The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945

by The New York Times

  THROUGH FIELDS OF GERMANS

  At last we reached the leading reconnaissance unit; “You’d better watch out,” an officer said. “You’ve come through lots of Jerries. They’re all over these fields and there’s nothing up here except armored cars.”

  Kilometer post 13 was right there. That meant that we were little more than ten miles from the center of the city and five miles from the outskirts. A tank fight was going on just a mile ahead, the nearest that our forces were to reach during the night. There was a little side road to a group of three houses. We went in there, and none too soon. Within a few minutes we heard the German planes come over. They took their time, tantalizingly flying around and around to get their bearings. An important crossroads was only 100 yards away, and we knew that we were in for it

  They began dropping flares. Then came strafing, then bombs. We flattened ourselves on the floor of the peasant’s stone house. One flare dropped next to it and, for what seemed like ages, we dug our heads into the ground and held our breaths, waiting and waiting. And then it came. Two bombs crashed beside the house, which shook dizzily as plaster fell from the ceiling.

  Only then did we learn that the farmer had built a refuge just outside the house and we dashed into it. There we were relatively safe. Within a few minutes, four jeeps loaded with ammunition dashed up. The men jumped out of them and into our refuge. Then began a strange night.

  We were surrounded by Germans, and we knew it. We dared not move. Two soldiers came in with us, while their comrades went up the hill to another refuge.

  Acrid smoke still filled the refuge, coming from the bombs that had been dropped almost squarely on it. Outside, more armor was trundling down the highway. This gave us some comfort, but our worry was the Germans who had been left behind, scattered in the fields.

  Somehow the night dragged its weary length. A peasant woman heated us some water for our coffee, which we hastily downed. Then we went on.

  Tanks with infantry were now ahead of us. Tough, bearded, dirty youngsters sat astride them as we passed, again aiming for the head of the column.

  NO CHEERS FROM PEASANTS

  The peasants were beginning to line the roads, but they were not cheering, as they had done before Naples. They were stolid and curious. Rome was being conquered again, but they showed no emotion at first. Then, as we got nearer to the outskirts, enthusiasm began to rise and a few peasants threw flowers at the tanks.

  It was 6:30 A.M. and we were almost at the head of the column. Two tanks were in front of us and there at last was the road sign, “Roma,” just at a bend in the highway.

  The first tank clanked around it and then came a crash and a vivid flash as it was hit by an 88mm. shell from a self-propelled gun that had undoubtedly been waiting. The tank driver was killed and two others were wounded. Everybody else dashed for the ditches. The infantry deployed and went forward.

  Civilians were foolishly running into and out of their houses, oblivious to danger but scattering wildly when shells came over. Then a sniper got going. He could not have been there before, but now he had a bead on us with a machine gun straight down the road.

  This will be a great day in history, but one would not have thought so from the demeanor of the Romans and the strangely peaceful sounds of Sunday morning in the spring. Church bells tolled and even a wedding procession walked solemnly to one church within range of the German guns. A train chugged and whistled along the tracks inside the city. An Italian rode up on a bicycle, not even hurrying as snipers’ bullets whined overhead.

  JUNE 5, 1944

  AMERICANS IN FIRST

  U.S. Armor Spearheads Thrust Through Last Defenses of Rome

  By The United Press.

  NAPLES, June 4—The Fifth Army captured Rome tonight, liberating for the first time a German-enslaved European capital. German rear guards were fleeing in disorganized retreat to the northwest.

  Except for the railway yards, smashed by the Allies’ bombs, the city is 95 per cent intact, United Press correspondents reported after their arrival in the city.

  Late tonight, the British Eighth Army, rushing into Rome from the southeast along the Via Casilina, was reported to be joining the Fifth Army in close pursuit of the hard-pressed enemy remnants, under orders to destroy them to a man if possible. Only enough troops to maintain order and ferret out any German snipers or suicide nests were to be left in Rome as the Allies’ main armies pounded on without pausing to celebrate their greatest triumph, coming 270 days after the start of the Italian campaign.

  FINAL STAND AT ROME’S GATES

  At the very gates of Rome, the Germans had made a final stand but Lieut. Gen. Mark W. Clark, after having waited three hours for the enemy troops to withdraw in accordance with their own declaration of Rome as an open city, ordered a violent anti-tank barrage. Then masses of Fifth Army men and weapons crashed into the city and began mopping up enemy snipers and a few tanks and mobile guns trying to cover the retreat.

  More of the enemy survivors of the Allies’ whirlwind offensive were streaming in congested retreat to the northwest at the mercy of the Allies’ planes, which, during the day, destroyed or damaged 600 enemy trucks and other vehicles. The Germans’ jammed traffic columns stretched fifty-five miles to Lake Bolsena.

  Direct radio contact with American correspondents in Rome was established tonight. A United Press reporter said that the main entry into the city had been made along the Via Casilina, which passes through the Porta Maggiore at the southeastern edge of the city. Other Allied troops were reported to have fought their way through the Ostiense freight yards, just south of St. Paul Gate, the main entrance to the city from due south and only one and one-quarter miles from the Venice Palace.

  The entry into Rome came with dramatic suddenness after the Allies, spear-headed by American armored forces, had shattered the last German defenses below the city in the Alban Hills. The final advance covered almost fifteen miles in twenty-four hours and was so rapid along the last miles that large pockets of Germans were believed to have been cut off. There was a furious battle in the workers’ district, where the Germans fought from streets and buildings before their ranks broke.

  The final breakthrough, the result of an overwhelming assault by the Allies’ arms, came in the twenty-four hours beginning on Saturday evening. After having outflanked enemy strong points in the southern Alban Hills the Allies smashed through those formidable peaks and burst out on the plain before Rome. They then drove on into the city.

  JUNE 5, 1944

  NEWSMEN AWAIT INVASION CALMLY

  By FREDERICK GRAHAM

  By Wireless to The New York Times.

  LONDON, June 4—As nearly as can be determined there are more than 350 assorted British and American newspaper, magazine and radio correspondents and photographers in the European theatre of operations now waiting to cover the coming invasion. Most of them are men and the majority of them represent the three major news agencies and daily newspapers.

  Correspondents who have been in this theatre for two, three or even four years seem to have absorbed the wisdom of patience—or maybe it is the British wartime diet that makes them appear patient as they wait for the invasion. A good many in this category have put down roots of a sort here. Admittedly these roots usually are pretty shallow but, even so, the correspondents appear to be in no high fever to tear them up and follow an invasion that may be less pleasant, comfortable and convenient than London.

  Correspondents who have been here one year or short of two years appear no more impatient to get the invasion under way than their older colleagues.

  The newcomers—those who have been here from three to six months—hardly give the impression that they are all keyed up, either. Most of them are still getting used to wearing a uniform and taking salutes from misled G.I.’s.

  Many of these never had been outside the United States before and would like to see more of London before leaving it. They want to see France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, too, bu
t they would prefer to see Britain before moving on.

  Correspondents, like military police, seem never to travel alone. In pairs or larger groups you see them almost everywhere in London: in small local pubs, in the cocktail lounges of swank West End hotels and in the bars of scrubby Bloomsbury, in pubs and restaurants around Fleet Street and in the better Mayfair establishments.

  The better-known correspondents—the “name” correspondents—and those representing the well-heeled publications can usually be found in the costlier and more exclusive bars and eating places. But there are enough correspondents who have tough expense accounts and less than magnificent salaries to provide business in great measure to the smaller and cheaper ones.

  War correspondent Frank Gillard at work in early 1944, during a mock battle to rehearse the reporting of the D-Day landings for BBC radio.

  JUNE 5, 1944

  U. S. BOMBS REDUCE NAZIS’ ‘ERSATZ’ OIL

  By Wireless to The New York Times.

  LONDON, June 4—Germany’s synthetic oil industry, which has become the Wehrmacht’s mainsource of supply since Rumania’s Ploesti oil fields were bombed, was crippled in three days of operations in May by the Eighth United States Air Force.

  During these three days the Zeitz plant, twenty miles south of Leipzig, was put out of production indefinitely. Other plants at Poelitz, outside Stettin, and Bruex, in Czechoslovakia, were so badly damaged it is unlikely they will be able to resume production.

  Five other synthetic oil factories at Merseburg, Magdeburg, Bohlen, Lutz-kendorf and Ruhland were badly damaged by attacks.

  In addition American bombers and fighters destroyed 343 enemy fighters. On May 12, 150 enemy planes were shot down, on May 28, ninety-three, and on May 29, 100.

  Of the thousands of American aircraft dispatched to these targets, 145 were lost.

  In the attack on Poelitz, on May 29, large fires broke out throughout the plant and smoke rose to a height of more than 10,000 feet.

  Zeitz was even more heavily hit. Building after building was either blasted flat or burned out.

  JUNE 6, 1944

  FIRST ALLIED LANDING MADE ON SHORES OF WESTERN EUROPE EISENHOWER ACTS

  U.S., British, Canadian Troops Backed by Sea, Air Forces

  By RAYMOND DANIELL

  By Cable to The New York TimEs.

  SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCES, June 6—The invasion of Europe from the west has begun.

  In the gray light of a summer dawn Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower threw his great Anglo-American force into action today for the liberation of the Continent. The spearhead of attack was an Army group commanded by Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery and comprising troops of the United States, Britain and Canada.

  General Eisenhower’s first communiqué was terse and calculated to give little information to the enemy. It said merely that “Allied naval forces supported by strong air forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.”

  After the first communiqué was released it was announced that the Allied landing was in Normandy.

  CAEN BATTLE REPORTED

  German broadcasts, beginning at 6:30 A.M., London time, [12:30 A.M. Eastern war time] gave first word of the assault. [The Associated Press said General Eisenhower, for the sake of surprise, deliberately let the Germans have the “first word.”]

  The German DNB agency said the Allied invasion operations began with the landing of airborne troops in the area of the mouth of the Seine River.

  [Berlin said the “center of gravity” of the fierce fighting was at Caen, thirty miles southwest of Havre and sixty-five miles southeast of Cherbourg, The Associated Press reported. Caen is ten miles inland from the sea, at the base of the seventy-five-mile-wide Normandy Peninsula, and fighting there might indicate the Allies’ seizing of a beachhead.

  [DNB said in a broadcast just before 10 A.M. (4 A.M. Eastern war time) that the Anglo-American troops had been reinforced at dawn at the mouth of the Seine River in the Havre area.]

  [An Allied correspondent broadcasting from Supreme Headquarters, according to the Columbia Broadcasting System, said this morning that “German tanks are moving up the roads toward the beachhead” in France.] The German accounts told of Nazi shock troops thrown in to meet Allied airborne units and parachutists. The first attacks ranged from Cherbourg to Havre, the Germans said.

  [United States battleshipsand planes took part in the bombardment of the French coast, Allied Headquarters announced, according to Reuter.]

  The weather was not particularly favorable for the Allies. There was a heavy chop in the Channel and the skies were overcast. Whether the enemy was taken by surprise was not known yet.

  EISENHOWER’S ORDERS TO TROOPS

  Not until the attack began was it made known officially that General Montgomery was in command of the Army group, including American troops. The hero of El Alamein hitherto had been referred to as the senior British Field Commander.

  In his order of the day, made public at the same time as the first communiqué, General Eisenhower told his forces that they were about to embark on a “great crusade.”

  The news that has been so long and so eagerly awaited broke as war-weary Londoners were going to work. Hardly any of them knew what was happening, for there had been no disclosure of the news that the invasion had started in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s 7 o’clock broadcast.

  Even the masses of planes roaring overhead did not give the secret away, for the people of this country have grown accustomed to seeing huge armadas of aircraft flying out in their almost daily attacks against German-held Europe.

  Details of how the assault developed are still lacking. It is known that the huge armada of Allied landing craft that crept to the French coast in darkness was preceded by mine sweepers whose task was to sweep the Channel of German mine fields and submarine obstructions.

  Big Allied warships closed in and engaged the enemy’s shore batteries.

  Airborne troops landed simultaneously behind the Nazis’ coast defenses.

  An array of sea craft at Omaha Beach, Normandy, during the first stages of the Allied invasion.

  JUNE 6, 1944

  WASHINGTON WAITS 3 HOURS FOR FLASH

  Special to The New York Times.

  WASHINGTON, June 6—Washington learned officially of the invasion of Europe at 3:32 A.M. today when the War Department issued the text of the communiqué issued by the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces.

  This flash was the climax of three hours of tense waiting that followed first German radio reports that hostilities off France had begun. Before that both the War Department and the Office of War Information said they had no information to confirm or deny the German reports.

  The communiqué was handed newspaper men in the War Department by Maj. Gen. Alexander D. Surles, chief of the Army Bureau of Public Relations. With the communiqué was issued a statement by General of the Armies John J. Pershing which declared the sons of the American soldiers of 1917 and 1918 were engaged in a “like war of liberation” and would bring freedom to people who have been enslaved.

  The capital awakened rapidly after the initial broadcasts. Lights flashed on and radios began to blare. Newspaper men hurried to their offices. Everybody was demanding to know whether it was “official.”

  If the White House was aware of the report, there was no outward indication. Only a few lights glowed there and the customary guards patrolled up and down monotonously.

  Only a few hours earlier—at 8:30 P.M.—Mr. Roosevelt had addressed the world for fifteen minutes on the fall of Rome.

  By 1:45 A.M., almost the entire public relations staff at the War Department had reported for duty.

  Elmer Davis, director of the OWI, met about half a dozen news men in his office about 4 A.M. and told them the OWI had no assurance that the invasion was coming off this morning but thought that it might be. He said that OWI did not put out any of the German broadcast reports prior to official conf
irmation from General Eisenhower’s headquarters.

  Between the official flash and the time General Eisenhower began his talk, the OWI was transmitting the text of the communiqué.

  JUNE 7, 1944

  LANDING PUTS END TO 4-YEAR HIATUS

  Fiery Renewal Of Battle for France—Britain Recalls Grimness of Dunkerque

  By RAYMOND DANIELL

  By Cable to Tax New York Times.

  LONDON, June 6—This was D-day and it has gone well.

  At daybreak Anglo-American forces dropped from the skies in Normandy, swarmed up on the beaches from thousands of landing craft and renewed the battle for France and for Europe, broken off four years ago at Dunkerque.

  And when darkness fell, on the word of no less than Winston Churchill, the King’s First Minister, who is still this country’s best reporter, they had toeholds on a broad front and were fighting as far back from the coast as Caen, which is eight and a half miles behind the Channel beaches and 149 miles from Paris.

  At the time he spoke the Prime Minister said that the battle which was just beginning was progressing in “a thoroughly satisfactory manner.” But even he, like most people in this island, had his fingers crossed.

  The Germans’ resistance until now has been surprisingly, perhaps ominously, slight. Several obstacles to any amphibious operation have been surmounted. The concentration of ships has escaped serious bombardment from the air and the huge armada has crossed the Channel without encountering real enemy naval opposition. Submarine obstacles and shore batteries, which had been pounded relentlessly by the Allied air forces, were less lethal than had been expected.