World Battlefronts: Defeat in the North

Flesh and blood could no longer stand before Omar Bradley’s slashing tank-infantry assaults, the endless, unopposed scourging by the greatest array of air power in history.

The Germans finally retreated. To escape a trap they fell back in disordered ribbons toward Paris and the Seine. On the road back, the swift-striking armor, the crunching weight of Allied guns, the unequaled devastation from the air would have even greater play. The Germans in western France were ripe for annihilation.

That was the situation last week when General “Ike” Eisenhower called on his troops to seize their opportunity: let no German escape. Said he in an order of the day:

“We can make this week a momentous one in the history of this war — a brilliant and fruitful week for us, a fateful one for the ambitions of the Nazi tyrants.”

Range of Destruction. Ike Eisenhower had moved to France and become a field commander again in order to be in at the kill. His tank-infantry teams, swinging in from behind, had brought Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s Seventh Army (20 to 40 divisions of the Reich’s best troops) into range of destruction.

Too late, Kluge, blinded by lack of air power, had learned what he was up against. In full daylight retreat, spread out on the roads, his troops had been chopped, torn, disorganized by an air assault that had no counterpart in all warfare.

The full fury of that attack could not yet be measured. There was no time for the statistics of destruction. But there were bits and pieces that gave a faint glimmer of what the Germans faced this week. In two days, fighters of the U.S. Eighth Air Force (ordinarily bombers’ escorts) destroyed nearly 1,000 trucks and vehicles. The Ninth Air Force fighters ran up an even larger score—nearly 1,800 vehicles. The big strategic bombers—Fortresses and Liberators, night-flying Lancasters and Halifaxes, every aircraft that could tote a bomb—raked the lines of retreat that reached back to Paris.

Outblitzed, Bewildered. Ike Eisenhower’s push had developed faster than the Germans had reckoned. Omar Bradley’s tankmen and truck-borne infantry —a new-formed Third Army—had stunned the enemy again &again with swift, piercing strokes:

They had shot a column over the Loire below Nantes (threatening a thrust toward Bordeaux). They had taken Angers in a drive that seemed aimed at Tours (the central supply base of World War I’s A.E.F.). These threatened whatever help Kluge hoped to get from the south. They were bewildering feints, as well.

They had covered 55 miles in 36 hours to take Le Mans. From there they had shot out more columns, reportedly to within sight of the magnificent Gothic cathedral at Chartres, only 30 miles from Paris.

Creaking Hinge. But apparently all this was only flank protection. The main effort had been put into a wide arc which swung around the Seventh Army’s unhinged left flank. The German Army facing north and west found itself being menaced from the south and east. Its route of escape was a narrow corridor to the east.

When the Americans reached Alençon, Field Marshal von Kluge recognized the mistake he had made. After Omar Bradley broke into Brittany (TIME, Aug. 7), Kluge had a choice to make. He could have brought his Fifteenth Army down from Flanders and his Nineteenth Army up from southern France and drawn the Seventh Army back so that the three could form a new front along the Seine and the Loire. But this would have involved leaving the Pas-de-Calais and Belgian robomb coasts and southern France open to attack.

Kluge took a bolder course. He left the Seventh Army to hold the British and Canadians in Normandy. He counted on the Americans spending time to mop up Brittany while he was scraping together reserves to seal off the Brittany peninsula. But he had underestimated U.S. speed and daring. Leaving mopping-up to wait, the Americans had already taken Le Mans and were swinging north against the Seventh Army’s rear when Kluge’s reinforcements began to arrive over his battered roads. Underrating the American threat, Kluge threw his reinforcements into an attempt to push his dangling flank to the sea near Avranches. This only drove his troops deeper into Eisenhower’s trap.

Then the Allies in the north began to move. Brisk, wiry Lieut. General Henry Duncan Graham Crerar’s Canadian First Army moved behind a 1 ,000-plane breakout bombing, fought fiercely to set up bridgeheads over the Orne, battled a German bulge to the west in which Kluge vainly spent some of his reserves.

Farther to the west Lieut. General Sir Miles C. Dempsey’s heavy force of Britons inched forward. Kluge’s right began to give at the great hinge below Caen just as his left had been unseated two weeks before by the Americans.

Plane v. Bicycle. Kluge was in a pretty fix. His supply lines had been bomb-ravaged (in three days more than 600 locomotives, nearly 7,000 freight cars had been destroyed). Reinforcements were delayed (one unit bicycled nine days to reach the front).

Now pushed between the Canadians striking south toward Falaise and the Americans striking north 12 miles below, the Seventh Army finally began to pull back. By this time Kluge was bringing part of the Fifteenth Army down to hold the line of the Seine but it was a question whether the Seventh Army could reach the Seine. The tattered Seventh might wriggle out of its corridor but the roads all the way back to the Seine were being strafed, and the bridges across it had been bombed out. In a coffin-shaped area roughly outlined by the Seine, Falaise, Argentan and ancient fivreux, Eisenhower had a chance of destroying the entire Seventh Army.