D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

liberating one town after another. ‘We have had a warm welcome all along the route,’ wrote a British officer, ‘although quite a number of the people still seem dazed and bewildered. The very young do not quite know what is going on. I saw one little boy proudly giving the Nazi salute as though it were the correct greeting and others looking at their mothers to see if it was right to wave.’
    In Putanges on the upper Orne, where many Germans had been cut off, the scenes were chaotic. ‘While I was talking to the Brigadier,’ wrote Major Neave in his diary, ‘a German half-track - driven by a Boche - and packed full of Boches passed by. Two civilian French - presumably Maquis - were sitting at the back with Sten guns, and a Frenchman on a motorcycle led the party. The Boche looked extremely unhappy and the French were shrieking with laughter.’
    Meanwhile Hodges’s First US Army was advancing from the south-west and the British XII Corps from the north-west. On 17 August, the Polish 1st Armoured Division received orders to push on to Chambois. But as the Poles were nearly five miles ahead of the Canadian 4th Armoured Division, they knew that they were in for a tough fight until support arrived. They reorganized rapidly. General Maczek sent the 24th Lancers and the 10th Dragoons towards Chambois, while the rest of the division took up positions around Mont Ormel. This was one of the dominant features along the high, wooded escarpment which overlooks the River Dives and seals the north-east end of the Falaise plain.
    That day, the American 90th Division at Bourg-Saint-Léonard, south of Chambois, received a nasty shock when the Das Reich division and the remnants of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier-Division suddenly attacked, forcing them to withdraw rapidly. General Gerow sent them back that evening to recapture this vital high ground.
     
    Generalfeldmarschall Model called a conference for 09.00 hours on 18 August at Fontaine l’Abbé. Eberbach, who had set out at 03.00 hours, still arrived two hours late because of the blocked roads. Oberstgruppenführer Hausser of the Seventh Army could not get through, so he was represented by Gersdorff, his chief of staff. Model gave them instructions for withdrawal to the line of the Seine. The panzer divisions were to hold open the bottleneck. But halfway through the meeting news came in that the Canadians had indeed taken Trun. Eberbach left immediately to organize a counter-attack by II Panzer Corps, now outside the pocket, but another shortage of fuel would delay them.
    On the road to Vimoutiers, Eberbach’s staff car was strafed by Allied fighters and the general had to shelter in a ditch. The RAF and Quesada’s Ninth Tactical Air Force were out in strength on that day and the next. Flying conditions were almost perfect, and with the remains of two German armies packed into an area roughly twelve miles by five, there was no shortage of targets. Successful Typhoon rocket strikes on vehicles were marked by widening columns of oily smoke. ‘The black mushrooms kept appearing,’ wrote General Meindl, ‘a sign that the enemy planes were having good hunting.’ He felt dazed by what he called ‘the flail of a fabulous air superiority’. He was also furious with the drivers, whose desperate attempts to escape sent up more clouds of dust, attracting the attention of fighter-bomber pilots. ‘It was enough to make one tear one’s hair and ask oneself if the drivers had gone off their heads completely and were hastening to place themselves in the view of the enemy planes until they went up in a blaze.’ There was little anti-aircraft fire to deter the Allied aircrew. Few of the self-propelled flak vehicles had survived, and army units, unlike his paratroops, did not believe in using small arms against aircraft.
    There was little sense of pity among the Allied pilots. ‘We rippled the rockets,’ wrote an Australian Typhoon pilot, ‘then separately we did cannon attacks into the massed crowds of soldiers. We would commence firing, and then slowly pull the line of cannon fire through the crowd and then pull up and go around again and again until the ammunition ran out. After each run, which resulted in a large vacant path of chopped up soldiers, the space would be almost immediately filled with other escapees.’ General von Lüttwitz of the 2nd Panzer-Division surveyed the scene that day with horror: ‘On the road great heaps of vehicles, dead horses and dead