Stephen Ambrose on Patton’s Fight to Win D-Day

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Stephen Ambrose was one of America’s leading biographers and historians, and one of my personal favorites, Undaunted Courage, I could read every year. At the core of Ambrose’s phenomenal success is his simple but straightforward belief that history is biography, that history is about people, and that’s the animating spirit behind Our American Stories, too. Stephen Ambrose passed in 2002, but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here at Our American Stories, thanks to those who run his estate. Here’s Ambrose with the story of the D-Day Invasion, Part Three: Winning with Patton. Let’s take a listen.

Hitler’s relations with his generals couldn’t have been worse, and now by this time he had taken, even more so than previously, personal control of the war. He was down to not just division but regimental level. He made the decision on who went where or when, what they did when they got there. And in this case, he threw everything that Germany had into this Mortain counterattack designed to cut Patton off from the sea, and he had a lot to throw into it. As many as ten divisions—not all of them full strength divisions, by no means all of them armored divisions—but nevertheless, a very impressive force. A greater force than Eisenhower had by quite a lot to stop it with. But Ike had two advantages in this Mortain counterattack battle. One was he knew Hitler’s plans. He knew Hitler’s plans because Hitler had to communicate, not by telephone wire. They had all been torn up by this time—telephone lines to the front lines. He had to communicate by radio, and Ike read everything that the German generals read, and he saw Hitler’s orders, and he knew what was coming. And he knew in what strength. Our second great advantage was his forces controlled the air. He talked to Bradley. There was some thought, “Jesus, Hitler’s putting so much into this, maybe we better pull Georgie back. Maybe we better have Patton stop where he is, or even come back a bit. And maybe we ought to move some more troops down there to the Mortain area than we’ve got, and maybe we ought to build our defenses down there, and we put a halt to our own offensive until we’ve thrown back this German counterattack.” There was some thought of that. Eisenhower said, “No. We’re going to depend on our air forces. When those German tanks come out of their laagers and get out onto the open road, we’re going to shoot them up and we’re going to wipe them out.” And when the German tanks did come out of their laagers and did start the attack on Mortain, they did make some progress initially, and then the RAF and the U.S. Army Air Forces, the U.S. Army Ninth Air Force, came into the battle. It was an important turning point in the history of war. A great tank attack—a thousand, two thousand tanks strong—was stopped primarily by aircraft and also by artillery on the ground from the Fourth Division especially, but basically aircraft stopped this German attack.

Now, the generals had told Hitler that was what was going to happen. They had been there in Normandy. They knew what that Allied air superiority meant. A German joke had it in Normandy: “If you see a plane in the sky and it’s blue, it’s British. If it’s silver, it’s American. And if it’s invisible, it’s ours.” And they knew what these fighters could do and these fighter-bombers. The generals did, and they warned Hitler and advised him against it, but he was determined to take this great risk, and he remained determined long after it was obvious that they were not going to be able to break through at Mortain. Hitler continued to throw his tanks into the attack, and they continued to get chewed up. Meanwhile, Patton was circling around behind, with nothing between him and Paris, begging his immediate superior, General Bradley, and beyond him, his next ranking superior, General Montgomery, and beyond him, General Eisenhower, for permission to go straight on through to Paris and then come on down on the east bank of the Seine River and trap the entire German Army of the West in Normandy without resources: no gasoline left, no ammunition left, the tanks all gone. It would be a bag of prisoners that would greatly exceed that captured at Stalingrad. It would mean the end of the war. Germany would never be able to replace these losses. The Allies, once they had put these prisoners into their cages, would be able to turn east and drive on to Germany with almost no opposition. So said Patton. Many weren’t so sure, and in this case neither was Ike, that the Germans were that thoroughly defeated. They decided, “We’re not going to go for that big solution—that is, Patton going on to Paris.” Rather, they told Patton, “We want you to swing in and swing to the north and meet the Canadians coming and the Poles coming down from Caen who will be attacking in this direction, and we will meet at Falaise and we will complete the encirclement of the Germans that were still there, still attacking in the direction of Mortain, and will bag all of them. It won’t be the whole German Army in the West, but it will be about half of it, and it’s a much safer operation.” There were still fears that Germany might somehow manage a breakthrough at Mortain, that Patton would outrun his supplies, especially gasoline. The smaller solution seemed the safer solution in this case, not only to Montgomery but also to Bradley and Eisenhower.

So Patton got his orders to swing in, and he did and began the attack toward Falaise and got to Falaise and was told to stay in place where he was. This infuriated Patton. He talked to Ike. He said, “Damn it, Ike, just let me go. Let me drive on north and I’ll drive those damn Brits back into the sea for another Dunkirk.” Well, Ike had to remind him that it was the Germans we were after, not the Brits. And in any case, Bradley’s halt order in Falaise for Patton made sense. Ike was afraid of two things. One, that if Patton started moving forward, he would soon bump into the Canadians coming south, and there would be friendly casualties (not the worst euphemism, you were going to take). That, the Canadians and Americans, not having each other’s radio signals down pat and not recognizing each other’s uniforms in these combat circumstances, would start firing on each other, and that would be just a terrible thing for the alliance. In addition, Eisenhower, although he knew that the Germans had lost most of their armor in the Falaise Gap, realized that these were German. These guys knew how to retreat, and they had been retreating ever since 1941 in the Soviet Union. They were the experts at it, and they would be mad to get out of the trap, so that they would use any and every trick and device available to them. He feared that a thin line between Caen and Falaise would be overrun by the Germans, trampled by them as they, in a panic, tried to get out of the gap, out of the trap. And so he agreed with Bradley and with Montgomery that Patton should be stopped at Falaise. In the end, then, the Battle of Falaise left a sour taste and led to charges that a great opportunity had been missed. That had Patton been allowed to go on at Falaise, or even more so, if he had been allowed to put into effect his big solution, the war could have been over then, right then. And Falaise is written about and spoken of by the veterans of the battle, sometimes almost as if it were a defeat for the Allies. There’s a whole other way of looking at this. The German Army in Normandy was destroyed. The casualties the Germans took were very high—as high as fifty percent of all their forces in the Mortain Battle. Eisenhower, who visited the battlefield a couple of days later, said that you could walk for literally a mile in every direction, stepping only on the bodies of dead Germans. Those Germans who did get out got out without their trucks, without their tanks, without their heavy artillery, without their animal wagons, without their supplies, without their land mines. They just got out as individuals. So Eisenhower chose to regard Falaise as a great victory for the Allies, and indeed it did mark the end of the Battle of Normandy.

And a special thanks to the estate of Stephen Ambrose, who has so graciously and generously allowed us to play some of this terrific storytelling. There was nobody better in bringing to life what our boys did and young men did on the beaches of Normandy and in the Pacific. But D-Day in particular, let’s face it: the World War II Museum in New Orleans. Before that was the World War II Museum, it was the D-Day Museum. And the reason it was in New Orleans? Stephen Ambrose was teaching in Tulane, and Higgins made the Higgins Boats in New Orleans. Part Three. In the final stage of the D-Day Invasion, Winning with Patton, here on Our American Stories.