In gambling war flareup –
Ex-Capone aide, bodyguard slain
Bullets riddle auto of Chicago gangster
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In Washington –
House speeds legislation on reconversion
Entire membership may be called Aug. 14
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Politics fills the air
Washington (UP) –
Congressmen, back just two days from vacations, were off to a flying start on the election campaign today with Senator Harold H. Burton (R-OH) asserting that a Republican President can work better with the next Congress and Senator Guy M. Gillette (D-IA) declaring that “Dewey simply hasn’t clicked in the Midwest.”
Assuming that the Republicans will capture the House, Senator Burton said a “deadlock” would ensue if President Roosevelt were reelected because the House could block appropriations needed to carry out presidential commitments to other nations.
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Mosquitoes are pretty bad in the swampy parts of Normandy. Especially along the hedgerows at night, they are ferocious.
Here in Normandy, they have something I’ve never seen before even in Alaska, the mosquito capital of the world.
When you drive along a Normandy road just before dusk, you’ll see dark columns extending 200 and 300 feet straight up into the air above a treetop. These are columns of mosquitoes swarming like bees, each column composed of millions of them.
At first, I thought they were gnats, but old mosquito people assure me they are genuine, all-wool mosquitoes. In a half-mile drive just before dusk you’ll see 20 of these columns. This is no cock and bull story; it’s the truth.
Our troops are not equipped with mosquito nets, so they just have to scratch and scratch. The mosquitoes, fortunately, don’t you give malaria, they merely drive you crazy.
One day at an ordnance company, I was talking with a soldier scrubbing rusted rifle barrels in a washtub of gasoline. His sleeves were relied up and his arms were covered with great red bumps. They were mosquito bites.
As we talked this man said, “Look at them mosquitoes hit that gasoline.”
Mosquitoes die beautifully
And sure enough, the mosquitoes were diving just like dive bombers, but once they hit the gasoline they just folded up and died beautifully and floated on the surface.
In one small-arms repair section that I visited, the only man who knew or cared anything about guns before the war was a professional gun collector.
He was Sgt. Joseph Toth of Mansfield, Ohio. He was stripped down to bit undershirt as the day was warm for a change. He was washing the walnut stocks of damaged rifles in a tub of water with a sponge. Toth used to work at the Westinghouse Electric plant in Mansfield and he spent all his extra money collecting guns. He belongs to the Ohio Gun Collectors Association. He says each one of the gun collectors back in Ohio has a different specialty. Some collect pistols; some muzzleloaders. His own hobby was machine pistols. He has 35 in his collection, some of them very expensive ones.
Ironically enough, he has not collected any guns over here at all, even though he’s in a world of machine pistols and many pass through his hands.
He says:
It isn’t so much the collecting. I just like to take them down. When I monkey with a gun, I like to take it clear down and put it back together again.
Toth also likes to talk. He’ll talk all day. As the other boys say, if he could always have a new type machine pistol to take down and somebody to listen to him at the same time, he’d constantly be the happiest man on earth.
Eggs are not plentiful enough in Normandy to supply the whole army, but a good scavenger can dig up a few each day. We buy them from farmers’ wives for six and eight cents apiece. We’re hoping someday to buy some from a farmer’s daughter.
These Normandy eggs are fine eggs, and about every fourth one is as big as a duck egg. The five men in our tent are all egg conscious, so we make it a practice to shop for eggs as we go about the country.
Ernie slaves over hot stove
We pass up regular breakfast in the Army mess and have our breakfast in our own tent every morning. By some inexplicable evolution of cruel fate, I have become the chef or this four-man crew of breakfast gargantuans.
Those four plutocrats lie in their cots and snore while I get out at the crack of dawn and slave over two Coleman stoves, cooking their oeufs in real Normandy butter – fried, scrambled, boiled or poached, as suits the whims of their respective majesties.
Except when I’m away with troops, I’ve been at this despicable occupation now for two months. And although my clients are, smart enough to keep me always graciously flattered about my culinary genius, I’m getting damn sick of the job.
So someday I’m going to carry out the most diabolical scheme. I’ll prepare, with the greatest of care, the most delicious breakfast ever known in France – I’ll have shirred hummingbird eggs and crisp French-fried potatoes and corn-fed bacon, done to a turn, and grape jelly and autumn-brown toast and gallons and gallons of thick, luscious coffee.
Then I’ll wake them up and I’ll serve it to all four of them on a red platter. I’ll serve it with a bow to Mr. Whitehead, and a curtesy to Mr. Liebling, and a “Good morning to you, sir,” to Mr. Brandt, and a long salute to Mr. Gorrell. And after I’ve served it, I’ll walk out casually as though I’m going up the hedgerow a little ways.
But instead, I’ll go on away and I’ll never come back again as long as I live, never, not even if they put an ad in the paper, and they will all wither away to nothing from lack of sustenance, and eventually they will starve plumb to death in this faraway and strangely beautiful land. Ha, ha.
Pegler: GOP conference
By Westbrook Pegler
St. Louis, Missouri –
This contribution to American literary treasure and political wisdom is being written under the same roof which covers the deliberations of the 26 Republican governors who are pondering a supplementary party platform under Tom Dewey’s general supervision.
Serious men all, of varying degrees of intelligence and statesmanship, they are meeting in defensive spirit, handcuffed, as it were by the prestige that Frank Roosevelt has assured for himself as a personal chum and easy confidant of Stalin and Churchill, and hushed by their own awe of a native American politician certainly no better than themselves.
This is a political fight between two American candidates for one office. If that office were mayor, sheriff or coroner, the Republicans would be at ease and ready to throw the record at Roosevelt.
If an incumbent sheriff, elected on a crime-must-go platform, had established a flagrant and mocking alliance with the very same sordid gangs, comparable to Ed Kelly’s and Frank Hague’s, that he had affected to despise and promised to destroy, the opposition would disgrace him with proof of his own hypocrisy.
Timid GOP disowns Fish
Yet, these Republicans speak softly and with a respect for the presidential office which no more belongs to Roosevelt as a candidate than it belongs to Dewey in the same status. They have been so dazzled, awed and humbled by Roosevelt’s own propaganda that when Congressman Ham Fish, a Republican, states an indisputable fact, Dewey and the rest of the party disown him.
The truth is that it wasn’t Ham Fish who injected issues of clannishness, religion and race into this campaign but Mr. Roosevelt’s own Communist auxiliary which went underground a few months ago and emerged as the Political Action Committee of the CIO.
Poles, Irish, Catholics, anti-Catholics, Jews, Masons, Protestants and units of labor and business all have voted as blocks in this country, off and on, according to the heat of the moment, for generations.
Mr. Roosevelt, himself, appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court a man of such miserable character that, just to win a cheap, local job as county prosecutor in Birmingham, Alabama, he joined an oath-bound gang of night-riding terrorists whose guiding creed was hatred and persecution of Jews, Catholics and Negroes.
Yet, such is the power of the Roosevelt propaganda and the spell of his New Deal cynicism, that today, there are even Republicans who disown Mr. Fish, not for his infallible oafishness but merely because he remarked that Mr. Roosevelt would command the Jewish vote.
Communists arouse prejudice
Every honest politician and political writer in the United States knows that religious and racial prejudice are political implements of the Communists as well as of the true bigots. Where the bigots arouse such issues in plain, stupid hatred and superstition, the Communists do it for the calculated purpose of causing bloody disorders.
They do it by selecting despicable characters to commit outrageous attacks on the dignity and character of honest, tolerant Americans. For years the Communists of Mr. Roosevelt’s own political auxiliary have been trying the souls of exemplary patriotic men who shed their blood in France in the purest devotion to American ideals, by subjecting them to loathsome abuse.
They call them Nazis and Fascists and, thus, traitors to their country and, for the delivery of these trying provocations they have selected ingrate refugees who not only scuttled out of the American draft in the last war but employed their time in soapbox exhortations to other immigrants to make a revolution here in the absence of the nation’s best fighting men.
That is the Communist way. The Communists all will vote for Mr. Roosevelt.
Yet the Republicans cringe and repudiate Mr. Fish on the very day that Vito Marcantonio, the Communist candidate is renominated for Congress in New York.
Marcantonio openly preaches Communist doctrine and is loyal at once, both to Mr. Roosevelt and to Joseph Stalin who slaughtered more human beings, his fellow Russians, is cold-blooded butchery and calculated famine than the United States has lost in all our wars from the Revolution down to this very day.
Mr. Fish fought bravely in World War I. Marcantonio has never worn a uniform or heard a shot and resisted every effort to arm this nation for its own defense until Hitler attacked Stalin.
And while the Republicans, in pallid voices, dissociate themselves from Mr. Fish, what says Roosevelt about the nomination of Marcantonio? He doesn’t even bother to deny that the Communists are his. The American people don’t even know where he is.
Stokes: Defeat of Clark offers GOP a political lesson
Missouri primary ‘punishes’ isolationist, defends Roosevelt’s policies
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
St. Louis, Missouri –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential candidate, and his running mate, Governor John W. Bricker, came here for a conference with the other 24 Republican governors at the end of a hot state primary election which seemed to offer the Republican Party a lesson.
Isolationism long had a toehold in Missouri. That philosophy received an unmistakable rebuke in the defeat in Tuesday’s Democratic senatorial primary of Senator Bennett Champ Clark. He was one of its apostles in the days leading up to the outbreak of war in Europe and in the tense debate before Pearl Harbor.
In the ousting of Bennett Clark, son of Champ Clark, Speaker of the House during the Wilson administration, there was also an element of punishment by Democratic voters for the Senator’s opposition to much of President Roosevelt’s domestic, as well as foreign, program.
‘Blind and stubborn’
This was not entirely an assertion of New Dealism among Missouri Democrats. It was a manifestation of that basic Democratic Party loyalty which holds that a Democrat should support a Democratic President, even if the voters themselves do not always approve his policies.
It is blind, stubborn, not easily understood, but all the same, there it is.
The Missouri primary was complicated by other factors, including political feuding. But there is no doubt that the Senator’s isolationism and his anti-Rooseveltism were the chief factors. They were the principal targets of attack by his opponent, Attorney General Roy McKittrick, and by the two St. Louis newspapers which hammered day by day on this theme. The effect was reflected in the poor showing by Senator Clark here in St. Louis which accounted for his defeat.
A vote-vane state
Missouri is one of that string of border states which serve as a weather vane. It is reported to be nip and tuck today.
Trimming on the international collaboration issue might be costly to the Republicans in November, for Tuesday’s primary showed it can be whipped up into quite an issue.
The CIO Political Action Committee had an influence in the primary result, particularly here in St. Louis, where they put on an effective registration campaign. They, too, are preaching international cooperation.
The defeat of Senator Clark has its sad aspects. It ends at least temporarily the 50-year Clark dynasty in Missouri politics, began by Bennett’s father, who almost attained the Presidency.
Clark honest, sincere
Bennett Clark’s isolationism was honest and sincere. Bennett Clark fought in France in World War I and had a distinguished record.
I recall a story he told me one day about when he went to Paris on leave. He said:
I went out to Versailles. I walked through the palace. There on the walls I saw pictures – the Duke of Guise entering Château-Thierry in 1300 and something, some other military leader taking over another place in 1400 something – a place in which we had fought just recently.
I said to myself, “Boy, they’ve been fighting over these same places for centuries!” Then I thought “What business has a boy from Missouri being over here?”
The boys from Missouri are back over there again, and in Italy, and in the South Pacific. It looks this time, however, as if Woodrow Wilson finally might be vindicated. Bennett Clark has lost out.
‘Divorce PAC, government,’ Martin Dies demands
Congressman threatens legislation, charges CIO group violating Hatch Act
Washington (UP) –
Rep. Martin Dies (D-TX) said today that he plans to sponsor legislation “divorcing the CIO Political Action Committee from the government” unless Attorney General Francis Biddle begins prosecution within 30 days against PAC and federal officials whom Dies has accused of Hatch Act violations.
The chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities said his proposed bill would make it a penitentiary offense for any person on the federal payroll to engage in political activity on behalf of the CIO or similar organizations.
He reiterated his demand that Mr. Biddle investigate and prosecute officials of the PAC and 72 government employees, including 15 who resigned to accept PAC jobs, for alleged political activity outlawed by the Hatch “Clean Politics” Act.
Denouncing the CIO committee as a “racket,” he charged that former government workers “obtain all the information they need” while on the federal payroll, then quit “and go to work for the PAC.”
‘Lame ducks’ named for Dies probe
Washington (UP) –
Two “lame duck” Congressmen, defeated in primaries where they were opposed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, were named today to a special three-man Dies Subcommittee to investigate CIO political activities.
The subcommittee will include Reps. Joe Starnes (D-AL) and John M. Costello (D-CA), both of whom were opposed by the CIO in their recent unsuccessful races for renomination.
Loss of Riddle blasted Reds’ pennant hope
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U.S. railroads to make firm bid for traffic
Faster and cheaper service planned
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Dewey is endorsed by Baltimore Sun
Baltimore, Maryland (UP) –
The Baltimore Morning Sun today editorially endorsed the Republican presidential candidacy of Governor Thomas E. Dewey and said it would “do what it can” to prevent a fourth term for President Roosevelt.
The paper said:
Mr. Roosevelt’s decision to run for a fourth term makes it necessary for The Sun to oppose him and to do what it can to forestall the evils which such a decision brings with it.
It described Governor Dewey as “a practical, level-headed man with a mind more like that of a scientists than that of a warrior on horseback.”
Boss Crump supports President Roosevelt
Memphis, Tennessee (UP) –
The remote possibility that Tennessee might join the group opposing the reelection of President Roosevelt and the election of Senator Harry S. Truman (D-MO) for the Vice President’s post, was dispelled here today by E. H. Crump, Shelby County (Tennessee) political leader.
In his first public utterance since Tennessee’s delegates to the Chicago convention strove vainly to place Governor Prentice Cooper’s name in the race for the Vice Presidency, Mr. Crump said the Tennessee Democratic organization would back the Roosevelt-Truman ticket.
The CIO in politics –
PAC campaign plan is to paint gloomy picture under GOP
Murray warns public not to ‘relax’ fearing ‘reactionaries’ will seek control
By Blair Moody, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Eric Johnston: Russia unlikely to change her political spots
Desire for some economic revision found, but there’s little chance for private enterprise
By Eric A. Johnston, U.S. Chamber of Commerce president
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Clark blames CIO for his defeat
‘Communist-led’ group assailed
St. Louis, Missouri (UP) –
Democratic Senator Bennett Champ Clark, pre-war isolationist and New Deal critic, today blamed the “Communist-controlled CIO” for his defeat for renomination for a third term in the U.S. Senate in Tuesday’s primary election in Missouri.
In a statement, Mr. Clark obviously conceded the nomination to State Attorney General Roy McKittrick and branded his defeat “a notable triumph for the Communist-controlled CIO in its efforts to take control of the Democratic Party.”
‘Fight just starting’
Mr. Clark said:
That fight is not conclusive. It is just starting. I am happy that I carried the bona fide Democratic counties of rural Missouri with whom I have been associated so long.
The people of rural Missouri were alert – like the Minute Men of Revolutionary fame – to the menace of CIO control.
Unofficial returns from 4,197 of Missouri’s 4,516 precincts gave McKittrick 161,056 votes; Clark, 140,175.
Isolationist record hit
McKittrick based his campaign attacks on Clark’s pre-war isolationist record and his stand against administration-sponsored legislation. Clark defended himself on the ground he was trying to keep the country out of the war.
McKittrick received his heaviest vote from the urban areas of the state, with the exception of Kansas City, which voted preponderantly for Clark.
In other state primary contests, Jean Paul Bradshaw, Republican lawyer of Lebanon, won the GOP gubernatorial nomination and will face Democratic State Senator Phil M. Donnelly in the November election.
While McKittrick was defeating Clark in the Democratic primary, Republican Governor Forrest C. Donnell carried off the GOP senatorial nomination against six opponents. With less than 300 precincts unreported, Donnell had amassed 135,219 votes to 61,576 for his nearest competitor.
Völkischer Beobachter (August 4, 1944)
Kampf um die Zeit
vb. Berlin, 3. August –
Die Lage in der Normandie ist nach wie vor durch einige sich durchkreuzende Entwicklungsreihen gekennzeichnet. Die nordamerikanischen Panzer des Generals Bradley haben, unterstützt durch starke Luftgeschwader, den Ort Pontorson in der Bretagne erreicht. Teile sind dann nach Westen und nach Süden in der Richtung auf Dinan und auf Rennes vorgestoßen. Man hat den Eindruck, daß der gegnerischen Führung das Beispiel der deutschen Panzerdivisionen vom Jahre 1940 vorschwebt. Sie hat aber bereits erkennen müssen, daß dieses Beispiel nicht so leicht nachzuahmen ist. Die vorgetriebenen Panzerspitzen sind wieder zurückgeworfen worden und haben dabei herbe Verluste erlitten. Man darf annehmen, daß die Nordamerikaner nunmehr versuchen werden, ihre Angriffe in derselben Richtung wie bisher, aber mit einem größeren Zusammenhang der Kräfte untereinander wieder aufzunehmen.
Inzwischen darf der General Montgomery keineswegs aufhören, seinen Blick auf die Mittelfront seiner Heeresgruppe zu richten, da von den Vorgängen hier viel auch für das Schicksal der vorgetriebenen Angriffskolonnen auf dem westlichen Flügel abhängt. Noch immer hängt die Mitte zurück. Allerdings haben Nordamerikaner und die Engländer des Generals Dempsey in den letzten vierundzwanzig Stunden alles getan, den nach Norden sich ausbauchenden Bogen abzuflachen und die Kräfte in der Mitte nach Süden hin Vordringen zu lassen. Percy und Tessy sind dabei in ihren Besitz gekommen. Sie nähern sich Vire. Trotzdem aber kann jener von Pontorson ins Innere vordringende amerikanische Keil leicht in die Gefahr eines ziemlich isolierten Frontvorsprungs geraten. Die Deutschen haben denn auch eigene Panzerverbände südlich von Villedieu zum Angriff nach Westen angesetzt. Das macht die besondere Empfindlichkeit der linken Flanke des nordamerikanischen Angriffskeiles von neuem sinnfällig deutlich. Dagegen ruht im östlichsten Abschnitt der Gesamtfront, bei Caen, die Kampftätigkeit immer noch. Das Scheitern des großen Angriffs in der vergangenen Woche muß die Engländer schwer getroffen haben. Sie brauchen noch Zeit, um sich für eine neue Offensive vorzubereiten.
Im Osten haben die Sowjets weiter erkennen müssen, daß sie ihre Hoffnungen auf eine ununterbrochene Fortführung des schnellen Vormarschtempos der Julimitte nicht haben verwirklichen können. An einigen Stellen der Ostfront verstärkt sich der sowjetische Druck. Das Bestreben, nicht nur mit kleineren Vorausabteilungen, sondern mit größeren Verbänden über die Weichsel zu kommen, wird weiter sichtbar. An anderen Stellen aber hat sich auch der deutsche Gegendruck verstärkt, mehrere deutsche Angriffe von nicht unbeträchtlicher Stärke haben die Sowjets an verschiedenen Stellen zurückgeworfen.
Mit solchen Gegenstößen örtlicher Natur wird sich naturgemäß der deutsche Gesamtplan nicht erschöpfen. Es ist kein Geheimnis, daß die deutsche Führung gegenwärtig Großzügigeres und Bedeutenderes tut als das Einschieben von Eingreifdivisionen in die kämpfende Front zum Aufhalten des angreifenden Gegners. Aber darum behalten die zähen Kämpfe der tapferen Männer vorne in ihren Schützenlöchern und an ihren Geschützen doch ihren hohen Wert auch für die im Gang befindlichen Maßnahmen der höheren Führung.
Daß in Deutschland und hinter der fechtenden Front gegenwärtig manches im Gange ist, was als Ziel am Ende ein beträchtliches und entscheidendes Gegengewicht gegen die Masse der anstürmenden und heranrollenden Feinde hat, weiß auch der Feind.
Gerade aus diesem Wissen rührt die besondere Heftigkeit seiner Angriffe in den letzten Wochen an allen Fronten. Er will den Deutschen die Zeit nicht lassen, die notwendig ist, bis das ausgearbeitete und bereits in der Ausführung stehende Programm beendet ist. Er will die Entscheidung vorher erzwingen. Die vorläufige operative Linie der deutschen Führung muß demgegenüber sein, die Entscheidung gerade erst dann herbeizuführen, wenn unsere Maßnahmen sich haben auswirken können.
Was sich also gegenwärtig auf allen Fronten abspielt, ist ein dramatischer Kampf um die Zeit. Ihn für Deutschland zu gewinnen, dazu dienen in den gegenwärtigen Wochen vor allem der Widerstand und die Gegenstöße der fechtenden Front, im Endziel aber auch die Planung der obersten Führung und die ganze hingebende Arbeit der Heimat.
Innsbrucker Nachrichten (August 4, 1944)
Schwere Feindverluste an allen Fronten
Erfolge deutscher Gegenangriffe in der Normandie und im Osten – Sowjetdurchbruch zur Beskiden-Passstraße gescheitert – Kriegsmarine und U-Boote am Feind – Landungsversuch auf Adria-Insel abgeschlagen
dnb, Führerhauptquartier, 4. August –
Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht gibt bekannt:
In der Normandie scheiterten örtliche Vorstöße des Feindes südwestlich Caen. Im Raum von Coulvain fanden während des ganzen Tages heftige Kämpfe statt, ohne zu einer nennenswerten Änderung der Lage zu führen. Südwestlich davon und im Raum von Vire gelang es, den eingebrochenen Feind durch den Gegenangriff eigener Panzerverbände zu werfen und den Zusammenhang der Front wiederherzustellen. 50 feindliche Panzer wurden abgeschossen. Eine starke Gruppe des Feindes ist eingeschlossen und wird konzentrisch angegriffen. Nordöstlich und östlich Avranches brachen zahlreiche von Panzern unterstützte Angriffe des Gegners verlustreich zusammen.
Im Ostteil der Bretagne dringen die über Avranches nach Süden durchgebrochenen motorisierten Truppen des Feindes nach Süden und Westen vor und stehen an mehreren Stellen mit den Besatzungen der deutschen Stützpunkte in diesem Raum im Kampf. In den beiden letzten Tagen verlor der Feind 216 Panzer.
Durch Kampfmittel der Kriegsmarine und durch Unterseeboote wurden im Seegebiet vor der Invasionsfront ein Kreuzer, drei Zerstörer, zwei Korvetten sowie fünf Transporter und ein Spezialschiff mit zusammen 36.000 BRT versenkt. Zahlreiche weitere Schiffe mit mehr als 56.000 BRT wurden torpediert. Mit dem Untergang des größten Teiles dieser Schiffe kann gerechnet werden.
Schnellboote versenkten in der Nacht zum 3. August im Ostteil der Seinebucht ein britisches Artillerieschnellboot.
Das schwere Feuer der „V1“ liegt weiterhin auf London und seinen Außenbezirken.
In Italien setzten sich unsere Truppen auf einen engen Brückenkopf dicht südlich Florenz ab. Erneute feindliche Angriffe gegen diese Stellung scheiterten. Schweres feindliches Artilleriefeuer liegt auf der historischen Stadt mit ihren unersetzlichen Kulturwerten.
Am Nordostrand der Karpaten ist der feindliche Durchbruchsversuch auf die Beskiden-Passstraße gescheitert. Hierbei wurde die 271. sowjetische Schützendivision eingeschlossen und vernichtet. Mehrere andere sowjetische Divisionen erlitten schwere Verluste an Menschen und Material. In der Zeit vom 31. Juli bis 3. August wurden 181 Geschütze, 13 Panzer sowie zahlreiche Infanteriewaffen und Kraftfahrzeuge in diesem Raum vernichtet oder erbeutet.
Wiederholte Angriffe der Bolschewisten westlich Reichshof wurden abgewiesen. Westlich Baranow vernichteten Sturmgeschütze 23 feindliche Panzer. An der übrigen Weichselfront sind heftige Kämpfe im Raum östlich Sandomierz, bei Pulawy und südöstlich Warke im Gange.
Nordöstlich Warschau wurden sowjetische Kräfte durch Gegenangriff unserer Panzer von ihren rückwärtigen Verbindungen abgeschnitten und auf engen Raum zusammengedrängt. 76 feindliche Panzer wurden vernichtet. An der Front von Warschau bis westlich Kauen scheiterten alle bolschewistischen Angriffe.
An der Front in Lettland brachen in mehreren Abschnitten feindliche Angriffe blutig zusammen, örtliche Einbrüche wurden abgeriegelt oder im Gegenstoß eingeengt.
In der Landenge von Narwa rannten die Sowjets erneut mit neun Schützendivisionen und vier Panzerverbänden gegen unsere Stellungen an. Sie erlitten wiederum schwere Verluste, ohne zu Erfolgen zu kommen.
Ein in den Morgenstunden des 2. August im Schutze englischer Zerstörer und zahlreicher Jagdbomber durchgeführtes feindliches Landungsunternehmen gegen die dalmatinische Insel Korcula wurde durch die Inselbesatzung nach kurzem, hartem Kampf abgeschlagen.
Feindliche Bomberverbände richteten unter Verletzung schweizerischen Hoheitsgebietes Terrorangriffe gegen Orte in Süd- und Südwestdeutschland, vor allein gegen Friedrichshafen, Saarbrücken und Kempten. Durch Luftverteidigungskräfte wurden 43 feindliche Flugzeuge, darunter 40 viermotorige Bomber, abgeschossen.
Bei dem im heutigen OKW-Bericht gemeldeten Versenkungserfolg der Kriegsmarine vor der Invasionsfront haben sich Einzelkämpfer aller Dienstgrade durch freiwilligen Einsatz hervorragend bewährt Ergänzend wird dazu noch mitgeteilt:
In den Kämpfen der letzten Tage an der Narwafront haben sich ein Armeekorps unter Führung des Generals der Pioniere Tiemann und die ostpreußische 21. Infanteriedivision unter Generalleutnant Foertsch besonders ausgezeichnet.
Bei den schweren Abwehrkämpfen in der Normandie schoss die Fallschirmjägerflakabteilung 5 in zwei Tagen mit zwei 8,8-Zentimeter-Flakgeschützen und mit Nahkampfmitteln 28 „Sherman“ ab und 4 bewegungsunfähig, hiervon Oberleutnant Morscholek allein 21.
Die 272. Infanteriedivision hat unter Führung des Generalleutnants Schack durch zähes Aushalten hei schwersten feindlichen Angriffen und immer wieder zu schneidigen Gegenangriffen antretend entscheidenden Anteil an dem Misslingen der feindlichen Durchbruchsversuche südlich Caen. Allein dem zähen Aushalten der tapferen Grenadiere dieser Division oft in fast aussichtsloser Lage, vom Feind eingeschlossen und tagelang ohne jeden Nachschub, ist es zu verdanken, daß bei den Durchbruchsversuchen des Feindes südlich Caen am 19. und 21. Juli die zum Gegenangriff angesetzten Kräfte rechtzeitig herangeführt werden konnten.
Bei den Abwehrkämpfen südlich Caumont hat sich die 326. Infanteriedivision besonders ausgezeichnet. Durch zähes Aushalten dieser Division gegen den an Menschen und Material überlegenen mit starken Panzerkräften angreifenden Feind wurde die Zeit gewonnen, neue Reserven heranzuführen und den feindlichen Durchbruchsversuch in der Tiefe aufzufangen. Bei den Abwehrkämpfen fand der tapfere Kommandeur der Division, Generalleutnant von Drabich-Waechter am 2. August in vorderster Linie den Heldentod.
Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force (August 4, 1944)
Communiqué No. 118
Allied forces have reached RENNES and have elements to the south of the town. Another column advanced through DOL and moving westward along the north side of the BRITTANY PENINSULA has reached the area of DINAN.
Other Allied formations east of the PERCY-VILLEDIEU road have captured BEAUMESNIL and are in the area of SAINT-SEVER-CALVADOS. Further south our forces have captured MORTAIN.
In the area southeast of CAUMONT, Allied troops have made progress towards VILLERS-BOCAGE and AUNAY where there has been some hard fighting. We hold the BOIS DE BURON.
There has been a series of enemy counter-attacks along the entire front from the north and east of LE BENY-BOCAGE.
Good weather yesterday afternoon and evening allowed Allied fighters and fighter-bombers, some carrying rockets, to give close support to the ground forces. Barges on the SEINE, an ammunition dump southeast of CAEN, gun positions, and a considerable number of enemy vehicles, were destroyed.
Bridges near PARIS, ORLÉANS, CHARTRES, and ROUEN were bombed with satisfactory results by medium and light bombers yesterday. Other formations attacked an ammunition dump at MAINTENON.
Three marshalling yards and an oil dump in ALSACE-LORRAINE, objectives near PARIS and BRUSSELS and a synthetic oil plant and a storage depot near DOUAI were hit by strong forces of heavy bombers. Accompanying fighters attacked rolling stock, power stations and other targets.
Rail communications were attacked during the night by our light bombers.
One of a formation of five E-boats was sunk by a direct bomb hit by coastal aircraft in an attack off the Channel Islands.
A force of enemy E-boats was intercepted on Thursday morning west of CAP DE LA HEVE by light naval coastal forces. In the short action which followed one of the enemy was sunk and another damaged before he made good his escape towards LE HAVRE.