Falaise: The Flawed Victory - The Destruction of Panzergruppe West, August 1944

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In the hot, dusty summer of 1944 Hitler’s panzers fought desperately, first to throw the Allies back into the sea and then to extricate themselves from encirclement in the Normandy countryside. For two and a half bloody months the Germans held the Allies at bay following Operation Overlord and the D-Day landings, but when they were finally trapped in the Falaise pocket it became a corridor of death.

General Dwight Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander, conjuring an image of Dante’s Inferno, remarked:

The final defeat of the German Army in the Falaise pocket on 20 August 1944 is rightly seen as the culmination of the hard-fought Normandy campaign. The destruction of the Wehrmacht, especially the vital panzer divisions in the West, seemed assured. Some likened it to Hitler’s crushing defeats at Stalingrad and in Tunisia.

Eisenhower’s view of Falaise though was tainted with an air of regret:

Respected American military historian Steven Zaloga is on record as saying: ‘Controversy over the Falaise Gap has been a staple of popular histories of the war, many of the accounts being sensationalist clap-trap’. That the Battle for Normandy did not go exactly to plan and that the pinching off of the Falaise pocket was not achieved with the finesse that the Allies may have liked should not detract from the fact that the desired result was achieved.

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