Meindl and his paratroops, meanwhile, had been able to continue on towards the heights of Coudehard and Mont Ormel only after the detachment of Polish tanks set off for a new position. Meindl suddenly spotted another group of paratroops advancing in skirmishing order across an open field. He whistled. Their young commander recognized him and Meindl heard him mutter, ‘Oh, it’s the old man.’ Meindl briefed him rapidly and told him to take all the paratroops with him. The only way to get past the blocking detachments of tanks was by a flanking attack to the north. In return, the young officer told him that Oberstgruppenfuhrer Hausser was not far away.
After a circuitous route, Meindl found the commander-in-chief of the Seventh Army sheltering in a bomb crater with men of the SS
The improvised attack went forward, and, ‘as if by a miracle’, they seized the heights of Coudehard at 16.30 hours when the Waffen-SS panzers attacked from the other direction, thus breaking the encirclement and creating a gap nearly two miles wide. The few prisoners they took confirmed that they had been up against the 1st Polish Armoured Division.
In the meantime General Hausser, who had been badly wounded, was evacuated on the back of one of the very few tanks left. Meindl’s main concern that afternoon was to send through the rest of the wounded in a column of clearly marked ambulances. ‘Not a shot was fired at them,’ wrote Meindl, ‘and I recognised, with thankfulness in my heart, the chivalrous attitude of the enemy.’ He waited a full half-hour after the column had disappeared before sending through any fighting troops, ‘so that there should not be the slightest suspicion in the mind of the enemy that we had taken any unfair advantage’.
News had spread behind them that a gap had been opened at Coudehard and that night a mass of stragglers hurried forward to take advantage of the opportunity. Meindl, however, was disgusted to hear from a senior officer who joined him that many more, including officers, had considered escape a hopeless project. As it grew light on 21 August, Meindl decided that they would not be able to hold open the gap for another day. He went round waking his men. It was not an easy task. Having organized a force to cover there treat, he set off on foot eastwards towards the Seine. It began to rain steadily. That at least would help conceal the route of the long snaking column of exhausted men.
Although part of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division finally arrived to strengthen the cordon between Trun and Saint-Lambert, small groups of Germans had continued to slip through all day. Some of them joined the SS combat teams fighting to keep open the gap, but a US spotter plane circling above them continued to direct artillery fire on the retreating troops. On the southern shoulder of the gap, a combat team from Leclerc’s 2eme DB had taken up position on a hill, where they found themselves almost next to the main Polish force. And further round to the south-west, the Langlade battlegroup with the American 90th Division fought ‘German attempts, more or less disorganized, to break through between Chambois and the Foret de Gouffern’.
That day was also a significant one for the citizens of Caen. The very final shell, fired from the line of the River Touques, fell on the city: ‘the sixty-sixth and last day of the martyrdom of Caen’.
On 21 August the Polish armoured division, cut off around Mont Ormel, was finally reinforced and resupplied by Canadian troops.[73] The gap was sealed. General Eberbach, accepting that hardly any more men would now escape, ordered the remains of II SS Panzer Corps to pull back to the Seine. The badly wounded Oberstgruppenfuhrer Hausser was taken to the provisional Seventh Army command post at Le Sap, where he told General von Funck to take over. (General Eberbach assumed command two days later.) Staff officers began to collect and reorganize troops. To their surprise, they found that in many cases over 2,000 men per division had escaped, but this figure still seems high.
Those German troops left behind showed little resistance. It was time to round up prisoners. ‘[The] Yanks say they collected hundreds all day,’ Major Julius Neave wrote in his diary. ‘The 6th Durham Light infantry have just reported that they are in a wonderful position and can see hundreds more walking towards them.’ Many units regarded flushing Germans out of the woods as a sport. But there were tragedies too. In Ecouche, the Germans had left hundreds of mines and boobytraps. ‘A boy of about ten years stepped out of the church to meet us,’ reported a young American officer with the 38th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, ‘and was blown up by one of these anti- personnel mines.’ British sappers, who had just arrived, began to clear the town to try to prevent any more accidents. They dealt with 240 mines.
At first it was hard to enter the area of the pocket because the roads were blocked with burnt-out vehicles. Tanks and recovery vehicles had to work round the clock clearing a path. The scenes inside defied belief. ‘The roads were choked with wreckage and the swollen bodies of men and horses,’ wrote the commander of a Typhoon wing, interested in seeing the results of their work. He was clearly shaken. ‘Bits of uniform were plastered to shattered tanks and trunks and human remains hung in grotesque shapes on the blackened hedgerows. Corpses lay in pools of dried blood, staring into space as if their eyes were being forced from their sockets. Two grey-clad bodies, both minus their legs, leaned against a clay bank as if in prayer.’ Amid the skeletons of burnt trees, the detritus of war and of military bureaucracy lay all around, including typewriters and exploded mailbags. ‘I picked up a photograph of a smiling German recruit standing between his parents, two solemn peasants who stared back at me in accusation.’ It was a sharp reminder that ‘each grey-clad body was a mother’s son’.
The writer Kingsley Amis, who also witnessed the scene, was struck by the massive number of draught animals which the Germans had used in their attempts to escape: ‘The horses seemed almost more pitiful, rigid in the shafts with their upper lips drawn above their teeth as if in continuing pain.’
American soldiers were drawn by the prospect of souvenirs to send home. A group from the 6th Engineer Special Brigade came across a whole cossack squadron lying beside their horses, as one of their number described: ‘The Don cossacks, the Terek cossacks, all these wore their original cossack uniforms except for the German emblem on their breast, the eagle and swastika. They had the fur hats, and we found out later that the head of this squadron was named Captain Zagordny. His wife was killed right beside him. She rode along with him when they rode out. The French people I heard were terrified of the Russians.’ The party of engineers eagerly collected up the long Russian sabres, ‘which still had the hammer and sickle on them’. Some men even collected saddles as well as weapons, and they threw everything into the back of their trucks. They were later allowed to take all their booty home, but not the sabres, because they were marked with the Soviet symbol. American military authorities did not want to upset their great ally, who was so sensitive about all the former Red Army soldiers fighting on the German side.
As well as the large numbers of prisoners, there were also several thousand German wounded to look after. During the mopping up, a German field hospital with 250 wounded was discovered, hidden deep in the Foret de Gouffern. Most of the injured left in the pocket had received no medical care at all.
British and American medical services were soon swamped. Their doctors were helped by hard-working German medical orderlies. ‘On the collapse of the Falaise pocket,’ wrote Lieutenant Colonel Snyder, ‘750 German wounded were brought in. Some of them were lightly wounded German officers, who complained that they had had to walk. One of the German orderlies, overhearing this, called back: “When I was in the German army, you officers told us we should march all day without grumbling”.’
Many
