The battle was over and the whole of the area from the Orne in the west to Mount Ormel in the east and from Falaise in the north to Argentan in the south was one vast cemetery of uninterred dead. Of all that area the largest number had been killed and the greatest amount of damage caused in the sector between Chambois-Trun-Vimoutiers . The Canadian official history reported that the heaviest concentration was south and south west of St Lambert, that is to say, in the area leading up to the escape routes. The acrid smell of burning and burnt-out vehicles was bad but the stomach was turned by the stench of the dead men and horses - and there were thousands of dead horses. The smell was all-pervading and overpowering. So strong in fact that pilots of light artillery observation aircraft flying over the area reported that the stench affected them ever hundreds of feet in the air.

Above the battlefield shimmered a miasma of decay and putrefaction; everything was covered with flies and blue-bottles. In the hot August sun the cattle which had been killed only days before were masses of crawling maggots, and the unburied Germans, swollen to elephantine grossness by the hot sun inflating the gases in the stomach, lay with blackened faces in grotesque positions. Here there was no dignity of death. In the worst bombarded areas fragments of bodies festooned the trees and on the Mount Ormel heights an ambulance convoy, hit and destroyed by Typhoons, presented a disgusting spectacle. The immobile wounded had been trapped in the ambulances and had burned to death in so fierce a blaze that their calcined bodies had shrunk to the size of mannikins.

There were whole areas in which one could not pass without treading upon a carpet of the dead. Eisenhower described how it was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time stepping on nothing but the dead and on decaying flesh. Some roads were completely impassable due to the congestion caused by burned-out trucks, dead horses, smashed tanks and destruction on a scale which the Western Allies had never seen.

Clearing the area was a low priority task and, indeed, some cattle lay rotting until well into November. When it was necessary to clear a congested road then bulldozers were brought in to shovel open large grave areas into which the animal cadavers were pushed and the whole site then covered over. The foetid stench and the rotting bodies were sufficient for the Allies to declare the whole of the area around the Dives river as an ”unhealthy zone” and supplied the civilian population with drinking water brought by convoy from towns as far away as Caen.

It was not until 1961 that the last traces visible to travellers through the area were finally removed, but there are still some signs. Allied tanks form memorials at Mount Ormel and at St Christophe le Jajolet the new bricks in older houses and the pock-marking of shrapnel can still be seen, but it is the countryside itself which remains the most potent memorial. The area is as quiet now as it was before the war came to it, for the valley of the Dives is not a tourist area, but even in its peace it still retains an atmosphere of the horrors which were played out there during the August days of 1944, when two armies were funnelled into and across a few bridges and a ford.

One considers the lie of the land and the few crossing points and then as sudden as a shot in the brain come the questions to which there have been no answers given: why did not the German engineers build bridges across the river so as to increase the number of escape points and why did they not create smoke-screens during daylight hours to hide from Allied aircraft the columns moving out of the pocket? Why was no road kept open leading into the pocket so as to bring forward the badly needed ammunition and the supplies which could have nourished the units holding the walls? There are many questions unanswered; much blame to be apportioned and much praise to be lavished. Some of the unanswered questions were mentioned above; some of the blame has already been laid at the doors of those who were responsible and the praise must go, as it always and rightly should, to the common soldiers and their junior officers, for this was truly a soldiers' battle from beginning to end. The British, the Poles, the French, the Canadians, the Americans - all the Allies fought well, but against that background of carnage and destruction there stands illuminated the ordinary German soldier - infantryman, panzergrenadier and tank man. They never failed to do their duty in conditions which were, particularly towards the end, no less than apocalyptic. Much of their sacrifice would not have been necessary had the generals who commanded them shown the same courage in confronting Hitler as did the simple soldier in facing tanks, guns, air assault, hunger, thirst and privation. The generals failed their men and the 10,000 German dead of the Falaise pocket were the price of their failure .

It was over. Behind the thin screen of ss grenadiers, paratroopers and Army units which the 353rd Division had formed, the miscellaneous groups which had escaped encirclement began to move towards the Seine, closely pursued by soldiers who were no less exhausted than the Germans but in whose nostrils there was the heady scent of victory.

The Seine was neither a refuge nor a barrier against the energetic tank thrusts of the Allied armor, but for an all too brief period, so far as the Germans were concerned, there was a momentary lessening of the tension - a breathing space in which the losses of the Normandy campaign could be totaled. One German historian estimated that only 20,000 men of the 80,000 in the pocket managed to escape, that a further 50,000 were taken prisoner and that 10,000 died on the field of battle. The American registration unit which carried out investigations in those sectors in which only US troops had fought reported that it found 220 tanks, 160 self-propelled guns, more than 700 pieces of artillery and 5,000 vehicles. British investigators of an Operational Research Team carrying out a similar exercise in the British, Canadian and Polish areas reported that in that sector there were 187 armored fighting vehicles and self-propelled guns, 157 armored cars or personnel carriers, 1,800 lorries, 669 civilian cars or staff vehicles and 252 pieces of ordnance. Neither team reported on the number of horse-drawn carts which were found or tried to estimate the number of dead animals.

The losses suffered by the Hitler Youth Division were shocking. The divisional commander, Panzermeyer, calculated that he lost 80 per cent of his Grenadiers, the same percentage of his tanks, 70 per cent of the divisional reconnaissance and personnel carriers, 60 per cent of the artillery and 50 per cent of the soft-skinned vehicles.

The German troops lost in the pocket could have been used to halt the further advances of 3rd vs Army towards the Seine, had they been withdrawn in time. But they were destroyed piecemeal and while they were suffering and dying American armored columns, brushing aside the weak opposition which faced them in the heartland of France, captured Paris on 25 August. Four days later the last German troops had crossed the Seine, as Matthew Cooper points out in his work on the German Army, skillfully led by commanders who prevented the retreat from becoming a rout and this despite losses in equipment on an unbelievable scale. Between one hundred and one hundred and twenty armored fighting vehicles were brought across the Seine; 2,200 had been destroyed or abandoned in Normandy. Fifty Divisions had been committed to action during June. Now only ten could be classed as fighting units. In three months the battle of Normandy had cost the Germans almost twice as many men as had the fighting in Stalingrad.

It is easy to blame Hitler for all the mistakes and there can be no doubt that the military ability of the Supreme Commander had been shown to be faulty, but the early chapters of this book have also shown how differences in opinion among the senior German field commanders, their deeply laid habits of unquestioning obedience to authority and the fact that many had been compromised by association with the 20 July bomb plotters, led to them fighting battles or accepting orders to undertake offensives for which there was no hope of victory and every probability of utter defeat. Guderian describes exactly the results of the High Command attitude.

While our panzer units still existed our leaders had chosen to fight a static battle in Normandy. Now that our motorized forces have been squandered and destroyed they were compelled to fight the mobile battle that they had hitherto refused to face. Favorable chances that the boldness of the American Command occasionally offered us we were no longer in a position to exploit. The original intention - to counter-attack the southern wing of the advancing Americans - had to be given up. It was clear that the German Army in the West was not about to face total disaster, it was already experiencing it, and there was no reason why the war could not be brought to an end in September. Generals Blumentritt and Zimmermann, in answers to questions raised during an interrogation and dealing with this phase of operations on the Western front, stated that by the end of August and the beginning of September the situation facing the German Army in the West was critical.

The two Army Groups'B' and'G' had been torn wide open on their inner flanks and the danger existed that the mass of Army Group'G' would be caught in the valley of the Rhone and crushed against the plateau of the Langres. Similarly Army Group'B' had been split in the center and the 5th Panzer Army, holding that sector, had been as good as annihilated. The 15th Army on the right was threatened with encirclement while Ist Army, on the left, was being pressed back eastwards and had been flung back towards Luxembourg and the Ardennes.

The way to the Ruhr and to the heart of Germany lay open, so far as they were concerned, to any commander who had sufficient forces and was bold enough to risk a decisive thrust. Operation Market Garden, Montgomery's imaginative thrust to lay a 90 km long airborne carpet, provided such an opportunity and with its failure there died the chance to have capitalized upon the victories which had been won in a single month, in August 1944, in and around Falaise.

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