The gap closed August 19 when U.S., British, Canadian, and Polish forces finally completed the Allied line. The tobacco pouch had been drawn shut.
The next day at 1200 hours the Normandy campaign was declared to be over. Seventy-seven days had passed since the D Day landing. Some thought that the war was essentially over after the disastrous German defeat, but that was wishful thinking. The fighting and dying would go on for another several months, with awful ordeals like the wintry Ardennes and Bastogne still ahead.
Around Falaise and Argentan, the numbers of dead were astonishing. At least 10,000 were killed. The Germans were comfortable with horses and had made use of them to pull wagons filled with supplies, or simply to ride. Now, dead horses lay everywhere. For days after the bombardment and retreat, witnesses described a gray haze over the valley. The haze came from swarms of flies settling over the dead men and horses. The unlucky men assigned to bury the dead sometimes had to shoot the bloated corpses to release enough of the putrid gas so that they could handle the bodies for burial. Some would suffer nightmares about such grisly sights for years to come.
With the battle won, General Eisenhower was one of those who came to tour the scenes of destruction. Much of Argentan, like other towns caught up in the fighting, lay in ruins. And yet, odd things had survived. Navigating the rubble, Ike's motorcade passed the bombed-out shell of a building, all of its windows shattered and the stucco pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel, but with its proud sign proclaiming "Ecole Maternelle" entirely intact.
Ike was awestruck by the human carnage. He later wrote, "The battlefield at Falaise was unquestionably one of the greatest killing fields of any of the war areas. Forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap I was conducted through it on foot, to encounter 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."
With so many dead, it seemed miraculous that vast numbers of Germans somehow managed to survive the bombardment.
At least 20,000 and maybe more escaped into Germany.
Another 10,000 men became prisoners. Some might say they were the lucky ones, having survived the final battle and avoided the ones still to come. Long columns of prisoners marched endlessly with hands on heads, wearing greatcoats despite the summer heat. Veteran soldiers knew that come nightfall or winter, they would be glad of a coat.
Some Americans, out of curiosity, struck up conversations with the Germans, many of whom spoke some English. They found the Germans friendly, relieved that the war was over, and eager to talk about their families back home, as were the Americans. The soldiers had a great deal in common. Both sides came away from these conversations wondering what they'd been killing each other for.
Epilogue
Major Dorfmann sat at his desk, a glass of French cognac at his elbow. Sadly, France was lost. Happily, Dorfmann had managed to get out with several cases of very good cognac.
The cognac was for more than consumption; in a way, it was currency. He remembered the bad time after the Great War, when money itself had become worthless. A wheelbarrow full of paper money was needed to buy a loaf of bread. He suspected that those times were coming again. When that happened, the small bottles of cognac would be like gold for trading. Until then, he could afford to drink some of it and hope for better days. Besides, he needed a bit of alcoholic inspiration to generate his latest propaganda piece.
He sighed and sipped his cognac, enjoying the bite of it on his tongue, along with the faint taste of grapes and earth and sunshine mixed in with the heat of the alcohol. Better days, indeed.
Production of Luftpost by his SS Skorpion unit had been temporarily suspended in the confusion of the retreat from France, but he was proud of the fact that production had continued as soon as he returned to Germany and secured the use of a printing press. The Nazi war machine had run out of Luftwaffe airplanes, but it was not likely to run out of newsprint and printer's ink anytime soon. Airplanes would be welcome, but the weekly newspaper was almost as useful as powerful inspiration for the common soldier.
The newspaper that had permanently ceased production was Lightning News: Condensed News for Service Men. This was the paper he produced in English to be read by the Allies. Had his propaganda articles about girls back home in America being stolen by negroes and Jews made the GIs fight any less hard by undermining their confidence and doubting their government? Dorfmann liked to think so; there was real value in such fake news to undermine the democratic will. Without his Lightning News, France might have been lost sooner, or fewer Wehrmacht troops might have escaped the Falaise-Argentan debacle.
Much of Germany's army had been destroyed or captured in the final, awful battle at Falaise. What was left of German forces had fled across the Rhine, hoping for a miraculous last stand. Fortunately for Dorfmann, he was as far as possible from the front — while also being a safe distance from Berlin.
It wouldn't be long there before there were recriminations and state-mandated suicides. Dorfmann wasn't planning to fall on his sword, like that unfortunate Von Kluge. No, he would make every effort to avoid Berlin, and every excuse not to return if ordered there. Besides, with the Russians coming at them from the East, Dorfmann wanted to make sure he surrendered to the Allies if and when the time came.
Meanwhile, the war was far from over. But with the Allies pressing in from the west, and the Russians threatening the east, Nazi Germany was more like a caged, cornered wolf than a beast on the hunt.
No matter how much cognac he drank, Dorfmann never would have expressed such sentiments to anyone. The Gestapo would have him strung up on a meat hook.
In point of fact, it was his job to instill hope on the homefront and inspire the troops in the field. Not an easy job these days.
He took another sip of cognac and smacked his lips.
What he needed was a good story for Luftpost. He needed a hero.
Dorfmann searched his mind.
He kept coming back to the young sniper, Dieter Rohde. He seemed to have been killed in the fighting at the Falaise Pocket. He had not much liked Rohde, who seemed impertinent and more interested in personal glory than Germany’s. No matter. It would not take a great deal of fiction to cast him as a hero.
A dead hero was the best sort in that he couldn't turn out to be a disappointment later.
Unfortunately, Rohde's immediate commander, Hauptmann Fischer, had also been lost in the battle. There had been a real soldier.
In the sort of rousing prose meant to inspire the troops, Dorfmann described Rohde's heroic last stand, holding off Allied troops so that the last of the wounded could be carried to safety across the ford at Gue de Moissy. He inserted an entirely fictitious report that the American General Patton had demanded to know how one German sniper could stop the advance.
Satisfied, Dorfmann pulled the typewritten page from his typewriter, made a few corrections in pencil, and passed it along to his typesetter.
In several large boxes that he always carried with him, Dorfmann kept various props to be used in staged photographs. He went to a box now and rummaged about until he found what he was looking for, which was an Iron Cross.