America at war! (1941–) – Part 3

U.S. Navy Department (July 10, 1944)

CINCPAC Communiqué No. 77

Guam Island was shelled by light surface units of the Pacific Fleet on July 8 (West Longitude Date). Defense positions and buildings were damaged, and several small craft along the beaches were hit.

Carrier aircraft of a fast carrier task group attacked Guam and Rota island on July 9. At Guam, military objectives at Piti Town were hit, and anti-aircraft batteries and coastal guns bombed. Anti-aircraft fire ranged from moderate to intense. One of our aircraft made a water landing and a destroyer rescued the crew. At Rota Island, rockets and bombs were used against objectives in Rota Town and the airstrip, and gun emplacements were strafed.

Liberators of the 7th Army Air Force bombed Truk Atoll on July 8. Several enemy aircraft were in the air but did not press home an attack. One Liberator received minor damage from moderate anti-aircraft fire. Corsair fighters and Dauntless dive bombers of the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing attacked Jaluit, Maloelap and Wotje in the Marshalls on July 9.

The Pittsburgh Press (July 10, 1944)

British capture three towns, key height south of Caen

Yanks advance mile, extend bridgehead in central Normandy

map.071044.up
Two initial objectives captured, Caen and La Haye-du-Puits, British and U.S. forces today continued to advance along the road to Paris. The Yanks pushed 2,000 yards south of La Haye (1), captured the towns of Le Désert and Cavigny and drove to within five miles of Périers (2). The British and Canadians extended their beachheads across the Odon River, captured three villages and a key height, and pressed toward the Nazis’ Orne River line (3).

SHAEF, London, England –
British and Canadian forces slashed into the exposed German flank below captured Caen today and drove forward through three fortified villages to within less than half a mile of the Orne River defense line due south of Caen.

Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery’s 2nd Army, striking again while the mop-up of the Caen area was underway, stormed through Éterville, Maltot (near Esquay) and Bretteville-sur-Odon in advances up to about a mile and overran the hotly-contested height called Hill 112 commanding the Orne–Odon salient below Caen.

U.S. forces advancing down the mid-Normandy highway toward Périers captured Sainteny, five miles southwest of Carentan, and other U.S. units expanded the bridgehead across the Vire for an average gain of a mile, reaching a point only 7,000 yards from Saint-Lô.

The expansion of the Vire bridgehead almost brought the front in line with the general battle zone through the Caumont–Saint-Lô area, and a headquarters spokesman said Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley’s drive there “shows considerable long-term promise.”

Threaten encirclement

The British-Canadian armored force cutting in below Caen like a giant scythe began developing a possible encirclement maneuver against the German troops holding out in the Faubourg-de-Vaucelles, southern suburb of Caen.

The high ground captured by the Imperials between the Odon and Orne Rivers was the key to the entire Caen sector, and the victory put the final seal of the conquest of the great inland port.

A spokesman, however, emphasized that the Germans were still fighting fiercely all along the Normandy front, but had been obliged to throw in reserves they had been trying to build up for a showdown.

Orderly withdrawals

It was emphasized that wherever the Nazis were giving ground, they were doing so by orderly withdrawals, and nowhere was there a sign of disorganization in the enemy ranks or large-scale disengagement.

With the seizure of Hill 112 between the Orne and Odon, the British were able to command the highway running south and slightly west from Caen, leaving only the Caen–Falaise highway in German hands and relatively free of interference.

In the immediate area of Caen, which fell yesterday, German strongpoints which had been bypassed in the final assault on the city were being cleaned out.

Counterattacks held

West of Caen, the Germans counterattacked, but were held everywhere by the British.

The Americans who captured Sainteny pressed on down the road from Carentan toward Périers, the road hub controlling the territory between Saint-Lô and the west coast.

To the northwest, the Germans counterattacked strongly in the area of La Haye-du-Puits, captured yesterday, but the Americans beat off the blows and destroyed a number of enemy tanks.

Front dispatches disclosed that Gen. Montgomery’s tanks and infantry, supported by warships and rocket-firing planes, had cleared a six-mile stretch of the north bank of the Orne in Caen and on either side of the city.

Couldn’t wreck bridges

A headquarters spokesman said the final stages of the British advance into Caen were so rapid that the Germans were not believed to have had time to destroy all the bridges across the Orne.

The British first pushed across the Odon River some five miles southwest of Caen nearly two weeks ago and so developed their threat to the Orne River that the Germans committed a major portion of their armor there.

The line swayed back and forth during five German counterattacks, but the British held firmly to their bridgehead.

Americans also advance

One column of the U.S. 1st Army at the western end of the 111-mile front pushed 2,000 yards south of La Haye-du-Puits, another seized Le Désert and Cavigny, three miles southwest and three southeast respectively of Saint-Jean-de-Daye, and a third drove down the Carentan-Périers road.

Headquarters acknowledged that the Germans had made a minor gain in violent counterattacks on the Mount Castre plateau southeast of La Haye, though the Americans still held high ground there.

The liberation of Caen cleared away one of the strongest obstacles on the highway and railway from Cherbourg to Paris 120 miles to the east, and gave the Allies a first-class port which had a peacetime capacity of two million tons of cargo a year. Caen, the largest city yet captured by the Allies in France, had a peacetime population of 50,000, some 20,000 more than Cherbourg.

Once well across the Orne, however, Allied armor can fan out across rolling country without a natural defense obstacle for 20 miles. Any German attempt to make a stand short of a ridge running northwest from Falaise, 20 miles southeast of Caen, to the Caumont area was expected to touch off an armored battle that may determine the length of enemy resistance in western France.

Caen was little more than a crumbling mass of ruins when it fell into British hands yesterday, but its port installation and the Orne Canal leading seven miles northward to the sea were believed largely intact.

Yanks finish conquest of Saipan Island

Win base in range of Japan, Philippines
By William F. Tyree, United Press staff writer

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii –
Completion of the conquest of Saipan in the bloodiest fighting of the Pacific War established U.S. forces today within bombing range of Japan and the Philippines.

Saipan, with two large airfields and deepwater harbors, opened a new springboard for further amphibious operations westward to the China coast and eventually to Japan itself.

The complete conquest of the 75-mile-square island, administrative center of the Marianas, was announced late yesterday by Adm. Chester W. Nimitz who said U.S. Marines and Army troops broke the last organized resistance by the Japs in the northern tip of Saipan Saturday.

11,300 Japs buried

The 25-day campaign for Saipan resulted in heavy losses to both the United States and Japan.

Of the enemy’s estimated 20,000-30,000 men originally on the island, more than 11,300 of them were buried by U.S. forces and hundreds taken prisoner.

Although U.S. losses for the campaign were not disclosed, Adm. Nimitz had previously announced that in the first 14 days of fighting, the United States suffered 9,754 casualties, of which 1,474 were killed, 7,400 wounded and others missing. It was believed, however, that the casualties were on a smaller scale since then.

Operations to continue

Adm. Nimitz’s communiqué gave no indication of the size of scattered enemy remnants still on Saipan, but operations to dig the stragglers out of the hills and caves will probably continue for some time.

Additionally, thousands of other Japs scattered through the remaining Mariana Islands from Guam in the south to Pagan in the north were virtually isolated by the conquest and faced continual aerial bombardment with little hope of assistance from home.

The final breakthrough of the Jap lines at the northern edge of Saipan was accomplished Saturday afternoon by battle-hardened veterans of the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions and the 27th Infantry Division, most of the latter from New York State.

Follows suicide charge

The end of the campaign came two days after the trapped Japs made a desperate break from their hopeless positions and drove more than a mile down the western coast to near the town of Tanapag before they were stopped. More than 1,500 enemy troops were killed in the assault.

While Saipan was won at the expense of the greatest personnel losses the United States has suffered in any Pacific campaign, the conquest was considered one of the most important because of its strategic location at the apex of a triangle with the Philippines and Japan proper.

On Saipan, the largest island yet taken in the Central Pacific, the Americans gained control of two airfields – Isely and Marpi – within 1,499 miles south of Tokyo and 1,470 miles east of the Philippines.

Can harass Japs

Possession of the island enables Adm. Nimitz to protect his air and naval power deep into the last big sea area farther westward under Jap control and open bases for submarines closer to the fields where they have been harassing enemy supply lines since the war started.

With these lines narrowed by Adm. Nimitz’s strides through the Central Pacific and Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s advances in the southwest, the Japs faced a threat of a further pinch of supplies to their home industries.

The campaign on Saipan was perhaps the costliest yet suffered by the Japs. Since it opened on June 14, the Japs lost their key base in the Western Pacific, together with the entire garrison, and more than 1,000 planes and 100 ships destroyed or damaged.

Raid Guam, Rota

Adm. Nimitz disclosed that carrier-based planes again attacked Guam and Rota, south of Saipan, Friday and Saturday, while a U.S. combat patrol shot down nine Jap fighter planes apparently attempting to fly from Guam to Yap, in the Carolina Islands.

Six twin-engined Jap planes were destroyed on the ground and probably two others near Agana on Guam. The Americans lost one fighter and one torpedo bomber in the two-day raid.

A Jap Dōmei News Agency broadcast said U.S. planes raided Guam, Rota and Tinian yesterday and that “several” cruisers and destroyers shelled Guam.

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.

Americans seize Livorno outpost

Threaten to turn Nazi line in Italy
By Reynolds Packard, United Press staff writer

americavotes1944

Roosevelt on spot on Wallace fate

Ultimate control of party at stake
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer

Washington (UP) –
Vice President Henry A. Wallace returned today from his 23,000-mile roundtrip to Asia, and the White House announced that he would confer this afternoon with President Roosevelt, who must decide whether Mr. Wallace will be on the Democratic ticket again this year.

The necessity of so deciding confronts Mr. Roosevelt with one of the momentous problems of his career – whether it compel the Democratic National Convention to renominate the Vice President. The convention starts July 19 in Chicago.

On his return here, as on his arrival in Seattle yesterday, Mr. Wallace had nothing to say about his own political destiny. He issued a statement that he was glad to be back and said that “this is the first time I have liked Washington weather.”

In a 20-minute radio address in Seattle, he had urged a “New Deal” for China and close collaboration between this country and “the new world of the Northern Pacific and Eastern Asia.”

It was reported in Seattle that Mr. Wallace has made no plans to attend the Democratic convention.

Mr. Roosevelt’s ability to control the convention and to have Mr. Wallace on the ticket is unquestioned.

What the President must decide is whether it would be wiser to avoid the bitterness that Mr. Wallace’s renomination would create or to accept some other running mate who might surrender to the Conservative Democratic organization if Mr. Roosevelt died in office and were succeeded by the Vice President.

That is about all there is to the uproar about Mr. Wallace, although in the public dispute now raging over the vice-presidential nomination there is little if any acknowledgment that all hands are thinking about ultimate control of the party organization.

1940 bitterness recalled

Mr. Roosevelt is 62 and if reelected, he would be 66 on leaving office. The possibility of his death in office, therefore, is something both he and his Democratic opponents consider in approaching the vice-presidential problem.

Mr. Roosevelt rammed the former Iowa Republican down the throat of the 1940 Democratic Convention with the explanation that he wanted a man of “that turn of mind” on the ticket with him. The compelling factor, however, was the President’s intimation that he would not accept the nomination himself unless Mr. Wallace was on the ticket.

It was a bitter show in 1940, with Mr. Wallace sitting grimly on the platform, blistering under the boos and clutching the speech of acceptance which he was never permitted to deliver.

Identical conditions today

Almost identical conditions now prevail except that the anti-fourth-term, anti-Wallace forces are more angry this time. They have been frustrated in their effort to get rid of Mr. Roosevelt and have settled upon Mr. Wallace as a compromise sacrifice.

The final pre-convention gesture of opposition to Mr. Wallace came over the weekend from the Virginia State Democratic Convention which instructed delegates to Chicago to vote against his renomination. The delegates have no presidential instructions.

No one here doubts that Mr. Roosevelt will control the convention in every respect. But it is equally certain that there will be bitter minority opposition not only to Mr. Wallace, but to the President’s renomination.

Some may take a walk

The Credentials Committee will seethe in contests, notable whether pro- or anti-Roosevelt delegates from Texas shall be seated. The South wants to restore the rule requiring nominations be made by a minimum two-thirds majority. There is angry fear in the South that the Northern Democrats, allied with labor and controlling great city organizations, will try to write into the platform a commitment on racial equality.

It is possible that some delegates may take a walk – as Senator Ellison D “Cotton Ed” Smith (D-SC) did in 1936 when a Negro preacher offered a convention prayer. But the majority of the delegates will vote for Mr. Roosevelt’s renomination, unless he forbids it, and for anything else he wants, including Mr. Wallace – if he wants him.


Oregon to vote for Wallace

Washington (UP) –
Willis Mahoney, former mayor of Klamath Falls, Oregon, and Democratic candidate for Senator from Oregon, predicted today that a majority of delegates to the Democratic National Convention from his state will vote for the renomination of Vice President Henry A. Wallace.

Mr. Mahoney also predicted that President Roosevelt will “overwhelmingly carry the Pacific Northwest” if he seeks a fourth term.

Although Mr. Wallace’s name did not appear on the ballot in the May Democratic primary in Oregon, some 11,800 Democrats wrote his name in for the vice-presidential nomination, Mr. Mahoney said.

You can still lend your help –
War Bond Drive extended; $21 million more needed

War correspondent Ralph Heinzen to speak tonight in move to spur campaign

Nazis face more secret weapons

SHAEF, London, England (UP) –
The Americans have several new secret weapons to use in their march to Berlin, Maj. Gen. Harry Benton Sayler, chief ordnance officer for the European Theater, disclosed today.

Among them, he said, is a gun with a range so great that the usual low-speed observations planes are useless as “eyes” for it and regular fighters will be used instead.

Gen. Sayler said:

We recently opened fire for the first time with the longer-range weapon against German headquarters. A pursuit plane was used fro observation. The fliers saw the German personnel trying to get away in cars and went down and shot them up.

Some of the new weapons have been used successfully in Normandy, Gen. Sayler said, but others are being held in reserve and details of them have not been released.

Gen. Sayler said that while Cherbourg was not ready yet to receive supplies in great quantities, “we hope soon to get supplies going directly to France from the United States.”


Nazis in France packing bags

Troops told to send belonging home
By Paul Ghali

Bern, Switzerland –
German officers garrisoned in the south zone of France on June 27 received orders to pack up their belongings and send them to Germany immediately. Each man was allowed to keep only 11 pounds of personal baggage. Shipments began on July 1.

This is private information just received by your correspondent from a most reliable source in France.

French military experts here believe that this news confirms recent reports that the Nazis are preparing for the eventual evacuation of France. But they also feel that the decree may well mean that several, if not all, German divisions in the south of France are making final preparations for forthcoming battles.

The total number of Wehrmacht divisions in the south zone is estimated by these experts at 18.

One thing appears certain. This German luggage, which presumably contains the booty of four years of pillage in France, will gave a long and hectic journey before it reached its destination. Communications from central and western France have become so disrupted that it recently took Dr. Braillard, Vichy delegate to the International Radio Broadcasting Committee, 50 hours to reach Lausanne from Paris, a trip which, before the war, required only seven or eight hours.

Shell fragment, moving with heartbeat, removed

Wounded soldier goes back to front for a time with particle buried in chest

Circus toll 158; 120 in hospitals

Victory bonds to be offered after war ends

Treasury spikes redemption rumor

Rabaul pounded four times in day

Reconversion dispute may go to Roosevelt

Military heads, WPB chief Nelson embroiled


‘Cutback jitters’ remedy sought by WPB officials

Contract shifts are considered for assuring quitting workers of continued war jobs
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer

Draft rejections national disgrace, medical chief says


Smiths in Army equal five divisions

Post-war plan would keep big corporate tax

Individuals would get a reduction

americavotes1944

Labor paper raps Wallace’s Russian talks

Ignorance of state of affairs charged
By Daniel M. Kidney, Scripps-Howard staff writer

Washington –
Vice President Henry A. Wallace’s Russian speeches were as inept as some he has made here, contends David J. Dallin, writing in the New Leader, liberal-labor weekly.

Mr. Dallin said:

Mr. Wallace’s speeches, although delivered in Russian, sounded like Wallace-English all the same. He not only promoted the American cause; what he said sounded perhaps a bit strange to his audience. After visiting industrial plants in Magadan, Komsomolsk and elsewhere in eastern Siberia, again and again he said, “I can bear witness to the willingness with which your citizens give their utmost efforts in mines, aircraft factories, metallurgical works.”

It so happens that the recently-emerged industry of this region has been built and is being operated largely by the manpower of the labor camps of eastern Siberia.

These camps, consisting of deportees, convicts, and “socially dangerous” elements, are among the saddest features of our sad times. Mr. Wallace, speaking of the inmates’ “willingness” to work, was unwittingly ironical.

Smuggled report cited

A report allegedly smuggled from Magadan forced labor camps, giving details of the wretched conditions there, is then cited by the writer. It says:

Half-decayed wooden barracks inside a ruin of wooden bunks, dilapidated fireplaces in which things could hardly be warmed up. No lighting after sundown. Food less than scanty.

One of the women’s camps in Magadan is being run by two young women leaders from the NKVD [formerly GPU], both very pretty, energetic but hellishly bad and hard. This camp is surrounded by barbed wire. During the summer, prisoners live in tents, men and women together. Women who keep to themselves are teased by the men.

People are extremely weakened, exhausted by the heavy labor. Most suffer from kidney trouble, from swelling of legs, from open wounds, from scurvy. Men often go blind. There are many cases of frostbite. Illnesses are spread because of the lack of recreation and of any signs of civilized life. Many die from diarrhea and general exhaustion…

‘Was it necessary?’

Mr. Dallin then concludes with this advice:

It certainly was no part of Mr. Wallace’s task, especially in wartime, to take up these problems with Russia, either publicly or privately. But he ought to be acquainted with the state of affairs, just as was Wendell Willkie who, after his visit to Russia in 1942, mentioned the problem in his reports.

Was it really necessary for Mr. Wallace to exclaim in Irkutsk that “men born in wide free spaces will not brook injustice” and that “they will not even temporarily live in slavery”?

Collaboration with Russia hardly requires statements of this kind before a well-informed audience in the Russian Far East.

Nazis abandon vehicles with empty tanks

German shortage of fuel indicated
By Edward V. Roberts, United Press staff writer


Defense questions bribe payoff man

Casey: A dead Nazi’s pictures bare war tragedy

Captured La Haye an awesome sight
By Robert J. Casey

On the U.S. front in Normandy, France –
South of La Haye-du-Puits, U.S. troops today were slowly blasting through more hedges, stone walls and ranks of unconvinced Germans on their way to the promised land of flat country where a man has a chance to see what he is fighting.

The weather, as usual, was rotten and mud thick and plentiful in fields and roadways, and the going was still tough and dangerous from one end of the line to the other, but when various corps spokesmen announced that “progress was satisfactory” you felt inclined to believe them.

Town a terrible sight

We got into La Haye in force yesterday morning and crashed through the principal defenses at the railroad station. To one who had looked at it across the lovely valley in the British sun of five years ago, the town was an awesome and terrible sight.

There was no charm about it now. Snipers were still sending out venomous fire from skeletons of rooftops. Rocket guns – “screaming meemies” – were dropping their howling slugs promiscuously from some concealed spot in orchards south of the town. The infantry moved about close to the battered walls, with heads well down and necks pulled in.

The ditches leading into the town were cluttered with German dead. Along hedgerows, turned over clear of the road, was a procession of the skeletons of burned and tortured trucks.

At the end of a side street under a tree, a dead German lieutenant, whose name had been Franz Ritter, lay grazing sightlessly into the rainy sky. Around him were scattered belongings that probably had been loose in his pockets when he fell – his paybook, military identity card, certificate of good standing in the Nazi Party, and a collection of snapshots, mostly of himself.

An American doughboy cradled his carbine under his arm and picked up some of the photographs. Looking through them, he said:

You can tell a lot about this guy from these. Look, here he is as one of those mugs in the Youth Movement.

He held out a picture of Franz in socks, shorts and military shirt, a sour-faced boy of about 17.

That’s about the time he started listening to this Hitler. And here he us as a member of the labor battalion.

Arrogant expression

That picture showed him in front of a barracks, leaning on a shovel and looking on the world with the same arrogant expression that now was frozen into his face by death.

And here he is as an officer, a bright new shavetail with a swastika on his arm. I suppose the whole world was his that day. All his folks were sending him congratulations and maybe presents.

The doughboys turned the picture over. There was a date on it: Feb. 17, 1944. That, as the doughboy said, probably had been the greatest day in the life of Franz Ritter, the Hitler Youth, the eager young laborer, the stiff-necked soldier of the Reich, the arrogant lieutenant. And on that day, he was less than five months from July 9 and only a few hundred miles from the muddy slopes of La Haye-du-Puits – a town of which he probably had never heard.

The doughboy bleakly said:

He’s had some hard luck, but you can’t say he didn’t ask for it. He was a Nazi and he was a sniper.

He laid the pictures back in a neat pile where he had found them and turned away. Franz Ritter continues to stare up into the rain.


American jeep lifts curtain on Cherbourg’s bleak years

Arrival of Yanks recalls Prussian-like entry of Rommel four years before
By W. C. Heinz, North American Newspaper Alliance

Cherbourg, France – (July 7, delayed)
On June 18, 1940, the mayor of Cherbourg, a thin, white-haired, white-mustached old man in a black suit, black tie and black shoes, stood with his staff on the steps of the little city hall here in the Place de la Republique and watch silently while a German tank roared up and gnashed to a halt. Four years and nine days later that same thin, old man in the same black suit, tie and shows and with his staff again around him, stood on the same step and watched while an American jeep swirled to a halt on the same spot.

Today in that same little city hall, you heard from that same chin, little man and one of the members of that same staff the story of those two days. The story that 73-year-old Dr. Paul Reynaud and 71-year-old Eugene Simon, his deputy mayor, told you, however, is also the story of the four years between, the story of two armies, and the story of the little people caught in the tide of this war.

‘Walked past us’

M. Simon said:

When the German tank halted, the top flew open and out climbed three German officers, all cleanshaven and in clean uniforms. While we stood and watched, not knowing what to do, they just walked past us and into our offices.

They said nothing to us but we could hear them talking in the mayor’s office, and then in a moment everyone outdoors snapped to attention as Gen. Rommel walked past without looking at us. We could hear Rommel shouting in the office, and then he came out, followed by the others, and again they walked past us without saying anything and drove away.

“Here we call Rommel the little man,” M. Simon said, and you could tell from the way he smiled when he said it that what the French here mean by that is only that little field marshal’s short stature.

People ignore band

Next day, however, the officers were back. They came back with orders that life was to go on as usual. Mayor Reynaud’s only comment on that was that it was a thing which was easily said.

As you sat, then, in the little office with the big desk and with chairs covered with red plush and listened to these two pale, old men with their black suits and their soft, slow way of thinking, you heard how on the next morning a Nazi military band marched into the Place de la Republique and gave its first concert in a bandstand which you could see through the window still standing there, dusty and in need of paint.

“Nobody went to hear the concert,” M. Simon said, “and after a month, the concerts stopped.”

Barges flop

You heard, too, how in a few days the Germans began building barges for the invasion of Great Britain, and how, when they put the barges into the water and loaded them with tanks in rehearsal, many barges were overturned and many tanks and German soldiers were lost.

You heard how the Germans, like children in their ignorance, actually though that the English Channel, for which their word is “canal,” was only 20 miles wide and how they went into the schoolrooms and tore down the maps, and when they saw that the Channel was 70 miles wide, they shouted in fury that the maps had been faked, and tore them up.

You heard, too, about the Nazi naval captain of the port. He was the former captain of the luxury liner Bremen who, before the war, received a gold medal from the Cherbourg Chamber of Commerce.

Commits suicide

M. Simon said:

If you want his name, you may find it in the cemetery. The Germans say that he committed suicide.

Then the two pale, old men, one wearing the Cross of Lorraine and the other the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor, told you about German planes. They told you how, in the hard fall and winter of 1940 and 1941, they watched German planes wing overhead on their way to Britain.

The mayor said:

We watched them leave by the dozens and come back in twos and threes. Then we knew that there was something over there.

After that, the two men told you, there were long years of waiting. They told of five ounces of bread a day, of no tea, no coffee, no cheese and only eight ounces of meat a month – this in the most fruitful part of France.

Nazis grow nervous

They told of the growing nervousness of the Germans at the news of the U.S. landings in France, and how they wanted to laugh and sing but couldn’t, and of the orders of evacuation, of the fight for the city, and then of how they stood in their old, black suits on the steps of the old city hall and watched the American jeep as it swirled to a stop.

You heard that when the jeep drove up the men in it were not cleanshaven and were not in bright, smart uniforms. They were grimy and dirty and there was dust on their clothes, but when they got out of the jeep, they didn’t walk stiffly past the pale, old men, but strode up to them and shook their hands.

The man who shook hands with the mayor was Lt. Col. Frank Howley of Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, head of the Allied civil affairs unit in Cherbourg, but no one has to tell you of the civil affairs unit or what it has to do here. You can see that everywhere on the face of this city and in the faces of the two old men and the other people.

Japanese routed in India region

Allies rout remnants of two divisions

De Gaulle aims to put regime on French soil

Says goal attained in Roosevelt talks
By R. H. Shackford, United Press staff writer