1 The Chase is On! Sunday August was a day of perfect summer weather in Normandy. The soporific sounds of a cricket match could be heard from a field at Saint-Symphorien-les-Bruyères, south-west of Evreux. In the adjoining pear orchard, Sherman tanks of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry had just been refitted and repaired after the battle of the Falaise Gap, the culmination of the battle for Normandy. Bats, balls, pads and stumps had been smuggled ashore on one of their supply trucks. ''Never let it be said that we invaded the Continent unprepared,'' wrote one of the players. The regiment was supposedly on twenty-four hours'' notice to move, but just after lunch the order came to move out in an hour. Its tanks were on the road in seventy minutes, heading for the River Seine, which the first British formation, the 43rd Wessex Division, had crossed at Vernon the day before. British troops were rather jealous that General George Patton''s US Third Army had beaten them to a Seine crossing by six days.

On August the Allied armies, now nearly a million strong, lunged forward from their bridgeheads east of the Seine, heading for Belgium and the German border. The battle for Normandy had finally been won, and the German army was in chaotic retreat. ''Along the main supply routes'', an American officer wrote in his diary, ''you see the evidence of our air effort against the enemy. Trucks have been bombed and strafed, rusted and twisted in wild profusion along the roads, occasionally a truck load of gas cans with the cans bulging out like a swollen dead cow, black and charred, or a train with mounds of bulging cans, twisted steel frames from the destroyed box cars.'' For British cavalry regiments, the chase was on. Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, the commander of XXX Corps, mounted in the turret of a command tank, could not resist joining in. ''This was the type of warfare I thoroughly enjoyed,'' he wrote later. ''Who wouldn''t?'' With more than tanks - Shermans, Churchills and Cromwells - the Guards Armoured Division, the th Armoured Division and the th Armoured Brigade charged forward on a frontage of eighty kilometres, ''scything passages through the enemy rear areas'', he added, ''like a combine-harvester going through a field of corn''.

The country between the Seine and the Somme was ''open and rolling with wide fields, no hedges and good roads''. The dangerous Norman bocage of tightly enclosed pasture and sunken roads lay far behind them. The Sherwood Rangers adopted their old desert formation from the North African campaign, with a squadron of Shermans spread out in front, regimental headquarters just behind it and the other two sabre squadrons on the flanks. ''To travel at top speed across hard, open country on a lovely morning,'' a cavalry troop leader wrote, ''knowing that the Germans were on the run, was exhilarating to say the least, and everyone was in the best possible spirits. It was almost like taking part in a cross-country steeplechase.'' Church bells pealed at their approach. Almost every house was festooned in the French national colours of red, white and blue. Villagers, overjoyed to be spared the destruction of Normandy, waited to greet them with bottles of wine and fruit.

Unshaven members of the Resistance, wearing armbands, tried to mount the leading vehicles to show the way. A staff officer with the Guards Armoured Division in a Staghound armoured car noticed ''their odd assortment of weapons which they brandished with more exuberance than safety''. From time to time a tank would run out of fuel. The vehicle then had to sit immobilized by the side of the road until one of the regiment''s three-tonners caught up and pulled alongside. Jerrycans would then be swung across to the crew members standing on the engine deck. There were the occasional short, sharp firefights when a German group, overtaken by the advance, refused to surrender. Clearing out such pockets of resistance was called ''de-lousing''. On the afternoon of 30 August, Horrocks felt the advance was still not fast enough.

He ordered Major General ''Pip'' Roberts to send his th Armoured Division through the night to take Amiens and its bridges over the River Somme by dawn. Although the tank drivers were falling asleep from exhaustion they made it to the bridges, and three-ton trucks brought in a brigade of infantry at first light to secure the town. Horrocks was close behind to congratulate Roberts on the success. After reporting on the operation, Roberts then said to his corps commander, ''I have a surprise for you, General.'' A German officer in black panzer uniform was brought round. He was unshaven and his face was scarred from a wound received in the First World War which had removed most of his nose. Roberts, Horrocks noted, ''was exactly like a proud farmer leading forward his champion bull''. His trophy was General der Panzertruppe Heinrich Eberbach, the commander of the Seventh Army, who had been surprised in his bed.

The next day, 1 September, was the fifth anniversary of the German invasion of Poland which had started the war in Europe. By a curious coincidence, both Allied army group commanders of the Normandy campaign happened to be sitting for portraits at their respective headquarters. Basking in the glow of victory after General George C. Patton''s triumphant charge to the Seine, General Omar N. Bradley near Chartres was being painted by Cathleen Mann, who was married to the Marquess of Queensberry. They could at least enjoy cool drinks on that beautiful day. The supreme commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, had just sent Bradley a refrigerator, with the message: ''Goddamit, I''m tired of drinking warm whiskey every time I come to your headquarters.

'' Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, wearing his trademark outfit of grey polo-neck sweater, corduroy trousers and black, double-badged beret, was sitting for the Scottish portraitist James Gunn. His tactical headquarters and caravan were in the park of the Ch'teau de Dangu, halfway between Rouen and Paris. Despite the messages of congratulation that morning on his promotion to field marshal, Montgomery was in such a bad mood that he refused to meet his host, the duc de Dangu, and members of the local Resistance. All Montgomery''s hopes of a joint offensive under his leadership into northern Germany had been dashed, because Eisenhower was replacing him as commander-in-chief land forces. Bradley was no longer his subordinate, but his equal. In Montgomery''s view, Eisenhower was throwing away the victory by a refusal to concentrate his forces. Senior American officers, on the other hand, were far angrier at Montgomery''s promotion. It made him a five-star general, while Eisenhower, his superior, still had only four stars.

Patton, whose Third Army troops were already close to Verdun in eastern France, wrote to his wife that day, ''The Field Marshal thing made us sick, that is Bradley and me.'' Even a number of senior British officers thought that Winston Churchill''s sop to Monty and the British press to camouflage the implied demotion was a grave mistake. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the Allied naval commander-in-chief, wrote in his diary: ''Monty made a Field Marshal. Astounding thing to do and I regret it more than I can say. I gather that the PM did it on his own. Damn stupid and I warrant most offensive to Eisenhower and the Americans.'' The next day, Saturday 2 September, Patton, Eisenhower and Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges, the commander of the First US Army, met at Bradley''s 12th Army Group headquarters, where Lady Queensberry had put away her paintbrushes.

According to Bradley''s aide, Hodges was ''neat and trim as usual in his battle dress'', while Patton was ''gaudy with brass buttons and the big car''. They were there to discuss strategy and the great supply problem. The unexpectedly rapid advance meant that they were outrunning the capacity of even the huge American military transport fleet. Patton begged Bradley that morning: ''Give me 400,000 gallons of gasoline and I''ll put you in Germany in two days.'' Bradley had every sympathy. So keen was he that all available aircraft continue to supply Patton''s Third Army that he had opposed the plans for airborne drops ahead to speed the Allied advance. Patton, who longed ''to go through the Siegfried Line like shit through a goose'', was already bribing the transport pilots with cases of looted champagne, but that was still insufficient. Eisenhower refused to budge.

He was also being badgered by Montgomery, who demanded the bulk of supplies to enable him to mount the main attack in the north. Allied diplomacy required the supreme commander to balance the rival demands of the two army groups as far as was humanly possible. This led to Eisenhower adopting a ''broad-front strategy'', which satisfied neither commander. Eisenhower''s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, commented after the war on the problems with Montgomery and Bradley. ''It is amazing'', he said, ''how good commanders get ruined when they develop a public they have to act up to. They become prima donnas.'' Even the seemingly modest Bradley ''developed a public, and we had some trouble with him''. Eisenhower''s failure to resolve the competing strategies of Montgomery and Bradley was then made worse by an accident.

After leaving th Army Group headquarters near Chartres that afternoon, he was flown back to his own command post at Granville on the Atlantic coast of Normandy. It was a grave mistake to have chosen a spot so far behind the rapidly developing battlefronts. In fact, as Bradley pointed out, he would have been better placed for communications if he had stayed in London. Towards the end of the flight back to Granville, his light aircraft developed engine trouble and the pilot had to la.