The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945
Page 125
Certain American forces were sent the same way. On a moment’s notice the whole machinery was set in motion to occupy one of the world’s largest cities.
It is no mean responsibility. Paris is in desperate straits. It is estimated that it needs immediately 3,000 tons of food and 3,000 tons of coal. After that, there must be a huge and steady supply.
But the decision had to be made, if only as a tribute to the tremendous fact that the French had reconquered their own capital. Every hand was raised against the enemy. For the first time in this war, the inhabitants of a city have wrested it from the enemy.
Paris would have fallen to our arms, but every American soldier in France would rather have had it this way. Paris, queen of cities, was freed by its own citizens, who proved that there was no such thing as defeat for them.
AUGUST 30, 1944
U.S., Britain and Russia Agree On Outline For Security League
By JAMES B. RESTON
Special to The New York Times.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 29—The chairmen of the United States, British and Soviet delegations at the Washington Conversations on International Organization announced today that they had reached “general agreement” on the structure and aims of an international league to maintain peace and security.
In a general press conference at the Dumbarton Oaks Mansion Edward R. Stettinius Jr., Under-Secretary of State; Sir Alexander Cadogan, British Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and Andrei A. Gromyko, Russian Ambassador, did not discuss the substance of the proposed security league or the means by which they would put force behind the league, but they made it clear that there was no disagreement among them on the creation of an assembly of all peace-loving powers, a world council of a restricted number of powers and an international court of justice.
“After a week of discussion,” a joint communiqué stated, “the three heads of delegations are happy to announce that there is general agreement among them to recommend that the proposed International Organization for Peace and Security should provide for:
“1. An assembly composed of representatives of all peace-loving nations based on the principle of sovereign equality.
“2. A council composed of a smaller number of members in which the principal States will be joined by a number of other states to be elected periodically.
“3. Effective means for the peaceful settlement of disputes, including an international court of justice for the adjudication of justifiable questions, and also the application of such other means as may be necessary for maintenance of peace and security.”
The delegates to the Dumbarton Oaks Peace Conference.
AUGUST 26, 1944
DELIRIOUS FRENCH MOB LIBERATORS
Milling Throngs Cry ‘Thanks!’ for Hours
By MAURICE DESJARDINS
Canadian Press War Correspondent.
PARIS, Aug. 25—For the last six hours we have been watching a tumultuous demonstration of gratitude by the liberated people of Paris.
After four years of German occupation, Parisians are putting on a show of sincere unbridled joy.
Thousands of delirious, happy people are massed along the boulevards and have been yelling hour after hour: “Merci, merci!”
This afternoon Gen. Charles de Gaulle drove past in a limousine and the cheers reached a new crescendo. Twenty-year-old patriots who were seeing him for the first time cried like babies.
One wonders when the fierceness of the demonstrations will abate. It shows no signs of doing so yet.
Upon approaching Paris this afternoon we saw two tired Germans in an American jeep. There was a crowd around them. Young French girls were spitting in one German’s face. He just grinned sheepishly.
The crowd cheering de Gaulle on rue de Rivoli, at the corner of the Hotel de Ville, during the liberation of Paris in 1944.
SEPTEMBER 1, 1944
FIRST ARMY SWEEP BECOMES A ROMP
Infantrymen Stay In Trucks as They Rush Onward After Runaway Germans
By HAROLD DENNY
By Wireless to The New York TIMES.
WITH UNITED STATES FIRST ARMY in France, Aug. 31—Our drive is sweeping on at a breathless, incredible rate. Never in all warfare have troops advanced so swiftly and with such power. The Germans wanted a blitz war and now they have it.
The battle has become a full pursuit now, with our armored columns slashing deeply into the enemy’s rear ranks and our infantry charging in trucks. So utter has become the enemy’s defeat that our troops seldom need to dismount and deploy.
American troops are approaching the Ardennes Forest and already have forced several crossings of the Meuse River. They overran at a bound the Villers-Coterets Forest, scene of some of the bitterest fighting in World War I.
Vast quantities of munitions and of German transport are being captured with almost every hour of the present battle. Two airfields and supply dumps were seized intact near Fismes before the Germans had an opportunity to destroy them.
FIVE TRAINS DESTROYED
Five German railway trains carrying personnel and every kind of equipment from collaborationist women who dared not remain in France to Tiger tanks on flatcars have been destroyed as they tried to escape.
I came across the smoking wreckage of one today at Braine, east of Soissons. This train had consisted of a locomotive and twenty-three cars and coaches. Among the cars were four carrying Panther tanks. At the rear was anti-aircraft guns mounted on a flatcar. In between were cars carrying personnel, including a score of officers and women companions, one carload of liquor in barrels, and one carload of perfume. It is extraordinary the kind of things the Germans are trying to get out of this country.
An American airplane had spotted this train and had radioed an armored column in the neighborhood. Our armor sped down the highway to a point where it intersected the railway line. There it waited. When the train approached the crossing our tanks opened fire. The first shots riddled the locomotive and it blew up. The German tanks on the flat cars were manned. The crews swung their guns around and opened fire on our tanks, causing some casualties.
TANKS ON CARS FIGHT BACK
Perhaps never before had there been a battle like it, tanks on board a train fighting tanks on a road. It lasted only a few minutes. All four German tanks were hit repeatedly and all set on fire, Their ammunition blew up and then their gasoline. The crews never got out.
Our tanks turned their fire on each succeeding car and coach in rotation and riddled and set fire to every one. Many Germans were killed. Some fled to a railway embankment on the far side and were either killed or captured. And some died in the flames of the perfume, which burned furiously and with an unpleasant odor.
Now that we are immensely strong, General Bradley is turning the German defeat into a rout.
As one high First Army officer said tonight: “The boche is in a state of disorganization beyond comparison. The drive of the American First Army is actually a pursuit and exploitation.”
The Germans have had to flee without a fight from geographically excellent lines on which they undoubtedly had expected to make a stand. That “defence in depth” of which Adolf Hitler and Field Marshal Gen. Erwin Rommel boasted before D-day has proved to be little more than lines on a map and much of it is already behind us now, with little fighting to take it.
The fighting since the liberation of Paris has been over battlefields of World War I, on many of which American troops shed their blood. This fighting has swept in an unchecked torrent across the Marne, Aisne, Ourcq and Vesle Rivers, and now has broached the Meuse.
MARNE JUST DAY’S BATTLE
The third battle of the Marne, along whose banks so many thousands died in 1914 and 1918, was but a day’s episode in the present drive. Our engineers flung hasty bridges across that deep, still, little river and our tanks and infantry and artillery poured over it without pause. Town after town and city after city has been set free without marring beyond that of smashed German vehicles that clutter the
ir streets where our forces caught and destroyed them.
I rode peaceably into Reims today and stopped for a quick cup of champagne, while crowds thronged the streets as on a holiday. The Reims Cathedral, where Joan of Arc crowned Charles and where so many other French Kings were crowned, has suffered no further damage since its vandalous pounding by German artillery for four years during World War I. It is just as it had been restored by John D. Rockefeller’s beneficence. Many citizens were praying in thankfulness there today.
SEPTEMBER 1, 1944
Invasion of Reich Forecast In Eisenhower War Review
By Cable to The New York Times.
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS, Allied Expeditionary Force, Aug. 31—Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied expeditionary forces in France, forecast the invasion of Germany today when he declared that the American and British armies in France must follow the Germans into the Reich to defeat them decisively and completely.
Brimming with confidence, General Eisenhower declared that the campaign in France was five days ahead of schedule. Today on “D plus eighty-five” Allied positions were well in advance of the line where it was expected they would be on “D plus ninety.”
Discussing the end of the war the supreme commander said he would stand by his prophecy of last Christmas when he declared that Germany could be beaten in 1944 if all on the battlefield and home fronts did their duty to the full.
MONTGOMERY CALLED GREAT SOLDIER
It is evident that General Eisenhower does not expect the Germans to be able to form a line in France, for he said he expected the American and British groups in the north and the invading forces in the south to continue their rapid progress.
The supreme commander confirmed reports that a new command set-up had been instituted in France under which Lieut. Gen. Omar N. Bradley and Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, just promoted to the rank of field marshal, commanding the Twelfth United States Army Group and Twenty-first British Army Group, respectively, are responsible to him. But he took great pains to explain that this did not mean a demotion for Marshal Montgomery.
Montgomery, who he said was one of the great soldiers of this or any other war, had been entrusted with the execution and direction of the battle in which from July 25 onward the first United States Army broke through west of St. Lô to Avranches and the Third Army exploited the break-through westward to Brest and eastward through Le Mans to the southeast of Paris.
BATTLE JOINTLY PLANNED
The planning of this battle, possibly the decisive one of the campaign in France, had been a joint affair, according to General Eisenhower.
The supreme commander emphasized that anyone who interpreted command changes as a demotion for Marshal Montgomery would not look the facts in the face, and declared that the change was part of a long-arranged plan under which Montgomery and Bradley would take command of the respective Army groups once the Allied forces had broken out of the Cherbourg Peninsula.
This break-out had occurred in a series of engagements starting from St. Lô during which Montgomery had exercised tactical command of the American land forces as well as the command of his own Twenty-first Group. It was the British general’s job to coordinate the battle all along the line in Normandy, General Eisenhower said.
Once the break-out from Normandy was completed and the Twelfth Army Group organization activated, the final stage of the Allied command system, which had been settled since last January, was reached, and Eisenhower took over Montgomery’s responsibilities for immediate control of the coordination of the Allied armies and Montgomery directed his attention to command of the Twenty-first Army Group.
STATEMENT CLEARS AIR
The statement that Montgomery had executed and directed the operations of both American and British armies in France during the great victories of July and early August was by far the most important news arising as General Eisenhower spoke to 150 newspaper correspondents. The allocation of command during those critical days has been argued over by hypersensitive soldiers and civilians of both nations in the last two weeks in London.
General Eisenhower’s statement cleared the air.
SEPTEMBER 2, 1944
PARIS CONTINUES SEIZING SUSPECTS
3,000 to 4,000 Persons Herded into Bicycle Racing Arena To Await Their Trials
By Wireless to The New York Times.
PARIS, Sept. 1—The round-up of collaborationists and those suspected of having been too friendly with the Germans continued today. Already there are some 3,000 or 4,000 suspects interned in the Velodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle-racing arena. They all are awaiting trial. Some of them—perhaps 600—are women. Included among those detained is Sacha Guitry, famous playwright who tells all who will listen that he is being unjustly detained. According to the guards, he refused for two days to eat with a fork, gobbling his rice by piling it on bread with his fingers.
Many of those who are being detained fear that they will be shot. Actually there does not seem to be much danger of that. With one or two exceptions those gathered up at the Velodrome are small fry. The big shots got out to Germany or into enemy territory before the Allies’ armies entered Paris. Most of these people who have been picked up on denunciation of neighbors are people who got to know the Germans, entertained them and accepted favors from them for the most part.
The round-up of suspects was still one of the major preoccupations of Paris today, along with food and transport.
While a demand arose for this new Provisional Government to abrogate the laws of Vichy formally, there was more and more evidence coming to light that the evils of German occupation did not end with the liberation of Paris. For instance, there is a whole section of Paris where the Jews still live in terror in a German-established ghetto.
There is currently a wave of denunciation in Paris. This Government is taking steps to see that while justice is administered mere vengeance does not prevail. Gen. Charles de Gaulle is determined that there shall be no terror.
The persons suspected and momentarily interned receive a preliminary trial by a committee of judges. If the judges find them guilty they are interned for a review of their cases by the Palais de Justice.
A Nazi collaborator being arrested in Paris in August, 1944.
SEPTEMBER 7, 1944
Americans Smash Way Across the Moselle; Battle of Reich On
By DREW MIDDLETON
By Cable to The New York Times.
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS, Allied Expeditionary Force, Sept. 7—Mudstained infantrymen of the American Third Army have fought their way across the Moselle River in face of fierce German fire to strike the first blow in the assault on Germany. They followed in the wake of armored reconnaissance units that darted across the enemy frontier and probed the Siegfried Line’s outer works from the border of Luxembourg to a point south of Nancy.
The vanguards of two Allied armies nearest the German frontier to the northwest are moving steadily toward the Reich while infantrymen are mopping up big German pockets to the rear. Yesterday tanks of the American First Army rumbled across the Meuse at Namur, Dinant and Givet, pushing on north toward Liege and Aachen and in the south across the northern shoulder of the Ardennes Mountains toward a vulnerable section of the Siegfried Line.
FIRST ARMY CAPTURES 25,000
The First Army captured more than 25,000 prisoners in a pocket southwest of Mons on Sept. 3, 4 and 5. Except for the Falaise pocket, this is the largest bag of prisoners taken since the opening of the campaign.
The British Second Army, whose entrance into the Netherlands was confirmed by Supreme Headquarters forty-eight hours after it had been announced by the Premier of that country, also is extending its salient both to the east beyond Lou-vain and to the west toward Ghent. Ghent is thirty-one miles from the German forts at Zeebrugge, which, in conjunction with those at Flushing, prevent the Allies from using the great port of Antwerp.
The left flank of the British Second Army is moving steadily westward toward the Channel ports, while Cana
dians and Poles of the Canadian First Army are pushing in from the southeast. The Canadians have glimpsed England from the Channel coast around Calais, and are pounding the stubborn German garrison in Boulogne. The Poles have smashed forward eight to ten miles from St. Omer to Cassel, seventeen and a half miles from Dunkerque. Three million surrender leaflets have been dropped on garrisons of Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais, Dunkerque and Ostend.
ALLIES ENTER YPRES
Meanwhile reconnaissance elements have pushed into Yprés in Belgium, twenty-six miles southeast of Dunkerque.
There is no longer any doubt that a stern and perhaps costly battle faces the Allies in their operations against the Siegfried Line. The American infantrymen that forced the Moselle were met by very heavy artillery fire while troops of the American First and British Second Armies, moving east, are encountering stiffer resistance as they near the German frontier.
A superiority in tanks has served the Allies well in their exploitation of victories around St. Lô and Caen, but it is clear that this stage of the battle is drawing to its close. For the next few weeks it will be up to the American doughboy and the British Tommy.
The stubborn German resistance in Brest is a reminder of how well the Germans can fight. More than 500 tons of bombs rained on the city from sixteen waves of Marauders and Havocs yesterday, but the Germans still are holding out defiantly. The ability of these enemy troops to withstand unchallenged air and sea power, while fighting off ground attacks, should be a lesson to those who believe the Siegfried Line can be cracked easily.