D Day: Closing the Gap at Falaise

Closing the Gap at Falaise

In retrospect, air was more critical-and under greater pressure at Mortain than at the subsequent fighting in the Falaise-Argentan pocket. Mortain was an Allied defensive battle whereas Falaise was an encirclement and an attempt to prevent the Germans from escaping out of the trap eastward. As the perimeter closed down, the pocket became a gap, and the Allies struggled to close it. The Falaise campaign probably began on August 7, the same day as the German counterattack at Mortain, when Canadian troops launched a ground assault called Totalize toward Falaise. For the next two weeks, Allied troops-British, American, and Polish- harassed the German forces caught inside the pocket until finally, on August 21, the gap was closed.

But by that time, what could have been a great encirclement echoing some of the pivotal battles on the Eastern Front had become something less a victory, but one qualified by the number of German forces that had been able to flee through the gap. The fact that enemy forces did escape outraged American commanders, from the even-tempered Eisenhower and Bradley to the mercurial Patton. They saw it as yet another example of bad generalship by Montgomery, who pressured the pocket's western end, squeezing the Germans out eastward like a tube of toothpaste, rather than capping the open gap. Patton, ever aggressive, pleaded with Bradley for clearance to cut across the narrow gap, in front of retreating German forces, from Argentan north to Falaise. But Bradley wisely demurred, recognizing that the outnumbered Americans might be "trampled" by the German divisions racing for the gap. "I much preferred," Bradley recollected subsequently, "a solid shoulder at Argentan to the possibility of a broken neck at Falaise."

Eventually, the Canadians pressed south from Falaise, the Americans north from Argentan, and both sought to narrow and close the gap by reaching the road network across and beyond the Dives River, at Trun, St. Lambert, Moissy, and Chambois. The roads beyond led toward Vimoutiers, funneling German forces into predictable killing grounds. Polish forces fought an especially prolonged and bitter struggle at Chambois that echoed Mortain's lone battalion. On August 19, the Poles seized Chambois (soon dubbed "Shambles"), establishing defensive positions on Mont Ormel, to the northeast. Here was an ideal vantage point to call in artillery and air strikes on the German forces streaming across the Dives and past their positions.

Extremely bitter fighting broke out between Polish and retreating German forces, but the Poles were able to retain control until the gap closed on August 21. The countryside around the Dives and Orne rivers was generally open, with sporadic patches of forested areas. The high ground across the Dives-specifically Mont Ormel-furnished an unparalleled vista of the entire gap area. In the third week of August 1944, this vista was marred by the near-constant bursting of bombs, rockets, and artillery, the ever-present drone of fighter-bombers and small artillery spotters (the latter especially feared and loathed by German forces), the corpses of thousands of German personnel and draft animals, and the burning and shattered remains of hundreds of vehicles and tanks. It was a scene of carnage without parallel on the Western Front.

In the days before the closing of the Falaise gap, the 2 TAF averaged 1,200 sorties per day. The air war was particularly violent from August 15 through the 21st. Typhoons and Spitfires attacked the roads leading from the gap to the Seine, strafing columns of densely packed vehicles and men. Under repeated attack, some of the columns actually displayed white flags of surrender, but the RAF took "no notice" of this since Allied ground forces were not in the vicinity, and "to cease fire would merely have allowed the enemy to move unmolested to the Seine." Typhoons typically would destroy the vehicles at the head of a road column, then leisurely shoot up the rest of the vehicles with their rockets and cannon. When they finished, Spitfires would dive down to strafe the remains.

Because the Luftwaffe was absent over the battlefield, Broadhurst directed 2 TAF wings to operate their aircraft in pairs. Thus, a "two ship" of Spitfires or Typhoons could return to the gap after being refueled and rearmed without waiting for a larger formation to be ready to return. This maximized the number of support sorties that could be flown, and, indeed, pilots of one Canadian Spitfire wing averaged six sorties per day. Nothing that moved was immune from what one Typhoon pilot recollected as "the biggest shoot-up ever experienced by a rocket Typhoon pilot." Another recalled the flavor of attack operations:

The show starts like a well-planned ballet: the Typhoons go into echelon while turning, then dive on their prey at full throttle. Rockets whistle, guns bark, engines roar and pilots sweat without noticing it as our missiles smash the Tigers. Petrol tanks explode amid torrents of black smoke. A Typhoon skids away to avoid machine fire. Some horses frightened by the noise gallop wildly in a nearby field.

Nor was Falaise strictly a 2 TAF operation; the AAF was also heavily committed. Over the duration of the Falaise fighting, air strikes gradually moved from west of Argentan to north, to east, and finally to east of the Dives River. One strike by P47s on August 13 gives a graphic indication of the sizes of German forces open to attack

That morning 37 P-47 pilots of the 36th Group found 800 to 1,000 enemy vehicles of all types milling about in the pocket west of Argentan. They could see American and British forces racing to choke off the gap. They went to work. Within an hour the Thunderbolts had blown up or burned out between 400 and 500 enemy vehicles. The fighter-bombers kept at it until they ran out of bombs and ammunition. One pilot, with empty gun chambers and bomb shackles, dropped his belly tank on 12 trucks and left them all in flames.

All told, on 13 August, XIX TAC fighter-bombers destroyed or damaged more than 1,000 road and rail vehicles, 45 tanks and armored vehicles, and 12 locomotives. Inside the pocket they reduced 10 enemy delaying-action strong points to rubble.

Four days later another Thunderbolt squadron, below-strength, flew over a huge traffic jam, radioed for assistance, "and soon the sky was so full of British and American fighter-bombers that they had to form up in queues to make their bomb runs." The next day, 36th Group Thunderbolts spotted another large German formation, marked out by yellow artillery smoke. Since the vehicles were in a zone designated as a British responsibility, XIX TAC sat back "disconsolately" while 2 TAF launched a series of strikes that claimed almost 3,000 vehicles damaged or destroyed. On August 19, one Spitfire wing put in a claim for 500 vehicles destroyed or damaged in a single day; that same day, another Spitfire wing claimed 700.