The Germans In Normandy

Richard Hargreaves “The Germans In Normandy” Pen & Sword Military, 2006, 250 pp.

This book is about the Germans defense and escape from the Normandy peninsula—it is written from the German’s perspective, a perspective usually ignored.  The portion of the book of most interest to me was the effort of the Germans to “breakout” of the allied encirclement.  

It was an extremely brutal contest and is clearly illustrated in this following example I took from book.  It came from a German soldier’s diary:

Pg. 216: Wherever one looked there were bodies.  The stench was appalling for the fields were filled with the bodies of artillery horsed and civilian cattle.  There were columns of burnt out trucks and in the cabs of some the incinerated bodies of the drivers.  There were corpses along the roads, in the ditches, some of them blown into the tree tips.  Along some stretches of the road whole blocks of lorries formed a dam and had to be pushed to one side by pairs of tanks working together.  There could be, under such conditions, no great respect shown to the dead and bodies lying in the roads were often rolled over by the tanks and crushed under the tracks.  It was not lack of feeling, but it was more important to save the living than to respect the corpses. 

I suggest the reader google Falaise and look at some of the pictures.  The Falaise Gap became a graveyard of German men and equipment.  I have visited the beach areas of Normandy twice but have not toured the area around Falaise. This book would serve as an excellent guide for such a tour.

The allies complete domination of the air and the sea-lanes for supply was certainly key to the victory.