Nazi prisoners on French coast awestruck over ‘chute landings
By S. L. Solon
With Allied Expeditionary Forces (UP) – (June 7, 1:00 p.m., delayed)
Allied forward troops, advancing steadily against undiminishing German resistance, were on the outskirts of Caen today and joining up with the Canadians.
They resumed their advance after several hours’ sleep under skies crisscrossed by ack-ack and tracer bullets.
A German tank counterattack has been smashed, but the Luftwaffe was making a desperate effort to check the advance and there was constant bombing of the beach area during the night. The skies were never without the roar of planes – usually mixed Allied and German craft.
Hold area extending inward
In this sector, the Allied troops have a good hold on a large area extending well inland.
We witnessed the arrival of the great airborne army which landed last night. Hundreds of airplanes swept overhead, flying low and disgorging colored parachutes, marking different paratroop units, and the sky was filled with bunches of multicolored silk like unfolding flowers.
The French nearby cheered the spectacle which probably was the largest formation of airborne and paratroop units ever used on a military operation.
German prisoners watched with awe the manifestation of power and almost appeared to show admiration at the fantastic sight of thousands of armed men dropping from the skies.
The glider-borne troops were fighting to break one of the toughest German defense areas. Paratroops who landed earlier to secure bridgeheads across a canal and river on the left bank, secured their first objective in a victory over superior forces.
The victory was achieved at a heavy cost, particularly to one battalion, but it saved far greater casualties which would have resulted from a frontal drive and they did a vitally important job in securing the left flank where the danger of German pressure was greatest.
Wounded return, pale and grim; praise heroism of invasion medics
By Dudley Ann Harmon
An invasion port, England (UP) –
This is the other end of the invasion – the return of the landing boats bearing the wounded.
These are the boys who didn’t get past the beaches and the water obstacles. They come back now with blood staining their hastily-applied field bandages.
They lie pale and still on their litters. For them the invasion is no success, the assault no walkover.
Wounded praise medics
I manage to catch a few words with one of the more lightly wounded as he hobbles off a LST with a bandage on one hand and his trousers torn to the knee.
He says:
The medics are doing a terrific job on the beaches. They have been right there giving morphine and bandaging wounds with bullets flying around their ears.
He continued:
I saw some boys with arms or legs blown away and they were getting tourniquets right away. I guess I was hit by a mortar shell or something. I fell down and when I came to, an army doctor was right there. He gave me morphine and sulfa powder and then I walked back down the beach under my own power.
Cling to their few possessions
Some of the wounded walk off the ship, slowly and painfully. Some of them are carried off stretchers borne by Negroes.
I watched the wounded pour ashore for hours. Here was one who puffed a cigarette and tried to look chipper; there was another with a smile; some were pale and unhappy.
On their litters they clutched the few personal things they had managed to hold – knives, cartons of cigarettes or boots with the sand of the French beaches still clinging to them.
The medicos were doing a terrific job here, at the wrong end of the Glory Road, too.