Bombers sweep northern France
Robot plane bases hammered by RAF
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
London, England –
Hundreds of British Lancaster bombers, with a fighter escort, swept over northern France early today in what was believed new attacks on the German robot bomb launching installations, while tactical forces again hit enemy communications behind the Normandy battlefront.
An Air Ministry communiqué identified the RAF targets only as “military objectives,” but coastal observers reported the great fleets of planes took only an hour and a half to shuttle over the straits, indicating the targets were somewhere nearby.
The communiqué said RAF Mosquito bombers attacked a synthetic oil plant at Buer, in Prussia, last night. Both operations were carried out without loss.
Other Mosquito forces, together with Bostons, carried out pre-dawn raids on at least 18 trains, railways and bridges over the Seine, directly behind the enemy lines, and harassed road convoys, at one point surprising a 10-mile-long convoy of trucks near Chartres.
Fighter-bombers strafed and bombed German reinforcements moving across pontoon bridges several miles from the mouth of the Seine.
Despite bad weather, which sometimes forced fighters down to less than 300 feet, Allied planes yesterday made 3,500 sorties, including attacked by rocket-firing RAF Typhoons on German strongpoints just ahead of the troops in Caen.
Down three fighters
Only one formation of German planes was encountered over Normandy yesterday. Australian Spitfires engaged 40 enemy fighters between Lisieux and Cabourg and shot down three of them without loss.
Adverse weather hampered aerial operations from Italy, although Flying Fortresses and Liberators, with escorting fighters, hit the Ploești oil fields in Romania.
Romania’s second largest refinery at Concordia Vega, on the north side of the fields, was covered by a smokescreen, but Liberators sighted several explosions and reported columns of oil smoke 18,000 feet high. The other target was the Xenia refinery, to the northwest, which was set afire by Flying Fortresses.
Mustangs made a separate offensive sweep over the area and downed most of the 14 German planes knocked out in the raid.