The Battle of the Falaise Pocket, fought from 12 to 21 August 1944, ended the Battle of Normandy. American forces swung up from the south while Canadian, British and Polish troops pushed south from Caen, trapping much of two German armies around Falaise. To close the last escape route, General Stanisław Maczek's Polish 1st Armoured Division seized Hill 262 at Mont Ormel, which the Poles called Maczuga, the Mace, and linked up with the Americans at Chambois on 19 August. For two days the cut-off Poles held the hill against desperate German attacks from inside and outside the pocket, until Canadian troops reached them on 21 August.5
In August 1944 the German armies in Normandy were caught in a closing trap. The last road out ran past a wooded ridge near the village of Mont Ormel, and on that ridge stood the Polish soldiers of General Stanisław Maczek: about 1,500 infantrymen and 80 tanks, cut off, short of ammunition and attacked from both sides.6
Part of The greatest battles of World War II · Before: D-Day · Next: Operation Market Garden
The trap in Normandy
For seven weeks after D-Day the Allies were stuck. In the hedgerow country of the west and on the open plain around Caen, they gained ground by the yard. Hitler forbade any retreat, so the German divisions fought where they stood and were ground down without replacement. At the end of July the Americans broke through at last in Operation Cobra, took Avranches, and sent George Patton's new Third Army racing out into open country.7
Hitler's answer made the disaster complete. On the night of 6 to 7 August he threw four panzer divisions at Mortain, aiming for the sea at Avranches to cut Patton off. The attack stalled within a day under American artillery and rocket-firing Typhoons, but Hitler ordered it pressed on regardless. Every mile his tanks drove west carried them deeper into a sack.8
The Allied commanders saw the chance. While the Americans under Omar Bradley and George Patton swung north toward Argentan, the First Canadian Army attacked south from Caen toward Falaise in Operation Totalize, opened on the night of 7 August, and again in Operation Tractable on 14 August. Both attacks were hit by Allied bombs that fell short on Canadian and Polish troops. Falaise itself fell to the 2nd Canadian Division on 16 August. Between the two pincers lay much of the German Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army, perhaps 100,000 men, whose only way out was a narrowing gap between Trun and Chambois.9
The gap at Argentan
The trap should have shut sooner. On 13 August Bradley halted Patton's XV Corps just south of Argentan while the Canadians were still several miles short of Falaise. The stretch between them, less than 25 miles, became known as the Argentan to Falaise gap. Why Bradley did not let Patton push on to close it became, in the words of the US Army's official historian Martin Blumenson, the subject of a considerable polemic, and the argument has never been settled. While the generals hesitated, tens of thousands of Germans slipped east.10
On 16 August Hitler at last allowed a withdrawal. Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, blamed for the failure at Mortain, was relieved of command, and Field Marshal Walter Model replaced him. Montgomery now ordered the Canadian corps to close the gap further east, at Trun and Chambois. His orders to the Poles were blunt: the 1st Polish Armoured Division must thrust on past Trun to Chambois at all costs, and as quickly as possible.11
Maczek's armored division
The Polish 1st Armoured Division carried a proud lineage. Its core went back to the 10th Cavalry Brigade, which Stanisław Maczek had led as Poland's first mechanized brigade in September 1939. After the defeat of Poland and then of France, its survivors escaped to Britain, and the division was formed in Scotland in 1942 from them and from Polish volunteers.12
The division crossed to Normandy at the turn of July and August 1944 and went into action under Canadian command. Its first battle, in Operation Totalize from 8 August, brought slow progress against stubborn German counterattacks. On 6 August, the Polish press agency's history portal records, Maczek called on his men to fight hard, but chivalrously. In mid-August he split the division into battlegroups and sent them deep into the German rear to help close the gap.13
Hill 262, the Mace
Mont Ormel is a ridge about two miles long that straddles the road from Chambois to Vimoutiers and dominates the countryside for miles around. Shortly after noon on 19 August the Polish advance guard reached its northern end, marked on the maps as Hill 262, and took it after a short fight. Maczek called the ridge Maczuga, the Mace, after its club-like shape on the map.14
Moving south along the ridge, the Polish tanks caught a German column of vehicles and armor driving bumper to bumper on the Chambois road and destroyed it. The smoke of the burning column hung over the valley into the dusk. That evening another Polish group fought its way into Chambois, a village in flames and choked with dead men and horses, and met the American 90th Division there. The Poles handed the Americans about 1,300 prisoners. The ring around the German armies was, for the moment, closed.15
Two days surrounded
By midnight about 1,500 Polish infantrymen and some 80 tanks held a perimeter on the northern end of the ridge. Two infantry battalions and a tank regiment faced west, toward the pocket. The rest guarded the approaches from the north and east, because the Germans would come from both sides. No supplies had reached them.16
On 20 August the Germans came. From inside the pocket, paratroopers of General Meindl's corps, who had slipped across the Dives in the night, made for the ridge, and behind them crowded every unit that still hoped to escape. From outside, the 2nd SS Panzer Division, already out of the trap, turned back to attack the hill from the rear and hold the corridor open. The climax came about five in the afternoon, when German infantry and tanks broke into the northeastern part of the perimeter. Infantrymen, tank crews and mortar men fighting as riflemen after their bombs were gone finally threw them out. Another thrust between two Polish battalions was sealed off only around seven.17
The hill held, but the night was grim. Ammunition and fuel were almost gone. About 300 wounded lay in the open under fire without proper care, and some 800 German prisoners had to be guarded inside the small perimeter. A Canadian artillery observer with the Poles, Captain Pierre Sévigny, kept calling down fire from the guns of II Canadian Corps on the Germans massing below. One Polish regiment counted about 110 men still able to fight.18
On the morning of 21 August the Germans attacked again from two directions and broke into the positions before the assaults faded. Around one in the afternoon the Canadian Grenadier Guards, after five hours of fighting along the road from Chambois, reached the hill. Their war diary records that the Poles had had no supplies for three days and that the Poles cried with joy when the Canadians arrived. That evening the pocket was declared closed.19
The corridor of death
The ground the Poles overlooked became a slaughterhouse. The roads of the pocket, wrote Blumenson, were like chalk marks on a billiard table, in plain view of Allied aircraft and artillery observers, and from the night of 18 August Allied guns poured in fire from every side. Columns of men, horses and vehicles tried to cross the Dives at St. Lambert and Chambois under that fire. One veteran later remembered that the whole plain seemed to be in motion.20
When it was over, the Allies counted the wreckage. Operational research teams found more than 8,000 German vehicles damaged, destroyed or abandoned, among them 456 tanks and self-propelled guns, and later estimates rose higher still. A Polish Press Agency account on dzieje.pl gives different figures: more than 400 tanks, 7,000 other vehicles and nearly 1,000 guns. Touring the ground, Eisenhower said the scene could be described only by Dante: it was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.21
Why Falaise mattered
The pocket destroyed the German position in Normandy. The numbers vary by source. The Juno Beach Centre estimates that about 100,000 Germans were trapped and fewer than half escaped, with about 10,000 killed and 40,000 taken prisoner. Blumenson counts some 50,000 captured and about 10,000 dead found on the field, and the Imperial War Museums put the toll at about 60,000 killed or captured and about 50,000 escaped. Those who got away left most of their heavy equipment behind. The Poles alone took more than 5,000 prisoners.22
The price was high. The Canadians lost about 5,500 men, 1,470 of them killed, between 8 and 21 August. The Polish division's losses in the Falaise fighting are given as 325 killed, about 1,000 wounded and 114 missing, though another account puts the dead at 466. Paris was liberated on 25 August, and by the end of the month the Germans were back across the Seine. Montgomery's verdict, as Polish sources record it, was that the Germans had been caught as if in a bottle, and the Polish division was the cork.23
Memory and Mont Ormel today
After the battle Canadian engineers put up a sign on the hill that read simply: A Polish Battlefield. Today a memorial stands on Hill 262, built twenty years after the battle, with a museum beside it that shows weapons, helmets and uniforms from the fighting, a film in four languages, including Polish, and an animated map of how the battle unfolded. From the hilltop the view runs down across the Dives valley where the German columns tried to escape.24
Maczek never went home. After the war the communist government stripped him of his Polish citizenship, and he lived in Edinburgh, working for years as a barman. His citizenship was restored in 1989. He died in Edinburgh on 11 December 1994 at the age of 102 and, as he had asked, was buried in Breda in the Netherlands, among the soldiers he had led. For Poles the stand on the Mace remains one of the proudest feats of the war in the West, a battle fought for your freedom and ours.25 › Stanisław Maczek
