Mortain - Operation Lüttich

Mortain Operation Lüttich - 1 August 1944, the Panzers counter-attack

« All was lost for Germany after the defeat at Mortain » — Kurt Dittmar, Wehrmacht general, 25 April 1945 


Just two months after D-Day in Normandy, Operation Cobra allowed the Allies to reach the gates of Brittany in record time. Deeply pierced on its left flank, the German front in Normandy was on the verge of collapse. Still reeling from the assassination attempt of 20 July, Hitler was not prepared to withdraw his troops from this theatre of operations. Against the advice of his generals, the Führer alone planned a major Panzer counter-attack — codenamed Operation Lüttich — aimed at cutting off the advanced American armoured forces that had pushed beyond Avranches from their rear. Had it succeeded, Patton's 3rd U.S. Army would have been isolated, or even destroyed. On the Western Front, the German army might then have straightened and stabilised its positions in order to — according to Hitler — later drive the Allies back into the sea.

At dawn on 7 August 1944, more than 300 German armoured vehicles struck westward through the lines of the VII US Army Corps. On both sides of the Norman front, Mortain became the keystone where everything would be decided. There, Allied headquarters trained their spotlight on the 30th US Infantry Division which, over six days of fierce fighting, absorbed the brunt of the Lüttich offensive. Though briefly, Mortain none the less became the epicentre of one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War. The tenacity of the Old Hickory division at Mortain enabled the remaining Allied forces to draw the Falaise Pocket, closing its jaws around Hausser's 7th Army and thus bringing the Battle of Normandy to an end.

A precise specialist in the fighting at Mortain, Anthony Paysant has made recent and highly illuminating discoveries about these engagements. Together with Stéphane Jacquet — a specialist in the Battle of Normandy — they offer the reader a rigorous and detailed account of the Battle of Mortain, day by day and hour by hour. They bring to life the titanic fighting waged by the G.I.s against the elite of Hitler's armoured troops, inviting the reader to return to the battlefield more than 75 years on.

Accompanied by maps, the work draws on unit war diaries and testimonies — largely unpublished — and also presents hundreds of photographs.