AUGUST 10, 1944
GEN. EISENHOWER MOVES TO FRANCE
Personal Headquarters Set Up in Normandy—Shift Made in Mediterranean
Combined American Press Dispatch.
GENERAL EISENHOWER’S ADVANCE COMMAND POST, Normandy, Aug. 9 (AP)—Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allies’ Forces, has established his headquarters on the Continent to maintain the closest possible contact with the Allies’ fast-rolling offensive. The Supreme Command Headquarters unit, it was announced tonight, was moved to Normandy by air during the past few days. Officers and enlisted personnel—including Wacs—are living in tents in a camouflaged area under constant patrol by heavily armed military police.
The general is near an airfield from which he makes speedy trips daily for personal conferences with Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery and Lieut. Gen. Omar N. Bradley. Instantaneous telephone communication with Supreme Headquarters in London is available from the general’s trailer living quarters, which is under twenty-four-hour guard by M. P.’s who squat in a dugout behind a machine gun.
General Eisenhower’s aide, Comdr. Harry C. Butcher, former Columbia Broadcasting System executive of New York, sleeps in a tent a few yards away.
AUGUST 10, 1944
NEW ALLIED VICTORIES ENDANGER THE ENEMY IN FRANCE
By E. C. DANIEL
By Cable to The New York Times.
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS Allied Expeditionary Force, Aug. 10—American tanks have crashed into Le Mans and beyond in their drive toward Paris. The German radio reported last night that the fast motorized forces were only eighty-seven miles from the capital, though the latest dispatch from the American front put the distance at approximately 100 miles.
[An Allied spokesman said that the German report was undoubtedly true, if not even on the conservative side, in view of the average rate of advance, The United Press reported.]
South of the main thrust past Le Mans toward Chartres and the Seine River, the Americans have spread out protective wings toward the Loire River, driving one column into the streets of Angers, fifty miles southwest of Le Mans on the Sarthe River, just above the Loire. A report that a second column had entered Nantes, a major port near the mouth of the river, has not been confirmed here. [Nantes has been captured, The United Press said.]
The Americans captured Le Mans (1) and were reported only eighty-seven miles from Paris as spearheads thrust toward Tours, Orléans and Chartres. Alençon (2) was threatened by another column. The Canadians advancing below Caen were only five miles from Falaise (3), forcing the Germans to pull back from the Orne, to the west. The Americans advanced near the Vire-Mortain road (4), but Mortain’s fate remained in doubt. In Brittany, the Americans won St. Malo (5) and launched a heavy attack against Brest (6). They were still in the outskirts of Lorient (7) and no progress toward St. Nazaire (8) was reported. Our forces were said to have fought their way into Nantes (9) and Angers (10).
ST. MALO CAPTURED
On the north coast of Brittany, the Americans finally captured St. Malo. The German garrison of Brest refused an invitation to surrender yesterday and the Americans were assaulting the outskirts, while a second American tank force was reported from the field to be driving to their assistance from twenty-three miles away. [The last ramparts were under assault, The United Press reported.] Resistance was continuing at Dinan in the north and Lorient in the south, on which two American columns were converging from the east and northeast. No progress toward St. Nazaire was reported.
While the spearhead from Le Mans proceeded, evidently without encountering any well-organized German defense system, the Canadian forces bore down the road from Caen in the north to a point within five miles of Falaise through the best constructed German line in Normandy. Between Le Mans and Falaise a large portion of the tattered German Seventh Army was in danger of being trapped unless it desisted from counterattacks and pulled back.
The Allies’ apparent objective is to decimate this army, the only sizable German field force southwest of the Seine River, and to merge the northern and southern branches of their own offensive, perhaps somewhere in the Chartres-Dreux area, for the storming of Paris. A Royal Air Force wing commander whose planes swept behind the battle lines yesterday reported that the enemy was tending to move east and southeast toward the Seine. The gap between the Seine and the Loire is already under persistent bombardment to discourage reinforcement or escape.
The Germans reported that the clean-up of Brittany was being left to infantry and that the tanks that had broken into the peninsula were being concentrated for a drive to the east. Ten divisions constitute the American striking force, the Paris radio said.
With unexplained persistence, the remnants of four German armored divisions continued to fight back twenty miles east of Avranches, where the Allies’ line is thinnest, and retook Mortain yesterday for the third time. A “very strong force” of Germans was operating between Mortain and Vire, to the northeast, an American officer reported. [Each side held part of Mortain, other dispatches said.]
Northwest of Mortain, the Germans made several counterattacks at Chérencele-Roussel. To the north, they struck around Gathemo with twenty-five tanks, five of which were knocked out. Between Mortain and Barenton, to the southeast, the American armor encountered resistance. Nevertheless, the Americans closing down on the Vire-Mortain road occupied three villages yesterday.
The German report that the Americans were within eighty-seven miles of Paris would place the advance elements in the vicinity of La Terte-Bernard, on the main railway and road through Chartres to Paris. [Other dispatches quoted German reports that the American drives were threatening Alençon, Orléans and Tours.]
In front of Le Mans, chief German resistance came from occasional strafing aircraft and sporadic fire from 88-mm. guns. The Germans acknowledged yesterday that no counter-attack on “any considerable scale” had been made against the American advance. To the north, the Canadian and British advance proceeded more slowly but crashed through the first and second lines of fixed defenses and forced the Germans to begin withdrawing between the Orne and Laize Rivers south of Caen. The Canadians, with British support on their left and right, were thrusting toward Falaise astride the road south from Caen, with two armored spearheads on a three-mile front.
As they drove within five miles of Falaise at Potigny, German tanks began to form up in the Laison River valley, one and a half miles to the east. Rocket-firing Typhoons ripped into them.
According to the latest reports the Allies’ and the Germans’ armor had clashed near St. Quentin de la Roche.
The Canadians plunging through the built-up German defenses found a network of inter-connecting trenches and dug-outs, reminiscent of those that their fathers had stormed around Amiens just twenty-six years ago. Clusters of machine guns, mortars and the ubiquitous 88’s defended these lines.
West of this battleground the German forces were falling back under the threat of being outflanked by the bridgehead thrown across the Orne by the British Second Army south of the Grimbosq Forest. The Germans used most of their infantry and armor in that area in an attempt to batter back the tiny 300-acre bridgehead, but the British forces continued to ford the river and yesterday, behind a storm of 6,000 heavy mortar shells and artillery fire, struck out to enlarge it. This force was driving to link up across the Laize with the Canadians.
Most of the villages immediately along the east side of the Caen-Falaise road were overrun by the Canadians as they advanced throughout Tuesday night and yesterday. They were supported by the British to the northeast. Heavy fighting was reported last night just south of St. Sylvain.
The Allies’ air forces continued their hot and close support of the drives on all fronts in improved weather. One wing of RAF Typhoons had shot up sixty-one tanks by early afternoon yesterday. On the previous day the United States Ninth Air Force claimed fifty-one tanks destroyed during 1,000 flights, besides other damage.
AUGUST 15, 1944
WHERE
THE ALLIES HAVE STRUCK NEW INVASION BLOW
FALAISE GAP CLOSING
Bombs, Shells Hit Foe Trying to Hold Open Highway of Escape
By The United Press.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 15—American, British and French troops are landing on the southern coast of France, a special communiqué from Allied headquarters in Italy announced today.
The communiqué, released simultaneously in Italy and by the War Department here at 6:10 A.M. EWT, reported that the landing forces were strongly supported by Allied air forces.
American, British and French fleets also are participating in the landing operations, which were preceded by heavy Allied bombings of German defenses on the Riviera last night.
The communiqué said:
“Today American, British and French troops strongly supported by Allied air forces are being landed by American, British and French fleets on the southern coast of France.”
A statement by Gen. Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean theatre, addressed to the people of France, said the objective of the new invasion was to “join up with the Allied armies advancing from Normandy.”
Rome broadcasts said the Allied landings began at 8 A.M., Rome time. The area bombed by our air forces included St. Tropez, St. Raphael, Marseille, Toulon and between Nice and Cannes.
The assault is meeting with initial success, reports from the beachhead said. Seven waves of infantry had been put ashore in the first two hours and one company reached its first objective within one hour after hitting the beach, the reports said.
AUGUST 17, 1944
PATTON LASHES OUT
Canadians in Falaise—Gap Cut To 6 Miles, but Many Escape
By E. C. DANIEL
By Cable to The New York Times.
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS, Allied Expeditionary Force, Aug. 17—In another swift and unexpected thrust, hard-riding Lieut. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. was reported by the Germans yesterday to have whipped his tanks within a little more than forty miles of Paris in an effort to outrun and outflank German forces fleeing toward the Seine from the Argentan-Falaise trap. Reports from the front indicated the gap had been cut to six miles.
General George S. Patton in Normandy, August 16, 1944.
Leaving clean-up operations in Normandy largely to other commanders and to history, General Patton, according to the German Transocean News Agency, was pushing his armored forces along three roads into Chartres, forty-four miles southwest of Paris.
FIGHTING REPORTED NEAR DREUX
Earlier yesterday American Third Army tanks were reported on the authority of the German High Command to he engaged in “heavy fighting” against the Germans in the “Chartres-Dreux area.” Dreux is forty-two miles west of Paris and only twenty-two miles from the Seine whose protection the defeated Germans in northwestern France are seeking.
As fighting ran fast and free again east of Alençon, the Allies imposed a ban once more on mention of place names and there consequently was no confirmation of the German reports. One veiled dispatch from the front, however, asserted that American forces had “another great day.”
General Patton’s sweep around the German flank, said Capt. Ludwig Sertorius, German commentator, possibly is planned to isolate German armies in Normandy from Paris and push them back into the estuary of the Seine. The estuary is some sixty miles down the river from Dreux.
There were indications from the front yesterday that the Germans were lining up barges on the Seine and organizing a hazardous evacuation across the river. If German reports are true the scene may be set there for a new battle of annihilation. All major Seine bridges northwest of Paris have either been broken by air attacks or are under repair.
The pocket west of Falaise was further compressed yesterday by concerted pressure all around the perimeter. Signs of disintegration inside the pocket increased. Clerks, cooks and other services troops were armed and put into the rearguards. The remnants of twelve units were counted in a single British operation, indicating all leftovers had been scraped together for a final fling.
Estimates of the number of prisoners that finally would be counted still were being scaled down, however. The latest guess from the British front was 40,000. At United States First Army headquarters it was stated officially that troops of eleven German divisions had been caught. What is left of these battered units remains to be determined.
Eight thousand prisoners so far have been penned and last night they were still coming back from the front by truckload. But still more also escaped yesterday under the cover of a morning fog that hampered air attacks. At one time 200 German transports were counted east of Falaise.
AUGUST 18, 1944
PARIS HEARS GUNS OF ITS LIBERATORS
By JOHN MacCORMAC
By Wireless to The New York Times.
LONDON, Aug. 17—One of the most uplifting items of news that exiled Frenchmen have heard since France fell they learned today from the German conqueror. It was that Paris today, for the first time since 1940, could hear the intermittent thunder of approaching gunfire.
“The roar of battle is approaching the French capital” was the first headline in the Paris radio news bulletin. The German Transocean News Agency announced that “the whole aspect of the capital is becoming that of a frontline city. For the first time the German command has appealed to the population to remain calm.”
Tonight over the American forces radio a Supreme Headquarters spokesman told Paris policemen not to leave the capital “under any pretext” and to hide if Joseph Darnand, Vichy Secretary of State for the Maintenance of Order, ordered them to Nancy, for the “day is not far off when you will have to rise and chase out the enemy and his accomplices.”
Whether the American tank forces approaching the city will attempt to enter the city or outflank it, and whether or not the capital is their immediate objective, seemed to matter little tonight. What the news boded was the early liberation of Paris and that, to Frenchmen in London, was electrifying. Paris is not the whole of France but it is France’s heart. “What are they saying in Paris?” used to be the chief anxiety of Napoleon on his campaigns.
It is in Paris that revolutions start and stop and wars begin and are ended. It was from there that Gallieni’s taxicab army issued to win the Battle of the Marne that saved France, when in 1940 Paris was abandoned without a shot the doom of France was sealed. The tale since then for Paris has been one of humiliation and hardship—Hitler’s posturings beside the tomb of Napoleon, bombings at the hands of France’s friends, starvation and impoverishment by her captors.
But Paris, unlike Vichy, has never accepted the German. The underground there has remained strong. If the city is quiet, it is not because of German appeals or threats, but because Gen. Charles de Gaulle this week instructed the city to await his orders.
Electric current is now available for Parisians only between 10:30 P.M. and midnight, and from today there will be no more gas. Paris must therefore be supplied with meals from central communal kitchens.
The food position is reported by the Germans to be so serious that peasants have been asked to speed the threshing of wheat and cart it into the capital. The city, though hungry, is orderly. It is disciplining itself, since the Paris police struck against the appointment of an unpopular high police official.
Since the Metro, the only remaining public means of transportation, is now shut down, Parisians went to work today on foot or by pushbike after a three-day holiday marking the Feast of the Assumption. The “people listening to a concert in the square in front of the Palais Royale were in high spirits,” the German Transocean news agency said yesterday, but it did not say why.
AUGUST 24, 1944
FRENCH DIVISION SENT INTO PARIS
French Armored Division Sent into Paris by Bradley
The following dispatch by a representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System, the first American correspondent to enter Paris, was cabled to London and broadcast from there.
By CHARL
ES COLLINGWOOD
PARIS, Aug. 23—The French Second Armored Division entered Paris today after the Parisians had risen as one man to beat down the German troops who had garrisoned the city.
It was the people of Paris who really won back their city. It all happened with fantastic suddenness.
The American Army was occupied with the drive through Evreux to the mouth of the Seine, after which it planned to invest Paris. But yesterday a Frenchman burst into Lieut. Gen. Omar N. Bradley’s headquarters. He was the chief of the French Forces of the Interior in Paris and he had a staggering, incredible story to tell.
He said that he had concluded an armistice with the German forces in Paris. The people of Paris had risen and had so hounded the Germans that the German commander had requested an armistice. He wanted to withdraw troops from the road blocks west and south of Paris, where they had been facing the Americans, and pass them through the city.
The armistice was to expire at noon today.
This news caused a sensation in General Bradley’s headquarters because, although we had known that rioting had been going on in Paris since Saturday, we had not known that things had gone so far that obviously the French had given the Germans a terrific beating.
The whole operation was geared to the complete encirclement of the Germans west of the Seine, but General Bradley decided that we must go into Paris. It was short notice, for the troops had to be ready to enter at noon today. He ordered the French Second Armored Division out of the line and told it to start moving east toward Paris.
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 124