Eisenhower: Volume 1 by Stephen E. Ambrose

Author:Stephen E. Ambrose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Eisenhower, on August 15, told the reporters that he expected that Hitler would end up hanging himself, but before he did he would “fight to the bitter end,” and most of his troops would fight with him. 30 It was a leap into the mind of the enemy, the highest form of the military art, and he was exactly right.

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Just how right Eisenhower was the Germans demonstrated in the Falaise pocket. They rejected the easy way out—surrender—and fought to hold open their escape route. Despite Eisenhower’s plea in his Order of the Day, it was the Germans, not the Allies, who made the supreme effort at Falaise. The rigidity with which the field commanders held to the boundary lines at Argentan and Falaise helped the Germans, to be sure, but the main factors were German fighting ability and determination. The gap was not closed until August 19; some forty thousand Wehrmacht troops escaped.

Eisenhower was disappointed but not downcast. “Due to the extraordinary defensive measures taken by the enemy,” he explained to Marshall, “it is possible that our total bag of prisoners will not be so great as I first anticipated.” 31 Falaise left a taste of bitterness and led to recrimination between the British and the Americans as to whose fault it was that any Germans escaped, much less forty thousand. Still, the disappointment should not obscure the fact that Falaise was a victory. Some fifty thousand Germans were captured, another ten thousand were killed. Those who escaped left their equipment behind. Later in August, Eisenhower toured the battlefield with Kay, Jimmy Gault, and press representatives. Gault wrote, “We were certainly not disappointed in the results, because the scene was one of masses of destroyed tanks, guns, transports and equipment of all sorts lying around, including many dead Germans and horses. The smell was tremendous.” 32 Eisenhower said that the scene “could be described only by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.” 33 Falaise, in fact, ended the Battle of France. The Germans, those who were left, were retreating pell-mell toward the border. They could not defend the line of the Seine, nor any other in France; their only safety lay in the West Wall. But, as Eisenhower knew, although everyone around him seemed at one time or another to forget, victory in France did not mean the end of the war, and as he told Mamie in early August, “In war there is no substitute for victory.” 34

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Following Falaise, the AEF overran France. Montgomery’s 21st Army Group drove along the coast toward Belgium, while the First and Third Armies headed east, toward Paris and beyond to the German border. The immediate question was, Should Paris be liberated? Eisenhower wished to avoid it for the present. To attack Paris might involve the Allies in prolonged street fighting and lead to the destruction of some of the most hallowed cultural monuments in the

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