D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

unbreathable,’ he wrote.
     
    On 21 August, Montgomery issued a declaration to the 21st Army Group: ‘The victory has been definite, complete and decisive. “The Lord mighty in battle” has given us the victory.’ Many, however, did not agree that the victory had been ‘definite, complete and decisive’. General Eberbach estimated that perhaps some 20,000 men, twenty-five tanks and fifty self-propelled guns had escaped the encirclement. ‘The losses of tanks from lack of gasoline were greater than those due to all kinds of enemy armaments put together,’ he wrote later. Gersdorff believed that between 20,000 and 30,000 managed to cross the Seine. 74 On the Allied side, Montgomery’s strongest critics were British.
    ‘One of Monty’s great errors was at Falaise,’ Air Chief Marshal Tedder said after the war. ‘There he imperiously told US troops to stop and leave the British area alone. He didn’t close the gap.’ Predictably, Air Chief Marshal Coningham, who loathed Montgomery, was even harsher: ‘Monty is supposed to have done a great job at Falaise. [But he] really helped the Germans get away. He still wanted to do the job by himself, and kept the Americans from coming up. We closed on Falaise too late.’ Coningham attributed his actions to jealousy of Patton, which is not entirely true.
    According to Montgomery’s chief of staff, General Freddie de Guingand, Montgomery had been ‘too tidy’. He thought the Americans should have been allowed to join the Poles at Trun. Monty regarded Bradley as under his command. Monty, said Brigadier Williams of the 21st Army Group, was ‘the high cock on the dungheap’. When Montgomery told Bradley to hold back at Argentan, ‘Bradley was indignant. We were indignant on Bradley’s behalf.’ According to Williams, Montgomery ‘was fundamentally more interested in full envelopment than this inner envelopment. We fell between two stools. He missed his chance of closing at the Seine by doing the envelopment at Falaise. Monty changed his mind and went for a short hook too late, perhaps because he was afraid of the Americans taking all the credit.’
    These strictures certainly indicate the frustration which boiled among both British and American officers at the missed opportunity to destroy the German armies in Normandy entirely. They are unfair in some respects. It was Bradley’s decision to allow Patton to split Haislip’s corps at Argentan, not Montgomery’s. But there can be little doubt that Montgomery’s failure to reinforce the Canadians at the crucial moment constituted a major factor in allowing so many German troops, especially those of the SS panzer divisions, to escape. The only chance of catching Model’s battered remnants during the last ten days of August now lay on the River Seine.

28
    The Paris Uprising and the Race for the Seine
    Even before the battle of the Falaise encirclement had started, General Leclerc had been consumed with impatience. To have his whole force caught up in the fighting round Argentan while most of Patton’s other divisions were sent towards the Seine had filled him with frustration. Then, on 17 August, when the 2ème DB was ordered to attack Trun, Leclerc at first refused. His American corps commander ‘had to ask him categorically whether he would disobey a written order’. Leclerc eventually backed down. Eisenhower, on becoming Supreme Allied Commander had agreed to de Gaulle’s request that French troops would be allowed to enter Paris first. In return, de Gaulle had promised that the French would do everything to support him. The political could not be separated from the military, especially when it came to symbolic gestures of vital importance to the French.
    While Leclerc’s division was stuck under General Gerow’s V Corps, clearing up the south-east corner of the Falaise gap, Patton’s Third Army had advanced much further than Bradley had realized. Patton, with his various corps spread over such a huge area, had to abandon his Jeep and take to the air. ‘This Army covers so much ground that I have to fly in Cubs most places,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t like it. I feel like a clay pigeon.’
    Haislip’s XV Corps had moved from Dreux to Mantes on the Seine, where one of his regiments would cross the river on the night of 19 August. Patton, after a flying visit, proudly announced to Bradley that he had ‘pissed in the river that morning’. Meanwhile, XX Corps was advancing on Fontainebleau and Melun