The American column at Avranches did not stop. German observers counted tanks and trucks moving nose to tail for hours, a river of steel that did not thin. By August 1st the town had fallen and the road east into France stood open behind it.
No German formation had the strength left to close it.
Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge read the reports at his chateau headquarters. He had commanded in the West only since July, handed the post after his predecessor was dismissed for defeatism. Now he faced an order from Hitler that he knew was impossible.
Hitler demanded a counterattack to sever the American breakout at its narrowest point. Eight panzer divisions were to strike like lightning to the sea, cutting off Patton’s army. Von Kluge studied the map and saw a different picture.
He told Berlin the chance of success was slim.
But the order became absolute on August 4th. Von Kluge began pulling tanks from every sector that could least afford to lose them. The men left behind in those thinned positions had no way of knowing what had just been taken from them.
By the night of August 6th the divisions chosen for Operation Luttich were still moving into assembly areas. The attack would open without artillery preparation, the one advantage Hitler allowed them. Silence was meant to mask the blow.
In the dark hour before dawn on August 7th, engines turned over across three assembly areas. The fog and darkness hid the four panzer divisions moving into position. It was the only cover they had left.
The attack opened against the US 30th Infantry Division, commanded by Major General Leland Hobbs. The division had held this ground for barely a week and did not yet know how much of the German army had just turned to face it.
On the northern arm, General Hinrich von Lüttwitz’s 2nd Panzer Division found a seam and drove straight through it. By gray light his tanks had crossed 15 kilometers, reaching Le Mesnil-Tôve. It should have been the proof the whole operation needed.
Instead it 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 the flank. Next to it, the 116th Panzer Division had not moved at all. Its commander, Gerhard von Schwerin, believed the attack could not succeed and gave no order to advance.
A core commander reported that von Schwerin had “made a mess of things.”
By noon on August 7th the fog lifted. Four German panzer divisions stood 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 on open ground in full daylight. The Luftwaffe had been promised to cover them.
Almost none arrived.
Allied fighters were already over German airfields around Chartres. The few that slipped through were intercepted well short of the battle. Above Mortain, the sky belonged entirely to the other side.
At a crossroads called La Blancherie, a platoon of 66 men with bazookas and anti-tank guns held the only route an SS regiment could use to keep moving west. By the time the fighting quieted, more than 60 German vehicles sat wrecked along that single road. An entire regiment had been stopped by a platoon that was never meant to hold alone.
Rocket-firing Hawker Typhoons of the RAF’s Second Tactical Air Force flew more than 300 sorties. A pilot reported the largest concentration of enemy armor anyone had seen since the invasion began. By dusk, RAF pilots alone would claim roughly 90 tanks destroyed.
Many panzer crews abandoned vehicles that were never hit, unwilling to stay inside armor that fire could turn into a furnace. A tank did not have to be destroyed to be taken out of the battle. It only had to be abandoned.
At 3:20 in the afternoon a message reached 7th Army headquarters. The Leibstandarte’s attack had been stopped completely, halted by aircraft its own commander could not see coming.
Dwight Eisenhower would later credit the Typhoons alone with smashing the enemy’s spearhead. Von Kluge’s own chief of staff, Hans Speidel, would say the armored attack was undone by Allied air power almost alone.
Hitler did not release the divisions. He ordered the offensive renewed. Even as 70 miles to the east, a hole in the German line was opening that no one at Mortain was defending.
Omar Bradley already saw more in this than a defense that was holding. To a visiting official from Washington he called it an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century. The whole of two German armies were pinned by their own attack with room opening up behind them.
On August 8th, Lieutenant General Wade Haislip’s 15th Corps, spearheading Patton’s third army, met almost nothing standing in front of it. It took Le Mans, a road junction the Germans had no force left to hold because every tank that might have held it had gone west toward a coastline the attack was never going to reach.
By August 13th, von Kluge stopped pretending the attack could still succeed. He asked Hitler for permission to call it off. Hitler agreed reluctantly, because the ground east of Mortain had become more dangerous than the coastline the attack was supposed to reach.
There was only one road east still open for the armies von Kluge needed to save. It ran through two small towns: Trun and Chambois. A bottleneck that would decide how much of Army Group B got out and how much did not.
Haislip’s 15th Corps reached high ground above Argentan, close enough to see the town. Bradley stopped him, wary of American and Canadian forces colliding in the dark. Patton argued.
Bradley did not move.
For three days the corps did not advance another mile. The gap between the halted Americans and the advancing Canadians measured barely 25 miles. Narrow enough that a single determined push could close it in a day.
Wide enough that for now everything still moving east through it got through.
The same divisions that had broken themselves against Mortain were now the ones holding that gap open. The force meant to punch through the American line was now the only thing keeping a German army from being sealed inside one.
On August 15th, von Kluge’s radio vehicle was destroyed in an Allied air raid. For several hours no one at his own headquarters could reach him. Hitler became convinced von Kluge had used the silence to open secret talks with the Allies.
Two days later, Field Marshal Walter Model arrived unannounced carrying a personal note from Hitler. Model had built a reputation for showing up where a line was collapsing and holding it by force of will. He had come to relieve von Kluge of every command he held.
Von Kluge was ordered back to Berlin. He told his driver to take a different road toward Metz. Somewhere along it, in the back seat, he opened a vial of potassium cyanide.
He was dead before the car reached the city.
On August 19th, Canadian and Polish tanks finally shook hands with American and French troops in the ruins of Chambois. The linkup did not close the trap so much as narrow it to a single crossing point. A footbridge over the Dives at Saint-Lambert and a ford two miles south at Moissy, both jammed with more vehicles and men than either could carry.
Above it, on a ridge the Poles named the Mace, General Stanislaw Maczek’s First Armored Division held a hilltop directly over the last open route east. Cut off from resupply, running low on ammunition for three days, they called in artillery on their own perimeter to keep from being overrun. The hill did not fall.
By August 21st the fighting inside the pocket had stopped because there was almost nothing left inside it to keep fighting with. Paul Hausser, who had led the attack out of Mortain two weeks earlier believing in exactly this kind of stroke, escaped the pocket clinging to the back of one of the last tanks to make it through. He had been shot through the jaw.
What the Allies found when they walked the ground afterward did not need much narration. Roads were blocked for miles with burned-out tanks, dead horses still in their traces, and vehicles abandoned nose to tail exactly as they had once advanced.
Official US Army accounts put German losses at roughly 10,000 killed and 50,000 captured inside the pocket. Left behind were several hundred tanks and roughly 2,500 other vehicles. The armor and transport of two German field armies abandoned because there was no fuel left to move them and no time left to try.
Nineteen days earlier, German officers watching the bridge at Avranches counted an American column that would not stop moving hour after hour. They could not yet see where all of it was going. It was going in the end exactly there: through Le Mans, through Argentan, up past a hill called the Mace to a four-mile stretch of road between two villages most of those officers had never heard of.
The attack Hitler ordered to sever that column at its source is the same attack that pulled the panzer divisions out of the positions guarding the rest of the front. The gap those divisions left behind is the gap the Americans and Canadians drove through to close around them.
A single road. A single crossing point. A force that was strong enough to attack in one direction and never strong enough to defend in every other one at once.
The hill the Poles held is still there. A memorial stands on it now, looking down over the same valley the corridor of death once ran through. A quiet field on most days that 80 years ago was the last road.
