The Corridor of Death
Nothing and no one was immune from attack. Colonel Heinz- Gunther Guderian, son of the victor of Sedan, was seriously wounded when his Volkswagen was strafed and set ablaze by an Allied fighter. Major General von Gersdorff was strafed and slightly wounded by a P-38 Lightning at Chambois, and he subsequently reported that "The very strong low flying attacks . . . caused high losses .... units of the Army were almost entirely destroyed by low flying attacks and artillery." One country road eastward from Moissy earned the grim sobriquet le Couloir de la Morn: the Corridor of Death. At night, intruder aircraft attacked river crossings and ferries over the Dives. At least 10,000 German soldiers died, and 50,000 fell prisoner. Nearly 350 tanks and self-propelled guns, nearly 2,500 other vehicles, and over 250 artillery pieces had been lost in the northern section alone of the Falaise pocket. Von Gersdorff stated that armored divisions that did withdraw from the gap had "extremely low" strength. For example, the 1 SS Panzer had only "weak infantry" and no tanks or artillery; the 2 Panzer had one battalion, no tanks, and no artillery; the 12 SS Panzer had 300 troops and no tanks; the 116 Panzer had two battalions, twelve tanks, and two artillery batteries; and the 21 Panzer had four battalions and ten tanks. As historian Max Hastings has shown, these figures were by no means unique; four other SS Panzer Divisions could muster no more than fifty tanks among them. (Wehrmacht armored divisions typically possessed an organizational strength of 160 tanks, and approximately 3,000 other vehicles.) The carnage of the battlefield was truly incredible and sickened many fighter-bomber pilots over the site. Eisenhower, touring the gap area two days after it closed, encountered "scenes that could only be described by Dante." Perhaps the twisted allegories of Hieronymous Bosch would have been more fitting a choice, for Dante, at least, offered hope.
With the conclusion of the battle of the Falaise gap came the denouement of the battle of Normandy. These Allied successes did not end the war, which would rage on for another nine months. But Normandy triggered the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany. Though much has been written by critics about the remarkable ability of the Wehrmacht to rejuvenate and reform itself, and about the "toughening" and "thickening" of German resistance in the weeks and months ahead, not enough attention is paid to the flip side of this: Where was that strength coming from? German forces were being hastily transferred from the Russian Front (brightening the prospects of an eventual Soviet triumph in the East) and from within the critical bone marrow of the Third Reich itself. Hitler and his minions were spending capital they did not have. The toughening of the resistance at the Western Front was the thickening of a crust-a crust that the Allies would slice through in the fall and winter of 1944-45, exposing the vulnerable Nazi heartland underneath
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