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Comparison to the Battle of Falaise in 1944 suggests itself

An American ex-general commented on the collapse of the Russian position in the Ukrainian regional capital of Cherson with an interesting historical parallel: it was a "Falaise gap" into which the Russian army had gotten.

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Comparison to the Battle of Falaise in 1944 suggests itself

An American ex-general commented on the collapse of the Russian position in the Ukrainian regional capital of Cherson with an interesting historical parallel: it was a "Falaise gap" into which the Russian army had gotten. So a kettle of the Falaise type, writes Mark Hertling on Twitter.

The 69-year-old, who led US Army Europe as a three-star general, compares the Russian defeat in Cherson with a city in Normandy around which the decisive battle between Allied troops and the Wehrmacht raged in August 1944. At that time, the German armored troops in northern France were largely wiped out in the Falaise pocket.

After landing on June 6, 1944, it had taken the Allied armies several weeks to break through to the south from their beachhead near the invasion beaches. At the end of July, several corps pushed south to reach the Loire as quickly as possible. The remaining units pushed east towards Paris.

In this situation, Allied air reconnaissance established that the German 5th Panzer Army and the 7th Army, together around 150,000 men, did not retreat to the east as expected, but apparently tried to hold their positions west of a line between Falaise and Chambois. So Allied Commander-in-Chief Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to strike the decisive blow earlier than planned. The aim was to encircle the two armies, which despite heavy losses still had considerable fighting power, and force them to surrender.

For this purpose, the British and Canadians, who were stationed near Caen, were to advance about 40 kilometers to the southeast via Morteaux to Chambois. At the same time, a US corps was to swing north from the direct route to Paris and also advance to Chambois via Argentan. If this operation were successful, the remains of two German armies would be trapped.

By August 12, 1944 at the latest, it was clear to the German commanders, led by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, that they were facing a serious defeat in a battle of encirclement if they did not immediately order a retreat. But Hitler refused, although Kluge reported to him that the noose was tightening around the two armies.

While the German troops were desperately defending themselves in the largest tank battle on the Western Front against the American, British, Canadian and Polish troops, who were more than twice as strong in numbers but above all had a material advantage, Kluge drove to the front on August 15, 1944. He wanted to see for himself at the headquarters of the 5th Panzer Army. But on the way, Allied low-flying aircraft attacked his column. Kluge remained unavailable for more than 24 hours.

Hitler, always notoriously suspicious of his top generals (a fact that had become much more so since the failed coup d'état on July 20, 1944), immediately suspected that the field marshal had disappeared to begin armistice negotiations with the Allies. There was no indication of this, but Hitler relieved Kluge of his command anyway and sent Field Marshal Walter Model, a defensive specialist from Army Group Center on the Eastern Front, to northern France to take over Kluge's post.

No sooner had Model recognized the seriousness of the situation than he initiated the retreat. It was high time: on August 18, 1944, the area between Falaise and Chambois that was still held by the Wehrmacht melted down to a width of eight kilometers. The Allies constantly raked this area with artillery and low-flying aircraft.

A day later, British, Canadian and US units united just north of Chambois. The encirclement was now closed, around 100,000 German soldiers were stuck inside, actually parts of eleven infantry and ten motorized divisions. In other words: almost half of the German units still capable of fighting in north-eastern France. Two Panzer divisions of the Waffen SS were stationed nearby.

Model disregarded Hitler's well-known wishes: he had the boiler evacuated instead of ordering the units not yet surrounded to break through in order to establish a connection to the boiler. Given the superiority of the Allies, the latter would only have put more German troops in danger of imminent annihilation.

On August 20, 1944, 35,000 to 40,000 Wehrmacht soldiers were able to escape to the east, including most of the staff and almost all senior officers. But they had to leave most of their equipment behind: 344 armored and 2447 other vehicles, 252 guns and 1800 horses.

A day later, on August 21, the Allies closed the weak point in their lines to such an extent that it was impossible for the German troops remaining in the pocket to break through. More than 50,000 Wehrmacht soldiers were taken prisoner of war, and around 10,000 more were found dead.

Eisenhower later called the battlefield south of Falaise in his memoirs "one of the greatest 'extermination sites' of all war zones". He was reminded of Dante's "Inferno": "You literally walked hundreds of yards in places on dead and decaying flesh."

However, the Allies had not succeeded in eliminating the German troops in northern France in one fell swoop. The military historian Detlef Vogel attributes this to the lack of experience of the deployed British and Canadian troops. On the other hand, the distribution of the US troops was essential: "The Allied decision not to use the majority of Patton's divisions to cut off the Germans, but rather to direct them to the east, undoubtedly prevented the powerful closure of the pocket".

Although German generals recognized the consequences of the defeat, Hitler doggedly continued the war. It has been calculated that between July 1944 and May 1945 a similar number of people lost their lives in World War II in Europe as in the previous five years. It is quite possible that Russia's President Putin is willing to accept such loss numbers.

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