Hitler

landing of troops, armaments, and provisions. (At this point only Cherbourg, with a much-damaged harbour, was in Allied hands.) Hitler was prepared, as he bluntly stated, ‘simply to sacrifice certain troops’ to this end. The ports were to be held, he emphasized, ‘under all circumstances, with complete disregard for the people there, to make it impossible for the enemy to supply unlimited numbers of men’. Should this not happen, a breakthrough could come quickly. Along with this, in an early glimpse of what would become a ‘scorched-earth’ policy targeted finally at the Reich itself, all railway installations, including track and locomotives, were to be destroyed, as were bridges. The ports, too, were in the last resort to be destroyed if they could not be held. If the ports could be held for between six and ten weeks in the autumn, precious time would have been gained.
    Time was, however, not on Hitler’s side. Learning of the gravity of the Allied capture of Avranches, he ordered – picking up on an operational plan that had been put forward by Kluge – an immediate counterstrike westwards from Mortain, initially intended to take place on 2 August, aimed at retaking Avranches and splitting the advancing American forces under General George S. Patton. The counter-offensive, eventually launched on 7 August, proved disastrous. It lasted only a day, could not prevent some of Patton’s troops from sweeping down into Brittany (where stiff defence, however, saw the garrison at Brest hold out until 19 September), and ended with the German forces in disarray but narrowly avoiding even worse calamity.
    On 15 August Hitler refused Kluge’s request to pull back around 100,000 troops threatened with imminent disaster through encirclement near Falaise. When he was unable to reach Kluge that day – the field-marshal had entered the battle-zone itself in the heart of the ‘Falaise pocket’ and his radio had been put out of action by enemy fire – Hitler, well aware of Kluge’s flirtation with the conspiracy against him and of his pessimism about the western front, jumped to the conclusion that he was negotiating a surrender with the western Allies. It was, said Hitler, ‘the worst day of his life’. He promptly recalled Field-Marshal Model, one of his most trusted generals, from the eastern front, appointed him to take over from Kluge and dispatched him to western front headquarters. Until Model arrived, Kluge had not even been informedby Hitler that he was about to be dismissed. Hitler’s peremptory handwritten note, handed over by Model and ordering Kluge back to Germany, ended with the threateningly ambiguous comment that the field-marshal should contemplate in which direction he wished to go. Model’s arrival was unable to alter the plight of the German troops, but under his command – assisted by tactical errors of the Allied ground-forces commander, General Montgomery – it proved possible to squeeze out at the last minute some 50,000 men from the ever-closing ‘Falaise pocket’ to fight again another day, closer to home. As many again, however, were taken prisoner and a further 10,000 killed.
    Kluge must have reckoned with the near certainty that he would be promptly arrested, expelled from the Wehrmacht, and put before the People’s Court for his connections with the plotters against Hitler. On the way back to Germany on 19 August, in the vicinity of Metz, he asked his chauffeur to stop the car for a rest. Depressed, worn out, and in despair, he swallowed a cyanide pill.
    The day before, he had written a letter to Hitler. The field-marshal, who (as Hitler knew) had had prior knowledge of the bomb-plot, and who had even the year before Stauffenberg’s attempt shown sympathy for Tresckow and the oppositional group in Army Group Centre, used his dying words to praise Hitler’s leadership. ‘My Führer, I have always admired your greatness,’ he wrote. ‘You have led an honest, an entirely great struggle,’ he continued, with reference to the war in the east. ‘History will testify to that.’ He then appealed to Hitler now to show the necessary greatness to bring to an end a struggle with no prospect of success in order to release the suffering of his people. This dying plea was as far as he would go to distance himself from the Dictator’s war leadership. He ended with a final vow of loyalty: ‘I depart from you, my Führer, to whom I was inwardly closer than you perhaps imagined, in the