Military History | Mémorial de Montormel — The Polish Badge Is Captioned in French

The ridge above Coudehard was on the German plan before it was on the Polish one. In the breakout from the encirclement known as the Falaise pocket, la poche de Falaise, and the Kessel von Falaise, General Meindl's II. Fallschirmkorps was ordered to seize the Mont Ormel high ground and hold the corridor open from it. When the attack came, a battlegroup of the 1st Polish Armoured Division was already sitting on it, on Hill 262 — ground its own soldiers had named the Maczuga, the mace, for its shape on the map.

From mid-morning on 20 August 1944 that battlegroup was cut off, attacked by Germans trying to get out of the pocket and by the II. SS-Panzerkorps trying to let them out. Canadian tanks of the Grenadier Guards reached the position the following afternoon. How much of the German army got past is not settled. Heeresgruppe B claimed at the time that 40 to 50 per cent of the encircled units escaped, a figure the American official historian Martin Blumenson read as optimistic and his Canadian counterpart C. P. Stacey thought unlikely to understate. Blumenson's own answer was that no one knew.

No total has ever been published for the civilians killed as the pocket closed. The deaths in these communes are counted one at a time, by name, in a census kept at the Université de Caen.

The wall on the crest went up in 1965, raised by a committee of Orne councillors and residents. Its lintel is cut PRO LIBERTATE ET PACE, and the Polish division's badge fixed to it is captioned in French, 1re D.B. POLONAISE, one plate among several armies'. The département built the museum behind the wall in 1994. Poland's own gift to the hill, a bust of Stanisław Maczek, was unveiled on 27 August 2014.

📸 Cover: the 1965 monument on the crest at Montormel, its lintel cut PRO LIBERTATE ET PACE, photograph by Harmonide, 17 February 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.