On Normandy front –
Hard-pressed Nazis use salvaged guns
On the U.S. 1st Army front, Normandy, France – (July 8)
The war on this complicated front started inching its way southward again this morning after a night of reorganization and another artillery earthquake. Movement was slowest in the west, more where new gun mobilizations have failed to compensate Heinie for having been caught out at the Aire crossing.
Troops that went in on the extreme left yesterday morning had reached a point 500 yards south of Saint-Jean-de-Daye during the night and were still advancing. The second spearhead in this attack, which cut across the Vire et Taute Canal during the afternoon, had cleared the marshes and was beating back the Germans successfully on dry ground beyond.
Queer artillery
Thanks to the murderous terrain, Heinie has been able to put up a good defensive fight, but in the eastern sector his luck at the moment seems to have run out. His artillery continued to plaster roads and battery positions with plenty of force, but to the disinterested observer, it looked like queer artillery.
It doesn’t make much difference to you, as you try to make yourself flatten in a mud puddle, whether the incoming shells are of orthodox caliber or not, but you begin to take notice when whizbangs and slow-moving crumps arrive in the same spot almost simultaneously. That just isn’t the way to fire artillery if you can help yourself.
It has been known for some time that the Germans all along the front, have been throwing in guns only recently salvaged from the junkpiles of 1939 and 1940 – Polish and Czech field pieces, Russian howitzers and French 75s and railway guns, not to mention exotic varieties of off-size British cannon abandoned before Dunkerque – and here’s proof of it, as a U.S. artillery major sharing my frontline mud puddle pointed out.
“If he [the enemy] gets away with this, he’s a Chinese magician,” the major said. He pulled his head down while two more Heinie shells came blasting into a hedge, one with a boom, the other with a flat crack.
Real supply problem
He said:
That’s it. This is a fine place to find out what every kind of shell in the world sounds like. He’s using them all. Think what is going on up there in his artillery positions. He has everybody’s guns up there but you can see for yourself that he hadn’t got very many of any one kind in any one place.
Tentatively, I guess it will be some 75s and a couple of 25-pounders and about half a dozen 12-inchers. And that’s no kidding. He must be getting down pretty close to the bottom of the barrel.