Waffen-SS: The Falaise Pocket, 1944

Background

The Waffen-SS panzer divisions had inflicted fearsome losses on Allied units in Normandy between June and August 1944. However, by mid-August German forces were threatened with encirclement and destruction. The SS units managed to keep open the Allied jaws before they finally snapped shut at Falaise, and what was left of the once mighty Wehrmacht in France retreated east.

Kluge's suicide

While Kurt Meyer's panzer crews were duelling with Montgomery's tanks on the road out of Caen, the German front in Normandy was in the process of collapsing. Hans von Kluge, the commander of Army Group B, was pleading with Hitler to allow a withdrawal of the 400,000 troops that were now threatened with encirclement. The Führer ordered Kluge to stand and fight. The German armies were now being pressed into an ever-smaller area between Falaise and Argentan, and relentlessly pounded with artillery and air strikes. Kluge drove to visit Dietrich's headquarters on 15 August, and got stuck in the maelstrom for several hours after his convoy was strafed by Allied fighters and his radio truck destroyed. Suspicious that Kluge had been trying to negotiate a surrender, Hitler ordered him back to Berlin. Kluge bit on a cyanide capsule instead and was dead in seconds. The next most senior general in Normandy was Hausser, so he was appointed to command all the troops trapped in the Falaise Kessel (or kettle).

Kluge's replacement, Field Marshal Walther Model, reluctantly agreed to order a withdrawal on the 16th to set up a new line on the Dives River, but the senior Waffen-SS officers, who now held all the important commands in the kessel, had been pulling back for five days - they had realized that the battle was lost.

The Waffen-SS pulls back

The Leibstandarte, Das Reich and 17th SS Divisions east of Mortain had been the first to fall back. Threatened by encirclement by American tanks to the south and British armour from the north, they staged a brief rearguard action on the Orne River at Putanges on the night of 17/18 August. After its sister divisions had safely crossed at midnight, the Leibstandarte blew up the last bridge and slipped away. II SS Panzer Corps was next to go, ordered to fall back through Argentan to form a counterattack force.

prev | next