Author's note. The video above shows the aftermath of the fighting at the Falaise Pocket.
Directly facing the 2nd Canadians Corps are parts of four infantry divisions and 12th Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) Division with fifty 88 mm guns and 110 tanks including 20 Tigers. The assault, code named Tractable, is similar to the earlier attack at Verrières ridge except that it is in daylight and the force is concealed behind a giant smoke screen.
Prior to the main attack, 2nd Division suffers many casualties as it runs into fanatical resistance from German Panzer grenadiers and a number of the almost unstoppable Tiger tanks. However, resistance is uneven and a barrage of propaganda leaflets produces a large number of surrendering Germans.
Most of the infantry are utterly exhausted by August 12th. The long marches loaded with shovels, weapons and extra ammunition for the heavy machine guns and anti tank Piats and the frantic digging to gain shelter from shell fire reduce them to the extreme limit of endurance. Sleep is nearly impossible. German resistance is stiffening and they are under fire almost continuously. They are also debilitated with dysentery (Enteritis) and crawling with lice. Words cannot describe the capacity of men to carry on despite agonizing fear, grinding fatigue and a dull, despairing fatalism, day after day unable to remember events even an hour before.
The battle for Falaise begins at 11.25 am. with an immense barrage including coloured smoke shells to mark targets for the bombers. The valley is soon obscured by smoke from the 25 pounders into which the flail tanks leading columns of 21st and 22nd Canadian Armoured Regiments tanks, advance at 11:40 am. Behind these are the armoured cars of 7th Rece, and then the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade in Kangkaroos. Soon the advance degenerates into a disorderly array of moving vehicles while German prisoners stream back to our start lines. The Royal Air Force is bombing targets bypassed by the advance when some of the aircraft start dropping bombs, well short of their targets, on massive arrays of Canadian and Polish tanks, guns and infantry.
The men frantically wave strips of yellow cloth identifying them as friendly troops and others ignite yellow smoke canisters but still the bombs fall. A little Auster aircraft, of the type used by airborne artillery observers, flies close below the bombers firing red flares, risking death as the pilot desperately tries to stop the bombing.
But it continues for one and a half hours. Sir Arthur Conningham, Commander in Chief RAF Tactical Forces watches the debacle from the turret of an armoured car but even he is unable to stop it.
Final estimates are 150 dead and 250 wounded which seems impossibly low. It is a miracle anyone survived.
The surviving Royals have lost almost all of their equipment including clothing, six anti tank guns, fifteen mortars, seventeen machine guns, 29 wireless sets and 24 vehicles. They wander about in a futile attempt to find wounded men and missing equipment. Moral is at rock bottom until a rum ration and a meal can be supplied. By midnight the quartermaster has replaced most of the lost clothing and equipment and in the morning the seriously under strength battalion moves out, some of the men armed only with shovels.
We pack all the gear from the command post into our armoured car ready for the next move toward Falaise but when I check the guns nothing has moved. They are still in the gun pits with the quads alongside but the gunners are sprawled around as if dead. I find one of the quad drivers collapsed over his steering wheel and ask what the hell is going on.
He replies, 'Just suffering the shits, sir . . . like everybody else.'
Dysentery has plagued us all for weeks and the medical officer long ago ran out of medicine. I wake up one of the gunners and gently remind him that the infantry are depending on us, we can't let them down. I repeat the entreaties with each of the men and gradually the gun sergeants persuade all of them to move. You will never admire men more as they slowly go to work looking as if they are dying on their feet.
I think of the infantry dragging their weapons forward, digging trenches and with the little strength they have left (from the enteritis) have to fight off German counter attacks.
The drivers gingerly work their gun towing quads along a narrow trail marked through a German minefield and negotiate huge bomb craters at our new position. And then it starts to rain heavily. I abandon procedure and keep the quads with guns so that the gunners have some shelter inside the quads. Luckily we are not called on to fire all night and the men can rest.
On August 18 the guns are positioned southeast of Falaise overlooking a narrow corridor between the 1st Canadian and the U.S. armies. At first there seems to be little action except for low flying Tiffies (Typhoons) and Spitfires.
Two thousand Polish troops with 70 tanks, cut off on a little hill and resisting attacks from both sides as the Germans desperately try to keep the corridor open, suffer 1,450 casualties, 450 of them fatal.
I target a distant line of men and horse drawn wagons attempting to escape the shrinking pocket and order fire. There are by now 3000 allied guns within range of the pocket and all add to the carnage.
Between August 10 and 25, 25,000 Germans die in the pocket and 40,000 are taken prisoner. In the Normandy fighting, the Germans lose 400,000 men half of them as prisoners.
Little remains of the elite 12th S.S Hitlerjugend Panzer Division. After Failaise, they have only ten tanks, no guns and only 300 of the 20,000 young fanatics who murdered Canadian prisoners at the start of the Normandy campaign. The elite 2nd S.S Das Reich Panzer Division is reduced to 15 tanks and 450 of the men who shot all the men of Oradour-sur-Glane and murdered 400 women and children, burning them to death in the church as a reprisal for delaying attacks by the French maquis.
The war in Europe will continue for another ten months but the end is insight as we fight our way north through Belgium and the Netherlands before the last great battle to cross the Rhine.
The video shows actual scenes of the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944 before the events described above. There are no actors in any of the videos shown.
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Normandy 1944
Non-FictionThis work is an extended review of The Guns of Normandy by George Blackburn in honour all Canadian soldiers who died in Normandy 75 year ago and those who gave their lives more than 100 years ago in the first world war. It describes the brutal bat...
