Dan Snow's History Hit - The Falaise Pocket: WWII's 'Corridor of Death'

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

The D-Day landings were just the first step in the liberation of France. They were followed by two months of vicious fighting for control of the Norman countryside that came at the cost of thousands of casualties. The Allies needed to deal the German defenders a final death blow; and so in mid-August, 1944, they forced a decisive engagement on the Germans near the town of Falaise, the birthplace of William the Conqueror.We're joined by historian Peter Caddick-Adams, author of '1945: Victory in the West', who takes us through the often overlooked Battle of the Falaise Pocket.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On the evening of June 6th, 1944, the Allies had much to be thankful for. They had landed on the beaches of Normandy. They had established a toehold on the shores of Northwest Europe, from which they knew they'd be very hard to dislodge. They'd sort of avoided a very costly, embarrassing, disastrous defeat. But they hadn't yet won a stunning victory. German units were overcoming their initial surprise and confusion.

They would begin advancing towards the sound of the cannon. France and the rest of Northwest Europe lay under German occupation, and the fight to liberate those places began now. So what followed, starting right there and then, was three months of savage fighting. It's known as the Battle of Normandy, but in effect it was the battle for France. It was the battle to defeat the German field army in Western Europe. Casualties would be appalling. they would be similar to the rates sustained in the big battles the first world war thousands of men a day killed wounded missing for the allies for Britain America and Canada this was their biggest single battle against Germany in the second world war and it's

one I think that we we all too often overlook it was raging 80 years ago this summer so here on the down to history podcast we thought we'd unpack it good and proper and we got the man to do that we've got the wonderful historian the legend peter caddick adams he's a brilliant broadcaster author historian specializes in military history his most recent book is 1945 victory in the west and he's working on a biography of churchill now well. So go and check those out. But in the meantime, here's the Battle of Normandy, the fillets, pocket, and more. Enjoy. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Peter, we hear a lot about the success of those D-Day landings.

6th of June, 1944. A huge achievement. Lots of troops brought ashore. The start of ports being built, airfields being created in Northwest Europe, but we hear less about what followed. Can you characterize the fighting from D plus one, the day after D-Day, right the way up until this decisive moment that we're going to talk about today? What were those weeks like?

Yeah, I mean, it's a funny old thing, isn't it? I mean, I wrote a book about D-Day and it took me nearly a thousand pages and I didn't get beyond the first 24 hours, which was not my original plan. So it just shows you how much there is action packed into that era. And that was just day one. The campaign is 77 days and we tend to look just at that first 24 hours as shorthand for the whole thing but actually the real fighting came afterwards we expected a really tough fight to break into the beaches and through all the german defenses but actually that went much much smoother than we had every right to expect And our problem was the terrain behind the beaches.

So everyone sort of says, well, why didn't we train for this peculiar Normandy terrain, which is typified by high hedgerows and small fields, which the Normans called bockage? And the answer is we weren't going to hang around now. We would just fight hard for the beaches, perhaps two or three days and then the germans would have been broken and we cruised through the rest of the normandy countryside and the plan was actually to go as far south as the loire river and then swing round onto the river seine and that would take 90 days and the campaign pretty much took that length of time but was nothing like what the allies envisaged. And the crux of the campaign is this horrible grinding fight through the Boccage, which the Germans fell back on because they got defeated on the beaches within the first 24 hours and made this sort of naturally defensive terrain their own and hedgerows are great to sort of hide in and put anti-tank weapons in and as the germans sort of slowly retreated and they used

heights because it's quite high ground in the in the west low ground in the east and the wrecks of towns they were able to provide sort of pinpoint defence so that you almost got a First World War-type stalemate of a no-man's land and two separate sets of attackers and defenders staring at one another, digging trenches to survive the artillery bombardments. And the whole thing almost grinds to a halt. Why doesn't it completely grind to a halt? What are the differences, if you like, between the First and Second World War? How are the Allies able to just keep the momentum going enough to make sure it doesn't completely bog down?

The crucial difference, I think, is twofold. One is air. And we have not only developed tactical air power in a way that the Germans can't, but we've gone through a learning curve of developing it in the North African desert and the Italian campaign. tactical aircraft onto really quite small targets so you can direct a a fighter arm with cannon or rockets onto a farmhouse something as small as that or a small copse of trees containing tanks so that's the first point and the other is the way allied armor has developed and evolved not just the tactics but the actual tanks themselves particularly to break through the hedgerows and they not only attach dozer blades to the front but weld some of rommel's metal obstacles to the front of sherman and stewart tanks and they're colloquially known as rhinos because they look as though they're beasts with horns and if you charge a sort of hedgerow with these and shake the tank around, it can

actually break through. Otherwise, the whole thing would have ground to a halt in First World War terms. But even so, the casualty rate of around about 3,000 killed or wounded every day, every single day for those 77 days, is just higher than what we receive on the Somme or Verdun in 1916 or Passchendaele in 1917. In other words, it's a much worse attritional battle. And we forget that because we win in the end and we win in about two and a half, three months time. And does the terrible mathematics of attrition come in here? If both sides are suffering awfully, are there more replacements available to the Canadians, the British and the Americans than were. And the Russians launch a massive offensive in Poland, Belarus, around about this time, Operation Bagration, which takes up the lion's share of German combat power to try and defend it. And all through the Second World War, we have to remember that 90% of the German casualties are taken on the Eastern Front. a war, we have to remember that 90% of the German casualties are taken on the Eastern Front. So every day, Hitler's military situation conference, the Eastern Front comes first,

the Western Front comes second. For us, this is our major effort. This is where all the Allied focus and assets and resources are directed. But we have a manpower shortage too, which is more serious because we're a democracy and so we can't conceal our casualties. And Montgomery is very aware that the number of allotted personnel that he has to fight this campaign is limited. He's only got one British army. And if he breaks it, he will go down in history as another butcher of the western front and he doesn't want that at all and the americans have exactly the same problem their casualties in normandy start to exceed expectations and they for all uh in a huge size of their armed forces they have a finite run of manpower and the canadians are exactly the same. They're trying to avoid conscription, which they never really get to until the very end of the war.

So there is a manpower cap for the Western allies. So the solution is metal, not flesh. You rely on artillery and strategic bombing, large four-engine bombers dropping large-caliber aerial bombs to do the job that manpower would have done. And again, that's very unlike the First World War. And you mentioned the command there, Montgomery commanding Allied forces in the field, but looking over his shoulder, because he's got Eisenhower taking a fairly active role as well, was the Allied high command a happy place at this time? The Allied command is not a happy place.

And you've got a certain amount of sort of jostling for position. So Eisenhower is a very experienced theater commander because he's done that job in the Mediterranean. But his job is facing the politicians, brushing off their demands for quicker completion of the military campaign. So he's looking upwards and underneath he's got different military commanders of whom the most prominent is Montgomery. But Montgomery is prickly, he's rather arrogant, he's not terribly collaborative and he looks down on the Americans as late comers to the war, less experienced, less good soldiers than he and the rest of the British forces.

The one acceptance that might be Patton. And so you've got two prima donnas squaring off against one another. But people make the mistake of placing Montgomery and Patton against one another. They're at different levels. So they are rivals, but they're not threats to one another. Patton is commanding the 3rd US Army, whereas Montgomery is an army group commander, so one level up. But all the same, Montgomery feels that he's got the Americans

breathing down his neck. There are more of them. He doesn't particularly like the brash approach of Patton and feels threatened by him. The British Army and Canadian Army are completely compliant because Montgomery has selected every commander from core and divisional level. And they're nearly all former staff college students of his. So they owe him big time.

And they're not going to mess up and they're not going to go off and do their own thing. So they are completely and totally under his thumb. And that's fine when it goes well. thumb. And that's fine when it goes well. But then you've got the added mix of Winston Churchill, who thinks he's a great strategist as well and keeps coming over and irritating the hell out of Monty. I mean, in a way, that's the way coalitions work and should be, because if you're talking about the Western liberal democracies, there should be a political angle and the politicians should be able to come to the battlefield if and when they want. But Montgomery doesn't deal with them in the best of possible ways. So in some, it's an uncomfortable level of command.

Eisenhower is actually a very good politician in keeping the lid on everything and stopping the politicians from interfering too much. But under him, there are newspaper campaigns to finish Normandy quicker than we're able to. And of course, the papers aren't privy to all the problems that there are. But it's not a happy place. It's not the happiest place that the Allies have been in. North Africa and Italy, probably because it was far away from London or Washington DC and the media, was a much happier place for those commanders to be. How happy, Peter, by contrast, was the German high command? And had that command structure

been streamlined since the sort of quite complicated network of commanders that we talked about on the eve of the D-Day invasion? Well, how long have I got? I mean, I think if you ask me one of the main reasons why the Germans fail on D-Day or in Normandy, it's because of the complicated nature of their command system, which has no need of being uncomplicated. And partly it's because Hitler is running a Nazi-orientated German armed forces, and you get promoted if you're a good Nazi. And he trusts you if you're a good Nazi, but he doesn't trust you if you're just merely a good soldier.

And that's the trouble. And there aren't many people who tick both boxes. So there tend to be the wrong people, as far as he's concerned, in command. And Hitler is a great hirer and firer. So there's an awful lot of competent officers who get fired because they're not advancing quick enough or they're not doing Hitler's wishes. And Hitler regards that as treason rather than simply constructive criticism, which is actually really what you need in a good functioning army. I mean, there's a bizarre setup for all Germany's tanks. They're put together into something called Panzer Group West at the beginning of 1944. By the 1st of August, that's been renamed the 5th Panzer Army, and that's very much part of our story in the Falaise pocket. But I mean, there's no other army in the world I know that takes all its tanks and puts them in a special command separate from the infantry and all the

other arms that they're dealing with. And they have a lot of misfortune. Their commanders keep getting replaced, captured, bombed, wounded, and that just sort of simply degrades their performance. All of this acts as a brake on the German efficiency. I think the cards were always stacked against the German armed forces in Normandy because the Allies simply swamped them. But the Germans could have done a lot better than they did. And they had a very strong hand of cards, if we say. But that hand of cards, because because of Hitler has played extraordinarily badly.

And just quickly, Peter, what does better than they did mean? Does that mean throwing the Allies back into the sea? Or does it just mean turning this battle for Western France and indeed all of France into just a protracted nightmare for the Allies? I don't think the Germans ever have a realistic prospect of winning in Normandy because the Allies simply swamped them. I mean, that effectively is the Allied policy. I think by the end of June 1944, we've already landed something like 800,000 troops in Normandy, and that figure rises to a million in July and two million by September. I mean, those are figures that the Germans simply can't cope with. And we are awash with fuel. We never have an embarrassment about that, whereas the Germans do. So the Germans simply can't cope with. And we are awash with fuel. We never have an embarrassment about that, whereas the Germans do.

So the Germans are never going to win, but they can impose more delays on us and more attrition and fight a better battle than they do. Eventually, as often happens at the end of prolonged periods of attrition, one side really starts to give way. Talk me through the kind of beginning

of the collapse of German forces in Normandy. The collapse is very easy to map. The Allies have been planning, were always hoping actually, to hold the Germans in the east and attack and break out in the west, no matter what various generals wrote about in their histories after the war. And that's because all the German reinforcements would be coming from the east. So the first bottleneck they have to pass through is Caen, and it makes sense to try and hold them there and distract them with lots of urban

warfare. And that's the job of Montgomery, the British and Canadians fighting under Montgomery. So less German armor and less German reinforcements flow through to the west. And that's where the Americans plan to break out, where the terrain is more difficult. There's more bockage than there is in the east. And so the Americans plan a big breakout, which begins on the 25th of July. And this is called Operation Cobra. Now, the Allies in and around Caen also on the same day launch Operation Spring, which is largely launched by the Canadians. The Germans really respond to that very, very viciously and throw it back and pretty much stall and defeat it. But the Germans haven't realized that's not the Allied main effort. And the Allied main

effort is further over in the West. so by the time they wake up to the fact that cobra in the west launched by lots of american armored divisions in and around st low is actually the main effort the americans are getting through the bockage there it takes them three days to grind their way through preceded by a bombing campaign that simply bombs flat everything in a square and then moves forward and everything within that square whether they're civilians whether they're military whether they're houses whether they're tanks just gets bombed flat and it creates chaos for the tanks and the americans advancing through it but it does mean there's no more German resistance. And that allows the Americans in the West to sort of break through.

This is initially the first U.S. Army. And then within a few days, the third U.S. Army under Patton is established on the 1st of August. And he has more armor and really exploits that situation all the way down the Cherbourg peninsula to its base, to a town called Avranches. And that is an advance of 37 miles. They've advanced more in 10 days than in the whole previous six weeks, seven weeks of the

Normandy campaign. So the break when it comes is very dramatic, very real, and almost as much a surprise to the Allies as it is to the Germans. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Battle of Normandy, 80 years ago. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. And how did the Germans respond to this breakout? And why does that lead them into a potentially even greater catastrophe? Well, Hitler is furious, so nothing is ever his fault. It's always the fault of some of his generals. And there's one very important equation that we've got to insert here. On the 20th of July. So just before Cobra begins, some German officers led by Count von Stauffenberg have tried to assassinate Hitler

at his headquarters in East Prussia. So Hitler's faith in the German army, and particularly in his German army general staff, has completely evaporated. And unless you're a member of the SS, is completely evaporated. And unless you're a member of the SS, he doesn't trust what his generals are telling him anymore. And furthermore, when they asked to withdraw or retreat, he assumes this is some kind of deal making with the allies or treason. So the German generals are fighting with one hand behind their back. And Hitler comes, his own view is that if the German generals and their staff don't do exactly what he's saying, they're committing treason rather than offering logical military solutions. So they really are fighting at a major disadvantage because they're fighting a political battle as well as a military campaign. And the military campaign is now going badly.

They're at the risk of now being surrounded by these Americans that are breaking out, moving fast across Western France. What would the logical thing to have done been? What military solution might the generals have been thinking of? Okay, so the obvious thing to do is to withdraw, to withdraw to the south and to the east, because obviously the Allies are going to aim for the German border. And what you need to do is proceed them, get back to the German border and start to defend it. I mean, you know, there's no other possible interpretation of the way the

campaign is going to go. And you need to use that time of being slightly ahead of the Allies to head back towards the fortified German front that was built before the Second World War, the Siegfried Line. Now, Hitler doesn't see it like that. He wants to stand and fight. I mean, his mentality in Russia was no retreat. And he tries to apply that in the West. And grudgingly, was no retreat. And he tries to apply that in the West. And grudgingly, all the time, he's forced always too late into agreeing to a retreat, by which time he's already forced his troops to engage the Allies. And each time they get defeated, and they lose more men, and they lose more armor, and they start to hang around, be dispersed into small groups, captured and surrounded, and that's what's going to happen for the rest of the Normandy story. Talk to me about the moment it becomes

clear that there's a really very large group who could be encircled and destroyed around the so- called Falaise Pocket. What's going on here? Okay, so I mean, Cobra breaks through the German defences. After 10 days or so, it's reached the town of Averanche, right down at the base of the Cherbourg Peninsula, and is about to break out into open countryside because all the German troops are forward of that position. There's nothing behind at all. And a quick look at the map from Hitler's point of view

shows you that the Allies have advanced through a very, very narrow corridor that's kept open really by aircraft and by armour on the flanks. So what Hitler does is he summons all his panzer divisions in Normandy and says, right, I want you to go to the west. I want you to go to a town called Mortain, and I want you to advance from Mortain towards the coast. And if you can cut through this American tank corridor, then that'll be the finish of the American campaign. And actually, that's quite a logical solution. But he's forgetting what Allied air can do. So four of the Panzer divisions, the only ones that can be made ready, get to Mortain.

They launch their attack. And it's completely degraded by the professionalism of the american army but masses and masses of air power and the german tanks grind to a halt can't punch their way through and there's now a concentration of german tanks that the allies can begin to surround so the americans can swing around to the south and then swing east and as the germans pull back montgomery's forces which are further east can start to maneuver going south so the germans are surrounded on three sides by allied forces the north you've got the british and the canadians and a polish division under british command To the west and the south, you've got the Americans

with a Free French division under command. And the Germans now are moving eastwards as fast as they can, but running out of petrol, running out of ammunition, running out of energy. When they reach the ancient town of Falaise, this is what's going to create the Falaise Pocket. Which is what, just a big bubble of encircled German troops? Yeah, I mean, a big bubble. The military have all sorts of different names for sort of surrounding and enveloping their foes. And Pocket is as good a name as the Bulge in the Battle of

the Bulge or Salient as in the eep salient but they all add up to the same sort of thing and the longer an army lingers surrounded by its foes the more it's going to be completely welled and trashed the reason why the germans have gone that way is because the fales plain that's all the land to the south and east of the old town of fales doesn't have any of these hedgerows, doesn't really have much high ground, and is open and flat. And it's great for armour. And ironically, it's the place that Montgomery reckoned he could just about get to on D-Day itself if he wasn't stopped. And that was always the British objective. Well, of course, you know,

that's complete and total fantasy. He doesn't do that. But that was somewhere where both sides wanted to go and operate because those big open spaces are a bit like the North African desert in terms of long range visibility, great for tank battles. If you're fleeing and heading back to Germany, that's a good place to get to because you've got big, wide roads instead of being hemmed in through narrow, little sunken lanes. So the Germans are, well, the Germans may have started to regret those wide open spaces, I suspect, by the time they end up there surrounded on three sides. Talk to me about this Polish division you've mentioned, because they take part in extraordinary action, don't they, to try and make sure the Germans are unable to escape effectively off to the west, back towards Paris, back towards Germany? I always think that when we talk about the Falaise Pocket, it's a bit of a misnomer and it's a bit of a distraction because it's very difficult to sort of visualise. But if you think of the Falaise Bottle, that's probably a better

visual image. So you've got the Allies on three sides of this bottle, and then you've got the cork at the end and the bottleneck. That's where the Germans are trying to flee through. And as the German position narrows, which is round about the 10th to the 13th of August, so not long after the Mortain counterattack, not long after the breakthrough, everything's happening very, very quickly now.

The neck of the bottle is being pressurized from the north by two Canadian divisions and a Polish division and from the south by the 90th American division. And eventually what you want to do is seal that bottle, put a cork in it. And it's the Polish armored division, which is the cork in the bottle and actually that position is on high ground the only bit of high ground in the area around which the sort of germans need to retreat so the poles are on high ground a place called the kudahard and mont bormel where there's a Polish memorial now. But they are effectively the cork in the bottle trying to stop the Germans retreating. And the Germans hurl themselves against those Poles.

Well, the Germans hurl themselves from two directions, because outside you've got lots of Germans battling either to get into the pocket to keep it open, as well as at the same time, you've got all the Germans in the pocket who are desperate to get out. And if we talk numbers for a minute, there are 15,000 to 20,000 Germans who are killed. We don't know for sure. That's an estimate. There are 20,000 to 50,000. Again, it's an estimate of Germans who are taken prisoner, but by so many different units, no one's ever quite done the maths. And there are the same number again, so between 20,000 and 50,000 who escaped.

So roughly, we could be talking about anything up to 100,000 Germans knocking around a battlefield, but they're all hungry. They've got no ammunition. They're being well-aid by Allied by allied aircraft allied artillery and their morale is very low and their opponents are absolutely at peak performance with no shortages of equipment at all and this is one of the key points here is that the most effective thing to do on a battlefield is try and make your enemies surrender right killing or disabling them all it requires enormous amounts of of material spent and time

and effort and bloodshed on all sides if you can surround and make a group of enemy hopeless then they'll surrender vast numbers of people are then removed from the chessboard yeah i mean that's the ideal solution so i'm talking to you in the middle of june round about the time of waterloo and of course we know at the end of Waterloo, some of the French, oh God, just refused to surrender, will quite happily die for the emperor rather than give in. And that's like some of the Germans. So some of the Germans are SS who will simply not surrender under any pretenses and will fight literally to the last cartridge. And opposite them are Poles who have been at war with Germany since the 1st of September 1939 and are not prepared to take any surrenders either. So it

is a visceral fight to the death on parts of the battlefield. Plenty of Brits and Americans of German extraction and Canadians who are quite happy to sort of take surrenders and many Germans who are quite happy to surrender. But surrenders and many Germans who are quite happy to surrender. But you never know who you're up against. That's the problem. And so you don't take the risk. If you see a German, you try and shoot and kill him. Plus, a lot of this attrition is at long range by artillery, Canadian and particularly Polish gunners on the high ground to the north, firing at Germans they can see in the distance and a lot of planes flying overhead just engaging targets and of course there's no possibility to surrender to a plane that's diving in at three to five hundred miles

an hour trying to take you out with rockets or cannon. So the Poles fight ferociously to keep this cork in the bottle are Are they successful in doing so? And what's the result of that? Yes, they do. I mean, they are surrounded. They're degraded in numbers. But this is the moment Poland is fighting back on the Western Front in Normandy. So they are not going to give way.

They lose heavily in manpower and equipment. Very curiously, they capture quite a lot of German Poles who are fighting in German uniform, who've been given the option of service in the German army or a camp. So they've chosen the German army. So these guys are given fresh Allied uniforms and recycled back into battle and actually fight for the Allies extremely well.

So that Polish Armoured Division, curiously, ends up with more people in it than they started with the poles do extraordinarily well the germans get more and more depressed by their situation but of course what the allies are trying to do is come up with this perfect solution of a complete and total envelopment and the surrender of the German army. And there is a debate between Eisenhower and Bradley who are being very cautious on one hand as to exactly where to close or to cork this bottle and Patton on the other hand, who is really quite ambitious to close the pocket early and keep everyone in it and force them to surrender. And Eisenhower and Bradley are really nervous and very, very aware of their climbing casualty bills. And so they would far rather let some Germans escape, but destroy the German army in Normandy,

which is exactly what happens. And so there are also power struggles going on in Allied high command at the same time. are also power struggles going on in Allied high command at the same time. When does it come to an end and how many Germans do they end up killing and capturing in this giant cauldron? It ends on the 20th, 21st of August, 1944, largely with the capture of three towns, Tron by the Canadians, Chambois is another town that's captured by canadians and poles and san lambert along a little river called the deeve river which is captured by a small canadian detachment led by a guy called major david curry who takes it holds it against lots of germans trying to escape

and because he goes for three days without sleep, always trying to keep his battle group in place and to keep the Germans in place, he wins the Victoria Cross. And there are a few photographs of him actually taking German prisoners in the process of this three-day battle, which ends on the 21st of August. And it's probably the only time a man is photographed actually winning the Victoria Cross in the middle of a battle. So he's one of Canada's great heroes. But the net result is that by the 21st of August, the fighting is over,

has died down. Those Germans who are going to have escaped have already gone. The rest are the dead, the dying, all those about to be taken prisoner. And the prisoner hall is anything up to 50,000. I mean, if you think that the Germans commit half a million men to the Normandy campaign, of whom at least half that number, 250,000, are killed and the rest are wounded or taken prison, just shows you how attritional that campaign is for the German armed forces. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. We talk about it as the Battle for Normandy or the Falaise Gap. In fact, it really is the struggle to liberate most of France, isn't it? Because what happens after this German defeat? Well, there are two other things we've got to insert into the mix. On the 15th of August,

the Allies land in great strength on the Riviera in the south of France, an American army and a French army working together because nearly all the German defenders have now gone up to Normandy. There's almost nothing to stop them. So they take huge amounts of terrain and the French partisans help them as well. So those two forces, those coming from the south and those coming from the north, link up in early September. from the south and those coming from the north link up in early September. So that's also going to aid the Allies. They're going to move far more swiftly, and there's a lot of logistics that come through the southern French ports, particularly Marseille. But key to that is the other factor, which is Paris. There's a fairly large German garrison in Paris. The French resistance in Paris rise up against it because they sense that the allies are

near. They know that the Germans have just been defeated in Normandy and de Gaulle is quickly on the scene because he's very worried about the communist resistance, which is very strong taking over Paris and scoring a victory for the left wing partisans. Whereas the goalists are far more right-wing. So de Gaulle is there in a flash, and he gets permission for the Free French Second Armoured Division, under his old mate General Leclerc,

to race ahead and liberate Paris. They arrive on the 25th of August, and that's liberation of Paris Day. So that's another date on which people quite often are liked to sort of acknowledge the end of the Battle of Normandy, because after that, the Germans are a spent force, and they're just running for the homeland as quick as possible. Peter, did this battle matter in the great scheme of the Second World War? The numbers are dwarfed by the numbers of casualties,

number of men involved on the Eastern Front. Why is this important? The Battle of Normandy matters hugely to the Western allies. It's the culmination of all their strategic hopes for the last two years, a landing in Normandy to liberate France in order to invade and defeat Germany. We can't get to Germany really any other way. Terrain-wise, it's too difficult to land in Belgium or Holland. It's too low-lying. The roads and lines of communication into Germany just aren't good enough or aren't good enough to sustain a large force.

So to get to Germany, you've got to go through France. And of course, because France has had this horrible occupation for four years, the desire is to liberate France, who were always great allies in the First World War and always seen as a major player in whatever balance of power in Europe. So France needed to be liberated. So it's incredibly important for the Western democracies to free the Gallic nation. How you do that, of course, is mired in controversy, particularly because of the French leader Charles de Gaulle. But we achieve it. We achieve it pretty much in the timescale. The Battle of Normandy takes 77 days. It was estimated to take 90. We end up pretty much where we expected to be along the line of the River Seine. We endure probably double the amount of casualties we expect. But we've broken through the German crust. They have nothing.

And so there is then afterwards what's called the Swan. And the Swan is simply the British, American, and Canadian armies advancing to the German and Belgian frontiers, almost with nothing to stop them at all. There's three weeks of almost nothing. And of course, that is why the Allies are lulled into a sense of full security, ready to undertake the Battle of Arnhem, which is a whole other story. It's a whole other story, which we'll be covering on this podcast. Peter, thank you very much indeed for coming on,

giving us such an elegant summary of a complicated and overlooked campaign. Thank you. And tell us, what is your most recent book? Well, I have just actually penned a book about Winston Churchill. So it's a mini biography, very lightweight in terms of page numbers, but full of deep insight, I hope, about our greatest Englishman. Of course. Deep insight, every page. Thank you very much, Peter Caddick-Adams. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan.

It's hugely enjoyable. you