Operation Cobra - Aftermath

Aftermath

At noon on 1 August, the U.S. Third Army was activated under the command of Lieutenant General George S. Patton. Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges assumed command of the First Army and Bradley was promoted to the overall command of both armies, named the U.S. 12th Army Group. Patton wrote a poem containing the words:

So let us do real fighting, boring in and gouging, biting.
Let's take a chance now that we have the ball.
Let's forget those fine firm bases in the dreary shell raked spaces,
Let's shoot the works and win! Yes, win it all!

The U.S. advance following Cobra was extraordinarily rapid. Between 1 August and 4 August, seven divisions of Patton's Third Army had swept through Avranches and over the bridge at Pontaubault into Brittany. The German army in Normandy had been reduced to such a poor state by the Allied offensives that, with no prospect of reinforcement in the wake of the Soviet summer offensive against Army Group Centre, very few Germans believed they could now avoid defeat. Rather than order his remaining forces to withdraw to the Seine, Adolf Hitler sent a directive to von Kluge demanding "an immediate counterattack between Mortain and Avranches" to "annihilate" the enemy and make contact with the west coast of the Cotentin peninsula. Eight of the nine Panzer divisions in Normandy were to be used in the attack but only four (one of them incomplete) could be relieved from their defensive tasks and assembled in time. German commanders immediately protested that such an operation was impossible given their remaining resources but these objections were overruled and the counter-offensive, codenamed Operation Lüttich, commenced on 7 August around Mortain. The 2nd, 1st SS and 2nd SS Panzer Divisions led the assault, although with only 75 Panzer IVs, 70 Panthers, and 32 self-propelled guns between them. Hopelessly optimistic, the offensive threat was over within 24 hours, although fighting continued until 13 August.

By 8 August, the city of Le Mans—the former headquarters of the German 7th Army—had fallen to the Americans. With von Kluge's few remaining battleworthy formations destroyed by the First Army, the Allied commanders realised that the entire German position in Normandy was collapsing. Bradley declared:

This is an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century. We're about to destroy an entire hostile army and go all the way from here to the German border".

On 14 August, in conjunction with American movements northward to Chambois, Canadian forces launched Operation Tractable; the Allied intention was to trap and destroy the entire German Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies near the town of Falaise. Five days later, the two arms of the encirclement were almost complete; the advancing U.S. 90th Infantry Division had made contact with the Polish 1st Armored Division, and the first Allied units crossed the Seine at Mantes Gassicourt while German units were fleeing eastward by any means they could find. By 22 August, the Falaise Pocket—which the Germans had been fighting desperately to keep open to allow their trapped forces to escape—was finally sealed, effectively ending the Battle of Normandy with a decisive Allied victory. All German forces west of the Allied lines were now dead or in captivity and although perhaps 100,000 German troops succeeded in escaping they left behind 40,000–50,000 prisoners and over 10,000 dead. A total of 344 tanks and self-propelled guns, 2,447 soft-skinned vehicles and 252 artillery pieces were found abandoned or destroyed in the northern sector of the pocket alone. The Allies were able to advance freely through undefended territory, and by 25 August all four Allied armies (1st Canadian, 2nd British, 1st U.S., and 3rd U.S.) involved in the Normandy campaign were on the river Seine.