BATTLEFIELD SERIES Part 3 "The battlefield at Falaise was unquestionably one of the greatest 'killing fields' of any of the war areas; scenes that could be described only by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh."
.
As the Allied forces were pushing through France and towards Paris in Aug 1944, the German resistance became heavier. After the fall of Caen and St. Lo, the German 7th Army, along with all its reserve units and supplies were subjected to a 3 prong attack near the town of Falaise from the US, Canadian, Polish and British Armies.
What became known as the Falaise Gap, the 7th Army was at the verge of being completely surrounded and fought tooth and nail in order to escape the 'pocket' and buy time. The Allies were determined in either destroying or surrounding the Germans and poured every soldier, plane, tank and artillery piece to do so.
On Aug 21, the gap was closed and 50,000 Germans captured. The 7th Army barely escaped and suffered a heavy price of almost 60,000 casualties and over 600 tanks destroyed. Some Panzer Divisions were completely annihilated.
The area in which the pocket had formed was full of the remains of battle. Villages had been destroyed, and derelict equipment made some roads impassable. Corpses of soldiers and civilians littered the area, along with thousands of dead cattle and horses. In the hot August weather, maggots crawled over the bodies, and swarms of flies descended on the area. Pilots reported being able to smell the stench of the battlefield hundreds of feet above it.
The Battle of Falaise marked the end of the Normandy Campaign and its considered one of bloodiest skirmishes of the Europe Theater. #ww2 #bfseries #reality #stayzero #zerofoxtrot