Allies reinforcements pour in
SHAEF, England (AP) –
Allies troops swiftly cleared Normandy beaches of the dazed Nazi survivors of a punishing sea and air bombardment, and armor-backed landing parties ranged inland today in a liberation invasion. Reinforcements streamed across the white-capped Channel.
Some reports reached here that Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery’s men had cut at Caen the Paris-Cherbourg railway, a main route supplying Hitler’s defenses forces in the Cherbourg Peninsula.
Prime Minister Churchill first disclosed that Allied troops were fighting in Caen, on the Orne River. He said the invasion was proceeding “in a thoroughly satisfactory manner,” and with unexpectedly light casualties.
The German High Command asserted that no Allied troops had penetrated Caen.
Returning RAF pilots said:
We could easily tell the beaches were secure – we could see our soldiers standing up.
Caen was the only point specifically named here as a scene of fighting, although penetrations as deep as 13 miles were reported. Nazi-controlled radios, however, reported Allied landings at a dozen points, with the most important on both sides of the estuary of the Orne River.
From west to east along the 100-mile shoreline, Axis accounts said Allied seaborne and airborne forces struck at:
The port of Barfleur (15 miles east of Cherbourg), the fishing village of Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue (five miles south of Barfleur) both sides of the Valognes-Carentan highway, a section of an important supply road to Cherbourg running five miles inland from the peninsular coast; the 27-mile-long area between Carentan and Bayeux, the Orne River estuary, a 15-mile stretch of beaches in the Villers-Trouville region across the Seine estuary from Le Havre, and the town of Honfleur (on the Seine six miles southeast of Le Havre).
The German-controlled Vichy radio also said that a vicious fight developed last night north of Rouen, on the Seine, 41 miles east of Le Havre, “between powerful Allied paratroop formations and German anti-invasion forces.”