thanks for the advice guys.
The reason I asked was because I came into a few situations where I wanted my units to fall back asap and all they did was reorganizing or recovering. I am trying to get used to the idea that once I commit units to a battle all I can do is watch events unfold.
If your men are conducting an attack and start taking excessive casualties they will try to retreat into the nearest cover.
If you have the extended force icon info checked in the game options, and you zoom into the action, you will see the top right icon on the extended counter has turned orange. It will either be an orange arrow, or an orange square, to indicate they are retreating or retreat recovering.
If they are stationary and retreat recovering, have no cohesion, and the suppression slider is red all the way to the right, this mans they are cowering/pinned and unable, or unwilling due to being in a good defensive position (fox hole) to move. They may also be in a very bad situation and taking so much incoming fire they can do nothing but lay on their bellies and pray, even in open terrain. This can happen if they are caught out in the open at first light in an enemy kill zone.
Something you as a player should try to create for the enemy when on the defence.
In this situation there is nothing you can do immediately to move them. Your immediate course of action should be to manually bombard the enemy units that are causing them the most problems, to suppress them, and in turn they will go into retreat or cower, thereby giving your man time to recover cohesion.
One of your options when you find yourself in this situation is to give your attacking force a defend in Situ order facing the enemy.
This will allow them to retreat under pressure to good defensive positions that they find themselves when they retreat, then stay there until you can either recover them with a withdraw order or move them out individually using the safest route.
You may even have to wait until nightfall to extract them.
You may also decide to leave them in place as a fixing force, while you outflank the position with another.
There are lots of variations as to what to do that are very situational depending on a huge amount of variables which include things like weather, quality of your force, availability of indirect support, enemy firepower and mobility, uncommitted reserves, time of day, terrain, command delay, and lots of others I'm sure.