East of Falaise, France June 26, 1944
The B-17s of the 452nd Bomb Group had a narrow corridor that they could fly in. The enemy controlled the ground underneath the sixty three bombers that had started on their final run once past the initial point. Deviations to the north or south of the narrow corridor would means tens of thousands of pounds of high explosives and steel would be exploding in either Canadian or American infantry divisions. A few German 88 crews were brave enough to fire at the thick bomber boxes. One trio of guns managed to fire eleven rounds before a forward air controller directed a squadron of Typhoons against the position. As the bomb bay doors opened up, the RAF fighter bombers were already rocketing the area around the few heavy and brave German AA gunners. The bombardier in the lead aircraft put the crosshairs on the smoke markers and then waited until everything lined up. Each Fortress dropped sixteen bombs; half The bombs had instant fuses, the other half had a fraction of a second of delay.
The men on the ground had been trying to escape a fiasco for the past three days. The elite corps of SS Panzertruppen had dashed west and then north and then had been caught in the open outside of the protection of their deeply prepared positions. American, British, Canadian, Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, New Zealand, Australian and South African pilots were flying four or five sorties per day to hit the same battalion. Whenever the aircraft were not overhead, artillery was coming in. The few heavy tanks that were operational could shrug off shrapnel, but the infantry that kept the American riflemen away and the truck drivers that kept the Panzertruppen fed and fueled could not. The spearheads actually pierced the American lines for a dozen miles. A few moments of intense bravery from one King Tiger company had them destroy over two dozen American Shermans when the Americans tried to counter-attack a crossroads. That success failed by nightfall as another battalion of Shermans sat on their supply lines and the great steel beasts of the Ruhr became pillboxes without infantry covering the gaps in the lines.
And then the US 3rd Army turned the corner and rumors had it that a corps was on the Loire and another was outside of Paris. No one knew what was happening, besides the full weight of the Allied industry was falling on their head. Infantry units that had been able to hold from fixed positions had been obliberated by Bomber Command. Pipe led infantry regiments followed the bomb line, and behind them the Guards Armoured chomped at the bit to exploit a break in the lines. It was not just one break, it was half a dozen breaks that the carefully husbanded Allied armored divisions crashed through.
Even as the pressure on the Normandy front built from the north, a crisis that could be resolved, another corps from 3rd Army swung east and then north in a shallow cross. An option to maneuver and withdraw along a broad front became a sausage where two Allied armies in the north and an armored corps in the south were the case, and the German 9th Army was the sausage meat. The German soldiers just outside of Falaise had been shelled, bombed, bayoneted and strafed for three days now. Four divisions had already been destroyed trying to hold back the Allied advance as their units which once were divisions and brigades were now overstrength battalions and weak rifle companies attempted to get over the Seine. There was hope that the river would slow the advance. Their was hope that the river would provide the opportunity to spread out and avoid the bombers. There was hope.
And then there were 1,008 five hundred pound bombs aimed at a single cross roads. Most of the bombs missed. But even a small percentage of a 1,008 bombs created yet another killing field. And if the bombers of the 452nd Bomb Group did not succeed in killing the retreating units, the 351st Bomb Group was twenty minutes out for their run. And if those bombers missed, the entire artillery of the 21st Army Group which would have taken the hour to restock and maintain their guns could be brought to bear.
