Third Phase of the Operation

The pocket, the run-out.--The Falaise-Argentan trap eventually netted 57,000 Germans. According to an unofficial report in mid-August, "There were 2 dead Germans for every live one, and the greatest stench of all time hung over the pocket." The crucial week of 12-19 August saw the Seventh Army all but liquidated, the Fifteenth Army turned back violently when it came to help, and individual soldiers rushing pell-mell across the Seine and back to Germany without organization, chain of command, weapons, or transport.

As the week started, General Patton's XV Corps was driving northward from Alencon and the Canadian First Army southward from Falaise. The Germans in the pocket had plenty of fight left. Behind them stretched an escape channel several miles wide, and on 13 August they made their first large-scale attempt to withdraw.

That morning 37 P-47 pilots of the 36th Group found 800 to 1,000 enemy vehicles of all types milling about in the pocket west of Argentan. They could see American and British forces racing to choke off the gap. They went to work. Within an hour the Thunderbolts had blown up or burned out between 400 and 500 enemy vehicles. The fighter-bombers kept at it until they ran out of bombs and ammunition. One pilot, with empty gun chambers and bomb shackles, dropped his belly tank on 12 trucks and left them all in flames. All told, on the 13th, XIX TAC fighter-bombers destroyed or damaged more than 1,000 road and rail vehicles, 45 tanks and armored vehicles, and 12 locomotives. Inside the pocket they reduced 10 enemy delaying action strong points to rubble.

The pocket was shrinking. The Germans inside used all their food and gasoline, and the trains and trucks coming to resupply them were stopped miles away from their destination. An 18-year-old prisoner fainted while being interrogated; he and his company had had no food for 4 days after fighter-bombers had smashed their field kitchen. Another prisoner, a junior officer of the 363d Infantry Division, said: "You have bombed and strafed all the roads, causing complete congestion and heavy traffic jams. You have also destroyed most of our gasoline and oil dumps, so there is no future in continuing the fight."

With the entire German force in the trap beginning to think the same way, P-47's carried leaflet bombs besides their more lethal loads.

On 14 August, 300 to 400 enemy soldiers waved a white flag when Thunderbolts of the 405th Group circled them northeast of Argentan. Fighter control was given the grid coordinates so that the nearest ground troops could pick up the prisoners.

Four days after the dismal rout of the 13th, the Germans tried another mass movement out of the pocket. Figuring that low clouds offered a reasonably good safeguard against our aircraft, they began to take to the roads two and three abreast in anything that had wheels. A short squadron of American fighter-bombers dived dangerously low through the clouds and saw the traffic jam already under attack. They sent word back to headquarters, and soon the sky was so full of British and American fighter-bombers that they had to form up in queues to make their bomb runs. The gigantic attack kept up until after nightfall. At dawn the next day the Thunderbolts of the 36th Group spotted more than 1,000 enemy vehicles headed north, bumper to bumper. Nearer Falaise, they saw 1,000 more vehicles marked off by yellow smoke. Eagerly the pilots radioed back to base, but were told not to attack because the vehicles were in the British area of responsibility. The aircraft of XIX TAC disconsolately stuck to their own operational zone, while Typhoons, Spitfires, and Mustangs of the RAF's Second Tactical Air Force annihilated or damaged almost 3,000 German vehicles.

That day a senior staff officer of the British Second Army said that the German's power of resistance had been shattered.

As the aircraft of XIX TAC, IX TAC, and 2nd TAF were cornering, immobilizing, and destroying the Germans in the pocket, General Patton's tanks reached the banks of the Seine at Mantes Gassicourt and Vernon. The XXV Corps immediately swung east along the river bank, closing a huge new trap around the enemy remnants which had escaped from Falaise. The enemy now fought to get to the Seine and across by ferry, barge, pontoon bridge, and even by swimming, the while XIX and IX TAC's sent implacable patrols over the river to catch the Germans in flight.