could smell the vile odor thickly filling their cockpits. Some pilots vomited. Everywhere for a stunned Eisenhower to see was proof that German Army Group B, which had contested Operation Overlord, the Allied Normandy invasion, had been effectively destroyed or dissolved. The survivors of this unprecedented carnage were, at this very moment, hurrying for Germany and the security of its fortified Siegfried Line. Yet this was a flawed victory. The possibility had existed to bag the entire enemy German army group, yet tens of thousands of survivors had escaped east across the Seine and back to Germany to fight again. Indecision at the highest levels of command had led to this incomplete victory in the battle of the so-called Falaise pocket. Because of this command failure, the promise of an early end to the war through a victory of annihilation in France went unrealized. There would be many more months of combat—the most intense fighting the Allies would see in Europe. ENERAL But there in the Falaise pocket, Eisenhower had proof that the Germans had suffered a defeat from which they could not recover. Planning and deception AS AMERICAN, BRITISH, AND CANADIAN FORCES moved inland from Overlord’s D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, they had immediately collided with the uniquely uncooperative terrain of Normandy. Locally called bocage, the countryside was divided up into thousands of small pastures, fields, and apple orchards bounded by hedgerows of prodigious height, antiquity, and toughness. The hedges formed natural fortresses and ambushes that the Germans could defend easily. The Americans, operating under a doctrine of mobile war, found their armored strength almost neutralized. Their advance immediately bogged down as the Germans made maximum use of the terrain. Despite this, the US First Army, under General Omar Bradley, successfully cut off the Cotentin peninsula and captured Cherbourg. The British and Canadians, under Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, who had defeated the Germans in El Alamein, Egypt, were also bogged down in the face of determined resistance by the Germans, who had two armies in Normandy: the Fifth Panzer Army and the Seventh Army, which together formed Army Group B. As bad as it was, the situation could have been much worse for the Allies if not for Operation Fortitude, an elaborate deception. The Germans had reserves in the center of France and 15 crack infantry and Panzer divisions at Calais, sitting on their hands waiting for an expected main invasion there. Adolf Hitler and his generals had been fooled into believing a second invasion was coming by Fortitude’s bogus radio traffic, inflatable tanks and trucks that looked like the real thing to German reconnaissance pilots, and the vivid presence of Lieutenant General George Patton as commander of the fictitious First US Army Group. Fearing Patton and FUSAG, Hitler kept his forces around Calais on station through all the vital moments of the Normandy campaign. With the help of an overwhelming and almost unchallenged superiority in the air, the Allies made minor advances in opening up their beachheads. The bocage imposed a kind of warfare reminiscent of World War I, where daily gains of a few hundred yards ALL PHOTOS: NATIONAL ARCHIVES Opposite: American infantrymen on patrol come upon a view of the war-damaged cathedral of Argentan, France, during an effort to mop up final German resistance in the Falaise pocket on August 20, 1944. Allied forces took approximately 50,000 prisoners in the pocket. OCTOBER 2007 AMERICA IN WWII 29
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