The Second World War (66 page)

The Hitler Youth Division’s success in holding open the neck of the Falaise pocket until 21 August allowed some 300,000 soldiers to escape and, more surprisingly, 25,000 vehicles to cross floating bridges and ferries operated by German army engineers under cover of darkness between 19 and 29 August. Behind them, however, the fugitives left 200,000 prisoners, 50,000 dead and the wreck of two armies’ equipment. Constant air attack into the clogged roads and fields of the pocket had left it choked with burnt and broken tanks, trucks and artillery pieces. Over 1300 tanks were lost in Normandy; of the Panzer divisions which escaped in some semblance of order none brought more than fifteen tanks out of the holocaust. Two Panzer divisions, Lehr and 9th, existed only in name; fifteen of the fifty-six infantry divisions which had fought west of the Seine had disappeared altogether.

Hitler directed some of the fugitive divisions to enter and hold the Channel coast ports as fortressess. He had already garrisoned the Atlantic ports of Lorient, Saint-Nazaire and La Rochelle, but the point of holding these ports had been nullifed as soon as Bradley had decided on 3 August to curtail his drive southward along the Atlantic coast in favour of an encirclement of Army Group B from the west. The decision to occupy the Channel ports, by contrast, was one of the highest strategic importance. It lay in the pattern of his earlier insistence on holding Baltic and Black Sea ports even after their hinterland had fallen to the Red Army, but in this case was far more strongly justified by logistic reality; for, while the Red Army depended scarcely at all upon seaborne supply, the Anglo-American armies did so almost completely. The denial to them of the Channel ports of Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk gravely impeded their ability to provision their advancing forces and was to have a critical impact on the development of the campaign of liberation throughout the coming autumn and winter.

Hitler’s Channel ports decision demonstrated once again his uncanny ability, even at moments of desperate crisis, to avoid the worst consequences of his acts of operational folly. It could not compensate for his wilful and egotistic co-operation in the unfolding of Patton’s
Blitzkrieg,
which had culminated in the devastation of the
Westheer
within the Falaise pocket. It could certainly not compensate for the irreplaceable loss of tanks and trained soldiers which the closing of the pocket had inflicted on the German army. However, it would mitigate the immediate consequences and help to ensure that when he came to mount his next – the last – great armoured offensive of the Second World War in the west he would do so on more equal terms than expected from the outcome of the battle of Normandy in August 1944.

While the Channel ports were filling up with their garrisons of stay-behinds from the Fifteenth Army and its remaining units were joining the fugitives of the Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies in the flight to the West Wall, the final act in the drama of the liberation epic was being played out in Paris. As the Normandy battle swelled to its climax, Hitler had conceived a plan to transform the French capital into a great defended bridgehead through which the Seventh Army could make an orderly retreat to the line of the Somme and Marne rivers and then to use the city itself as a battleground on which crippling losses might be inflicted on the Allied pursuers, even at the cost of turning it ‘into a field of ruins’.

Two developments worked to allay this outcome. The first was the arrival in France on 15 August of a second Allied invasion army, not, as long anticipated, on the ‘short route’ to Germany from the Pas de Calais, but in the distant south, between Nice and Marseille. The Seventh Army, the instrument of Operation Anvil, mounted by three American and four French divisions, briskly overcame the resistance of General Wiese’s Nineteenth Army and by 22 August had raced up the Rhône valley to reach Grenoble. Its appearance, and its peremptory unseating of the only effective manoeuvre formation remaining to General Johannes Blaskowitz’s Army Group G, the 11th Panzer Division, not only threatened an attack against the West Wall from a hitherto unexpected direction, through Alsace-Lorraine. It also made nonsense of any hope of holding Paris when a new Allied thrust menaced the rearward communications of the capital with Germany from the south.

The second development was domestic to Paris itself. Its population was not overtly resistant. In March it had welcomed Pétain with tumultuous popular demonstrations; as late as 13 August, Laval had returned to the city in the hope of reconvening the Chamber of Deputies to accord him powers as legitimate head of government who might treat on sovereign terms with the liberating armies. Nevertheless a spirit of resistance to German occupation smouldered, and as soon as it became clear that the days of the occupying force were numbered armed resistance broke out in the streets. On 18 August the Paris police force had, literally, raised the standard of revolt over the prefecture on the Ile de la Cité; as soon as it did so the covert resistance, of which the left-wing Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) was the most numerous, rallied to the flag. By 20 August the German garrison found itself under such pressure to maintain control of the streets that the Commander of Greater Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz, offered and succeeded in negotiating a truce. The scale the fighting had reached, however, now worked to alter Allied plans for the city’s liberation. While Hitler was ordering that the city be turned into a western Stalingrad, Eisenhower and Montgomery had set their faces against allowing their troops to penetrate its perimeter ‘until it is a sound military proposition to do so’. As soon as it became clear that the city was struggling to liberate itself, however, the Allied leaders found themselves obliged to go to the insurgents’ assistance. The appropriate means of intervention lay to hand. Since 1 August the French 2nd Armoured Division, which owed allegiance to General de Gaulle, had been in Normandy. On 20 August the general himself, whose title to the leadership of France the Allies would not yet admit, had also arrived – uninvited, unannounced and by a circuitous route. On 22 August Bradley transmitted orders from Eisenhower that the French 2nd Armoured Division under General Leclerc was to direct itself on Paris. De Gaulle, who had installed himself in the French President’s country seat at Rambouillet, endorsed the order and prepared to travel in its wake.

23 August was spent traversing the 120 miles which separated the 2nd Armoured Division’s positions from the outskirts of the city. Detained on the approaches by stiffening German resistance, Leclerc despaired of entering the capital that day. Then, stung by American allegations that the French were ‘dancing to Paris’ (there had been outbreaks of
fête
between episodes of fighting), he launched an infiltration by a small tank-infantry force along back routes into the centre of the city. At 9.30 on the evening of 23 August three tanks of the French 2nd Armoured Division, Montmirail, Champaubert and Romilly, named from Napoleonic victories of 1814, stood under the walls of the Hôtel de Ville. Next day they would be joined by the bulk of the division which would fight its way into the historic heart of the city against last-ditch German resistance, and the day after by de Gaulle himself. No one more than he, the French army’s apostle of armoured warfare, would grasp how appropriate it was that the capital of the country first overwhelmed by
Blitzkrieg
should be liberated by the tanks of its own renascent army.

On 12 January 1944 Air Marshal Arthur Harris, chief of RAF Bomber Command, wrote:

It is clear that the best and indeed the only efficient support which Bomber Command can give to [Operation] Overlord is the intensification of attacks on suitable industrial targets in Germany as and when the opportunity offers. If we attempt to substitute for this process attacks on gun emplacements, beach defences, communications or [ammunition] dumps in occupied territory, we shall commit the irremediable error of diverting our best weapons from the military function, for which it has been equipped and trained, to tasks which it cannot effectively carry out. Though this might give a spurious appearance of ‘supporting’ the Army, in reality it would be the greatest disservice we could do them.

‘Bomber’ Harris’s prognosis of the effect of diverting his strategic bombers from the ‘area’ bombing of Germany to ‘precision’ bombing on France was to be proved dramatically incorrect. In the first place, his crews demonstrated that they had now acquired the skill to hit small targets with great accuracy and to sustain this ‘precision’ campaign even in the teeth of fierce German resistance. In March the objections of Harris and General Carl Spaatz, commanding the Eighth Air Force, Bomber Command’s American equivalent, were overruled and both air forces were placed under Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy. From then onwards strategic air forces embarked on a campaign against the French railway system which was to cost them 2000 aircraft and 12,000 aircrew in a little over two months. In April and May Bomber Command, which had dropped 70 per cent of its bombs on Germany in March, reversed its proportional effort: in April it dropped 14,000 tons on Germany but 20,000 on France; in May it launched three-quarters of its sorties against France. During June the weight of attack on France increased again when 52,000 tons were dropped in the invasion area and on the military infrastructure surrounding it.

Moreover, in flat contradiction of Harris’s forecast, RAF bombers carried out their missions with an effectiveness which not only ‘supported’ the army very effectively indeed but went far towards determining the Germans’ defeat in Normandy. By comparison with the British and American armies, the German army belonged to a previous generation of military development. Its Panzer and motorised divisions apart, it moved over short distances on foot by road and over long distances by rail; while all its supplies and heavy equipment, even for formations which possessed their own motor transport, moved exclusively by rail. The interruption of the French railway system and the destruction of bridges therefore severely restricted its ability not only to manoeuvre but even to fight at all; from April to June, and thereafter during the course of the Normandy battle itself, French railway working was brought almost to a standstill and most bridges over the major northern French rivers were broken or at least damaged too severely to be quickly repaired.

Much of the devastation was achieved by the medium-range and fighter bombers of the British Second Tactical and the recently formed American Ninth Air Forces; American Thunderbolt and British Typhoon ground-attack fighters flying vast daylight ‘sweeps’ over northern France destroyed 500 locomotives between 20 and 28 May alone. However, the far more serious structural devastation – to bridges, rail yards and locomotive repair shops – was the work of the strategic bombers. By late May, French railway traffic had declined to 55 per cent of the January figure; by 6 June the destruction of the Seine bridges had reduced it to 30 per cent, and thereafter it declined to 10 per cent. As early as 3 June a despairing officer of Rundstedt’s staff sent a report (decrypted by Ultra) that the railway authorities ‘are seriously considering whether it is not useless to attempt further repair work’, so relentless was the pressure the Allied forces were sustaining on the network.

The rail capacity that Germany’s OB West succeeded in maintaining in June and July 1944 just sufficed to provide the Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies with the irreducible minimum of food, fuel and ammunition (though not enough to revictual Paris, which was in serious danger of starvation just before its liberation). However, such supplies could be guaranteed to the fighting troops only as long as they did not attempt to manoeuvre; so fragile and so inflexible was the network of communication improvised between the Reich and Germany that the troops at the battlefront could depend upon it only if they remained fixed to its terminals. Once they moved, they risked starvation of essentials – hence their inability to ‘make a fighting withdrawal in France’. When their fortified perimeter of the bridgehead was destroyed by Patton’s
Blitzkrieg
, they could only retreat at the fastest possible speed to the next fortified position with which a communication system connected; and that was the West Wall on the Franco-German border.

The Normandy campaign, in both its preliminaries and its central events, therefore proved Harris wrong. Airpower used in the direct support of armies had worked with stunning success at the immediate and at the strategic level. None the less it was inevitable and also understandable that Harris should have resisted pressure from above to direct his bomber force from the attack on German cities. After all, Bomber Command justifiably prided itself on having for three years been the only instrument of force the Western powers had brought directly to bear against the territory of the Reich (the US Eighth Air Force had more recently come to the struggle). Moreover, Harris was the spokesman of a service whose singular and unique
raison d’être
was to bomb the enemy’s homeland.

The Luftwaffe, on the other hand, never espoused such an operational doctrine. Its chiefs had considered the desirability of founding it as a strategic bomber force in 1934 when it came into being, but rejected the option because they judged the German aircraft industry too underdeveloped to provide the necessary complement of large, long-range machines. Like the Red Air Force, it therefore grew to maturity as a handmaiden of the army, a role which its leaders, for the most part ex-army officers, were content to accept. Its ‘strategic’ campaign against Britain in 1940-1 was thus mounted with medium-range bombers designed for ground-support missions. When Günther Korten succeeded Hans Jeschonnek as Luftwaffe chief of staff in August 1943 he instituted a ‘crash’ effort to create a strategic bomber arm, but the attempt foundered for lack of the appropriate aircraft as a direct result of the decisions about the Luftwaffe’s future taken by his predecessor a decade earlier.