The Falaise Pocket

The battle of the Falaise Pocket, which took place from 16 to 19 August 1944, took its name from a combat situation that developed late in the Normandy Campaign, subsequent to the Allied breakout which turned the direction of the Allied invasion eastward toward Germany. A popular military history website has postulated, concerning this battle, that it actually gave rise to the operational thinking behind the more famously known operation—MARKET-GARDEN. The gist is that the “unexpected” success of Operation OVERLORD, the Normandy Campaign, created an opportunity for striking Germany’s industrial region much more quickly than earlier thought possible. For it had been anticipated that the advance of the western front towards Germany would be a long, hard slog—and it was that until about eight weeks into the Normandy Campaign when, rather suddenly, the German defenses in front of the southward advance of the Allied right flank, in the west around the town of St. Lo, collapsed. “What actually happened,” writes the author of this particular posting—

“was that the Allies were bogged down for many weeks in a virtual stalemate in Normandy and that the German defense … virtually collapsed overnight leading to the Falaise pocket, which was a complete disaster for the Germans, of the same magnitude as Stalingrad had been on the Eastern Front.”[1]

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery

Now, while it is somewhat of a stretch to compare the impact upon the Third Reich of battle of the Falaise Pocket with the stupendous disaster at Stalingrad, it is no stretch to say that the German lines fronting St. Lo did collapse virtually overnight. Because of the generally steady advance of British armor-supported infantry operations in the vicinity of Caen, on the Allies left flank—in the east and therefore much closer to Paris—German forces in the west, facing the steady advance of U.S. forces in the west faced the possibility of being cut off. Quite literally overnight those western units were pulled back to shore up the defense of the approaches to the Seine River—and to Paris. Their pull-back, coupled with the rapid advance and eastward turning of the U.S. divisions under Bradley, the so-called Allied breakout, created a “pocket” or an ever-dwindling space between the advancing Allied front on the right (west), as it wheeled eastward, and then northeastward, and the rear of the Allied (Dempsey’s) forces on the left (east). For a time there was a very real possibility that 80,000[2] Germans might be caught in this pocket and be totally wiped out. That they were not destroyed was the result of a combination of factors, the most significant being the Allied ground commander, Montgomery’s, propensity for over-cautiousness, the slowness of the Allied operational machinery to take swift advantage of developing battlefield situations, and the length of the Allied lines of communications, particularly behind the right wing advance of Bradley’s. The very last thing the Allied commanders wanted was to make the kind of mistake that would put their forces into the kind of predicament the Germans in the vicinity of the town of the town of Falaise found themselves in late August, 1944. Hence, though much of their equipment was destroyed,[3] “something over 20,000” German soldiers, “with only the clothes on their backs and personal weapons,”[4] lived to fight another day.

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[1] Unknown, “Operation Market-Garden,” History of War.org, http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/
battles_arnhem.html (accessed 27 July 2012).

[2] Carlo D’Este, Decision in Normandy (New York, E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1983), 430.

[3] Maps of World War II: Battle of the Falaise Pocket: August 16-19, 1944, On War.com, http://www.
onwar.com/maps/wwii/westfront/falaise.htm (accessed 27 July 2012).

[4] Max Hastings, OVERLORD: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 314.