The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  For another day German stragglers died trying to ford the Dives or sneak through the shadows. Others surrendered, shouting “Merde pour la guerre”—Shit on the war. “It was more of an execution than a battle,” a Canadian gunner said. Several hundred Germans with armored cars and blazing 20mm guns charged through the wheat toward Trun on Monday; a Canadian line of eight Vickers machine guns “shot them down in droves,” one soldier recorded. “It lasts a half hour or so.” The dead were picked clean of Lugers, daggers, watches, and bloody francs, spread in the sun to dry. An old Frenchman pushing a cart poked a dead German with his foot, the reporter Iris Carpenter wrote, then chortled as he urinated on the body “with the greatest care and deliberation, subjecting each feature in the gray face to equally timed proportions of debasement.” Yes, merde pour la guerre.

  * * *

  At last the guns fell silent, leaving the battlefield to resemble “one of those paintings of Waterloo or Borodino,” wrote Alan Moorehead, who cabled the Daily Express, “I think I see the end of Germany from here.”

  Distances may deceive in war, and the German demise was farther off than he and others realized. The pursuit and annihilation of a beaten foe is among the most difficult military skills to master, as demonstrated from Gettysburg to Alamein; and defeats in Russia, North Africa, and Italy had taught the Wehrmacht how to retreat. Precisely a year earlier, 110,000 Germans and Italians had escaped seemingly sure destruction at Messina.

  “All German formations that cross the Seine will be incapable of combat during the months to come,” Montgomery promised London. That too was optimistic, and more enemy troops crossed than should have. Alas, no corps de chasse nipped at German heels for the forty miles from Vimoutiers to the river.

  After liberating Orléans and Chartres on August 16 and 18, respectively, Third Army was ordered to swing below Paris and cross the Seine east of the capital en route to the German frontier. Fuel shortages already required daily emergency airlifts from England, but Eisenhower had ordered his lieutenants to outrun the enemy as he made for home. Of Patton’s legions, only XV Corps had swiveled north, crossing the Seine on August 20 by boat, raft, treadway bridge, and a narrow footpath atop a dam near Mantes, thirty miles west of Paris. German blocking forces thwarted efforts to sweep downstream along the riverbank, but GIs managed to overrun La Roche–Guyon after firing mortars and rifle grenades into the courtyard; Model and his staff scurried off to Margival, where Rommel, Rundstedt, and Hitler had met two months earlier.

  The Allied victory, though extraordinary, was incomplete. Despite “inextricable confusion,” in one German general’s phrase, as well as “shootings, threats, and violent measures” by SS toughs who controlled many of the sixty Seine crossing sites, those who escaped the Falaise Pocket mostly escaped Normandy. Two dozen improvised ferries, hidden by day along the oxbow glades, shuttled 25,000 vehicles to the east bank from August 20 to 24. Soldiers unable to book passage nailed together rafts from cider barrels, or pried doors from their hinges and floated them with empty fuel cans. Others lashed saplings with phone wire or clung to the bloated carcass of a dead cow drifting downstream. British intelligence estimated that 95 percent of German troops who reached the river also made the far bank. Estimates of the number escaping the Falaise trap ranged from thirty thousand to more than a hundred thousand; those who got away included four of five corps commanders, twelve of fifteen division commanders, and many capable staff officers. Tens of thousands more who were never within the pocket now joined the retreat across France.

  Yet by any measure the defeat at Falaise was profound. Perhaps ten thousand Germans lay dead and fifty thousand more had been captured. Thunderbolts buzzed the roads, herding men waving white flags into prisoner columns. “Life in the cages is pretty crude,” an American officer told his diary on August 24. “I heard one soldier tell another that water is being sold at 300 francs per canteen.” Among the dead was Marshal Kluge: en route to Berlin after his displacement by Model, he stopped outside Verdun, spread a blanket in the underbrush, and swallowed a cyanide capsule. “When you receive these lines, I shall be no more,” he told Hitler in a valedictory note. “The German people have suffered so unspeakably that it is time to bring the horror to a close.” The Führer composed his epitaph: “Perhaps he couldn’t see any way out.… It’s like a western thriller.”

  Allied investigators counted nearly seven hundred tanks and self-propelled guns wrecked or abandoned from Falaise to the river. No Seine ferry could carry a Tiger, and panzers stood scuttled and charred on the docks at Rouen and elsewhere. The tally also included a thousand artillery pieces and twenty-five hundred trucks and cars. Model told Hitler that his panzer and panzer grenadier divisions averaged “five to ten tanks each.” Divisions in the Fifth Panzer Army averaged only three thousand men, with barely one-third of their equipment. Army Group B had been demolished, complementing the destruction of Army Group Center in White Russia in June, although many divisions would display a knack for resurrection. As the historian Raymond Callahan later wrote, “The remarkable resurgence of the German army in the autumn obviously owes something forever unquantifiable to the imperfect Allied victory of Falaise.”

  Eisenhower took a quick tour of the pocket, swinging from Falaise to Trun and as far northeast as Vimoutiers. Two miles from Chambois, he climbed from the staff car and walked through the carnage wrought by his armies. “Indescribable horror and destruction,” wrote a lieutenant colonel in his entourage. “German guns and trucks and wagons, bloated dead by the score scattered everywhere.” Some were buried on the road verges, their paybooks tacked to crude crosses. A Canadian chaplain reported five thousand others tossed into a bulldozed mass grave at St.-Lambert. Charred corpses in burned-out panzers were dubbed “coal monuments” by Polish troops. British soldiers fired Sten rounds to evacuate gases from still more corpses before they were burned in a pyre. A German officer sat in the rear of a limousine next to his stylish mistress, both dead from cannon shells through the chest. “It was as if,” one officer wrote, “an avenging angel had swept the area bent on destroying all things German.”

  Troops cleansing the pocket wore gas masks to cope with what became known as the “Falaise smell.” Corruption even seeped into Spitfire cockpits at fifteen hundred feet. “Everything is dead,” wrote Ernie Pyle, who had arrived on August 21. “The men, the machines, the animals—and you alone are left alive.” A Canadian executioner with a pistol hiked along a stream bank where dozens of wounded horses “stood patiently waiting to die in the water.” The labor of clearing eight thousand slaughtered horses and countless cows would keep the bulldozers busy until November; Allied administrators declared the Dives an “unhealthy zone,” and drinking water was trucked in for months. Not until 1961 would scrap-metal collectors remove the last battle detritus from the orchards and grain fields.

  Norman schoolchildren sang in English to Canadian soldiers, “Thank you for liberating us.” The U.S. stock market tumbled in anticipation of peace and falling corporate profits. Reports from southern France suggested that a Franco-American invasion on the Mediterranean coast had pushed the enemy back on his heels. Many recalled November 1918, when the German army had abruptly disintegrated. “It is,” Montgomery declared, “the beginning of the end of the war.”

  That much was true.

  The Loveliest Story of Our Time

  WARM summer rain drenched the motley legions of liberation at dawn on Thursday, August 24, as three columns from the French 2nd Armored Division made ready for battle twenty miles southwest of Paris. Village women scurried through the bivouacs carrying urns of coffee and platters heaped with fried eggs and breakfast rolls. Soldiers finished shaving with ritualistic precision, then shouldered their weapons and swaggered into formation, “booming like bitterns throughout the wood,” as an American colonel later wrote, “pounding their chests and screaming, ‘En avant!’”

  Tricolor pennants flew from three thousand vehicles named for Napoleonic triumphs or for Fre
nch towns now unshackled, like Caen and Cherbourg. Each tank and scout car bore a white silhouette of France with the cross of Lorraine superimposed. The twelve thousand troops comprised not only French regulars, but sailors far from the sea, Lebanese Christian engineers, and Senegalese riflemen who until three weeks earlier had never set foot on European France. Also in the ranks could be found Spanish Republicans, Gaullists, monarchists, Jews, Muslims, Catholic reactionaries, animists, anarchists, antipapists, communists, socialists, freethinkers, and militant Quakers.

  Scores of frisky “warcos”—war correspondents—buzzed about swapping rumors, including a ludicrous report that any procession into Paris must await the arrival of Franklin Roosevelt. Among the scribes was Pyle, wearing a beret that made him resemble Montgomery; also Hemingway, credentialed to Collier’s magazine but commanding various French cutthroats whom he had ostensibly supplied with tommy guns and pistols and who called him Colonel or “le grand capitaine.” These irregulars, wrote Robert Capa, could be seen “copying his sailor bear walk, spitting short sentences from the corners of their mouths,” while Papa nipped from a canteen of calvados and patted the grenade tucked inside his field jacket, “just in case.” Hundreds of other Resistance fighters fell in, including a circus truck of sharpshooters who hissed the day’s challenge and parole to one another—“Paris” and “Orléans”—and daydreamed of unfurling a tricolor on the Arc de Triomphe after four years of the stinking swastika.

  Astride the road outside Limours, with tank goggles perched on his kepi and clutching the malacca cane he had carried through the war, stood the commander of this unorthodox cavalcade, Philippe François Marie, vicomte de Hauteclocque, who had concocted the nom de guerre of Jacques Philippe Leclerc to prevent reprisals against his wife and six children. Scion of minor gentry from Picardy, lithe and avian with azure eyes and a deep voice, Leclerc cultivated an air of mystery: “Like the Scarlet Pimpernel [he] is said to have been seen here, there, and everywhere,” wrote the OSS operative David Bruce, who was among Leclerc’s oddball lieutenants that Thursday morning. Leclerc had been a cavalry captain in June 1940 when he was wounded; he narrowly eluded German capture, escaping by bicycle to southwestern France, then slipping through Spain and Portugal on a forged passport amended with a child’s toy printing set. Sent by De Gaulle from London to rally anti-Vichy resistance in central Africa, he reclaimed the Cameroons and Chad for Free France, routed the Italian garrison at Koufra in southern Libya, then marched across the continent with four thousand men and a camel corps in a Kiplingesque anabasis to tender his services to Montgomery at Tripoli in January 1943. He subsequently organized the 2nd Armored Division in Morocco before landing over Utah Beach on August 1, the vanguard of a reborn French army in France. A devout Catholic who received the Eucharist every day, gunplay permitting, Leclerc also evinced a mulish streak that discomfited his ostensible superiors, as when he had snarled the roads at Argentan. Now informed that U.S. intelligence detected five thousand SS troops ready to die for Paris, Leclerc pointed an index finger at heaven and said, “Have no fear, we shall smash them.”

  En avant, then, en avant. Bumper to bumper the columns surged forward at seven A.M., escorted by “a weird assortment of private cars, trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles,” Don Whitehead reported. Veterans of the Franco-Prussian War stood at attention on the sidewalks, snapping stiff salutes. Cheering civilians tossed flowers, apples, and tomatoes, and offered tankards of “beer, cider, white and red Bordeaux, white and red Burgundy, champagne, rum, whiskey, cognac, Armagnac, and calvados,” David Bruce recorded, “enough to wreck one’s constitution.”

  Or perhaps enough to dull one’s martial edge. Ignoring General Gerow’s order to enter Paris from the west through Versailles, Leclerc shifted his weight to attack from the south past Arpajon, outrunning his artillery support and inadvertently stumbling into the thickest German perimeter defenses. The lesser, leftmost column punched through St.-Cyr to the intact Pont de Sèvres on the Seine, a few miles from the Eiffel Tower; the Arpajon force, after briefly sprinting at fifty miles an hour, soon battled roadblocks and street ambushes in suburban Massy and Fresnes. By Thursday evening the spearhead remained five miles from the Porte d’Orléans and eight miles from the city’s heart. Leclerc had suffered more than 300 casualties, with 35 tanks and 117 other vehicles destroyed.

  An irate Gerow complained to Bradley by radio about Leclerc “dancing to Paris” and “advancing on a one-tank front.” Equally irked, Bradley ordered the U.S. 4th Infantry Division to outflank the French and “slam on in” to the city from the southeast. Leclerc had a note dropped by spotter plane over central Paris: “Tenez bon. Nous arrivons.” Hold on. We’re coming.

  * * *

  Eisenhower had long planned to bypass Paris to avoid street brawling and because SHAEF logisticians warned that victualing the city would be “equivalent to the maintenance of eight divisions” in combat. But events had forced his hand. Labor strikes began on August 11, first by rail and subway workers, then by the police, three thousand of whom seized the préfecture on August 18. Wehrmacht patrols were bushwhacked across the city; ration convoys were hijacked while traveling from train depots. Shootouts left 125 Parisians dead on August 19. The last train carrying Jewish deportees had left Paris for the east on August 15.

  De Gaulle, who arrived in Cherbourg on August 20, feared another Warsaw: after a Polish uprising there began on August 1, in errant anticipation of the Red Army’s arrival, the Germans had methodically razed the city. Some 35,000 Resistance fighters infested greater Paris as part of a loose organization known as the French Forces of the Interior, or FFI, but their arsenal included only 570 rifles and 820 revolvers. De Gaulle moreover believed an insurrection would strengthen French communists, one of whom, a sheet-metal worker known as Colonel Rol, thundered that “Paris is worth 200,000 dead.” Eisenhower had consistently promised De Gaulle that French troops would free the city when the moment ripened; Deux Mètres now not only invoked that pledge but also displayed his genius for “tantrums, sulks, insults, postures, silence, Olympian detachment, political self-righteousness, [and] moral holier-than-thouery,” as the historian John Keegan later wrote.

  The moment grew riper. As the insurrection intensified, messengers had slipped from the capital, foretelling catastrophe if the Allies did not step in, quickly. Hundreds of skirmishes broke out before a fitful truce took hold, widely ignored by both the SS and the communists. Isolated in enclaves, German defenders built strongpoints and deployed 88mm antitank guns on approaches to the city. Parisians resurrected the nineteenth-century art of barricade building, using street cobblestones, manhole covers, upended German trucks, and even a five-hole pissotière. Soon more than four hundred such redoubts stippled the city, including barricades with portraits of Hitler propped up like targets. “The pictures of Delacroix and Daumier had been studied not in vain,” a postwar account noted, “and some [Parisians] affected the loose neckerchief and shirt unbuttoned to bare the chest.” Insurgents stitched FFI armbands and mass-produced Molotov cocktails with champagne bottles; the lightly wounded wore arm slings fashioned from Hermès scarves. “For every Parisian, a Boche,” communist placards urged. A clandestine radio station played “La Marseillaise,” banned for four years; Parisians turned up the volume and opened their windows. “I have the feeling,” a German sergeant wrote his wife, “things are going to get bad here fast.” Another envoy, a plump Swedish ball-bearing factory manager named Raoul Nordling, told Bradley that at least some German authorities hoped for an Allied intervention before scorched-earth reprisals became inevitable.

  By Tuesday, August 22, Eisenhower had relented. “If the enemy tries to hold Paris with any real strength,” the supreme commander told the Combined Chiefs, “he would be a constant menace to our flank.” Ambiguous intelligence suggested a German withdrawal. “It looks now as if we’d be compelled to go into Paris,” Eisenhower wrote Beetle Smith. “Bradley and his G-2 think we can and must walk in.”

  Som
e Germans were indeed decamping. Hitler authorized the departure of clerks and police apparatchiks. One journalist described how “Gestapo small fry in gabardine raincoats” crowded the train stations along with “gray mice,” uniformed German females. Ash from burning documents drifted around the Hôtel de Talleyrand and the Bois de Boulogne. Vindictive soldiers smashed hospital elevators and clogged the plumbing with concrete, then stripped foliage from boulevard trees to camouflage trucks piled high with bidets, carpets, and other loot. “We’ll be back for Christmas,” they shouted. Parisians, who for four years had so painstakingly avoided eye contact that Germans joked about “la ville sans regard”—the city that never looks at you—now jeered and flourished toilet brushes at their departing occupiers.