The slaughter at Falaise ended the eighty-day-long Battle of Normandy, the most decisive battle on the Western Front. The Germans lost over 400,000 combatants—killed, wounded, or captured—and the Allies suffered over 225,000 casualties, two-thirds of them Americans, among them 8,536 airmen killed and missing. The battle was a prelude to the liberation of Paris and the triumphant Allied drive across France to Germany’s western border, a campaign joined by Allied forces that landed on the coast of southern France on August 15.
