The Pittsburgh Press (September 12, 1944)
YANKS SIX MILES INSIDE REICH
Belgian ‘mystery fort’ falls
Battle of Siegfried Line launched; British take key port of Le Havre
By Virgil Pinkley, United Press staff writer
Drive into Germany by the Americans found the Reich invaded for the first time in more than a century. The invasion was in the Trier area (3), which was bypassed. To the north, U.S. troops were closing on Aachen, Germany, from the Liège area of Belgium, while British forces struck into southeastern Holland (2). On the southern section of the line, U.S. 3rd Army troops battled hard in the Metz–Nancy area (4) and made a juncture at Sombernon with 7th Army troops moving up from southern France. Seventh Army forces also drove closer to the Belfort Gap into southern Germany (5). On the Channel coast (1), capture of Le Havre by British troops was reported.
First story from Germany since U.S. started war
By Henry T. Gorrell, United Press staff writer
The following dispatch is the first story datelined from Germany since Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Jap attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into war.
With U.S. armored forces in Germany – (1:00 p.m. CET)
American tanks advanced on German soil today in a series of strong exploratory thrusts capitalizing the first U.S. combat invasion of Germany in history.
The initial penetration of Germany is in strength today. It falls on the 26th anniversary of the great American offensive at Saint-Mihiel in 1918.
Forward elements of our armor crossed the German frontier at 6:11 p.m. yesterday. The crossing was made by a U.S. armored division which swept across Belgium in a swift 10-day march, and now has crossed the last frontier of the campaign.
Like all our blows coming up from the Seine, today’s were audacious and skillfully organized.
The orders for this historic crossing into enemy country were issued from a bare, bleak barracks building which only a few hours earlier had housed German troops.
SHAEF, London, England –
The first phase of the battle of the Siegfried Line opened today when U.S. troops outflanked its outpost of Trier in a drive more than six miles into Germany and captured the “mystery fort” Ében-Émael on its northern approaches.
U.S. Marauder and Havoc bombers heavily plastered a long stretch of the Siegfried Line between Aachen and Saarbrücken while U.S. 1st Army guns pumped shells into Germany from newly-won positions just west of the frontier.
Far to the west, the great French port of Le Havre was reported to have surrendered about noon to British troops of the1st Canadian Army, giving the Allies control of one of the most valuable gateways to France.
United Press writer Henry T. Gorrell reported in a dispatch from Germany that a U.S. armored division was stabbing ever deeper into the Reich after establishing itself on German soil in force.
Supreme Allied Headquarters lacked further information on the penetration of Germany, which was reported to have flanked the ancient city of Trier and won a springboard for a full-scale push toward the Rhineland.
While the advanced 1st Army spearhead was probing the fortifications before the Siegfried Line, other elements of Lt. Gen. Courtney H. Hodges’ army to the north were fanning out from Liège. They seized a number of points almost on the German frontier, and smashed to within one mile of the Dutch border near the great fortress city of Maastricht.
It was in the extreme east tip of Belgium below Maastricht that the Americans seized Fort Ében-Émael. There, the Nazis unveiled their “blitzkrieg in the west” in 1940 and swamped the fort in a mysterious manner never fully explained.
With Ében-Émael and its adjacent fortifications overrun, and with Maastricht set up for frontal assault, the barriers before the German frontier in the Aachen area were crumbling.
The Nazis offered comparatively light resistance at Ében-Émael, which was held strongly by the Belgians in the first phase of the war but nevertheless toppled immediately under the German onslaught, touching off rumors of “secret weapons” of dread potency.
Marauders and Havocs of the U.S. 9th Air Force dropped bombs on German soil for the first time today. They hammered concrete pillboxes, anti-tank emplacements, and troop shelters in the Siegfried Line and the transport lines immediately behind the fortified belt in the Saarbrücken area.
Marauder mediums dropped 200 tons of bombs on the Siegfried Line at Scheid, 32 miles south of Aachen. Two forces of Havoc light bombers attacked railyards at Sankt Wendel, 17 miles north of Saarbrücken. Thousand-pounders crashed on pillboxes in the loop of the river Our near Echternach on the Luxembourg-German border.
First Army troops striking in the direction of Cologne and Koblenz captured Eupen, in the Liège area six miles short of the German border, and Malmedy, nine miles west of the border. Its advances brought the vanguard almost to the border along a 20-mile front in that area.
In the Eupen sector, U.S. troops moved up heavy artillery to pour salvo after salvo into the German city of Aachen.
The Americans almost completed the occupation of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, from which the first penetration of Germany was made.
A dispatch from Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley’s 12th Army Group headquarters said it was apparent that the American vanguard had not yet reached the Siegfried Line proper, which in the Trier area lies some 10 to 12 miles beyond the frontier.
A Nazi-controlled dispatch to Stockholm reported “heartrending scenes” during the evacuation of the German-Belgian border districts, when “crying women were separated from their husbands and families were split up. The stream of refugees is crowding the roads…”
Moving under a blistering artillery bombardment that ripped into the Nazis’ vaunted Siegfried Line, Gen. Hodges’ 1st Army rolled across the German border yesterday afternoon and early today was reported advancing steadily into the great forest belt of the Rhineland.
The terror of invasion that Hitler’s armies carried into more than a dozen European states in the first flush of Nazi power was visited upon the German homeland for the first time in more than a century, and preliminary reports from the front said the Germans were offering only the feeblest resistance.
Trier, birthplace of Karl Marx and probably the oldest city in Germany, was bypassed as U.S. tank and infantry columns fanned out through the densely-wooded hills to the east probing at what appeared to be a soft spot in the Nazi West Wall defenses.
Simultaneously, the Allies established a continuous battlefront across eastern France and the Low Countries from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, with a juncture of U.S. troops from the 3rd and 7th Armies at Sombernon, 104 miles southwest of the Belfort Gap.
British 2nd Army forces at the northern end of the Allied battle line and Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s U.S. 3rd Army on the southern flank ground forward slowly toward the frontier in the face of stiff resistance.
First accounts of the 1st Army strike into Germany emphasized the relative “softness” of the opposition, in contract to the bitter fighting retreat staged by the Nazis on both flanks, and suggested that Gen. Hodges might have uncovered a weak spot in the enemy’s thinly-held line.
Forests lie ahead
The Germans failed to offer more than sporadic rearguard resistance in the early hours of the invasion, but headquarters spokesmen cautioned that ahead of the Americans lie the forests of Osburg, Hermeskeil and Birkenfeld, which would provide strong defensive positions if the Nazis elect to stand and fight.
The Americans threatened almost momentarily, however, to shake their armored spearheads loose on the great military highway running 55 miles northwest from Trier to Koblenz and the Rhine which Hitler’s engineers built for the invasion of France.
The official Allied communiqué gave only the sketchiest details of the 1st Army advance, but headquarters sources permitted the disclosure that they were operating east of Trier.
In their race to beat the winter weather into Germany, the Allies were well ahead of schedule, at least in comparison to 1918. The invasion of the Reich on Sept. 11 was 15 days earlier than the comparable opening of the Meuse-Argonne offensive on Sept. 26, 1918, which forced the Kaiser’s armies to surrender six weeks later.
With the officially-announced juncture of the U.S. 3rd Army and the 7th Army – an almost all-American outfit – at Sombernon, 15 miles west of Dijon, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had three magnificently-equipped U.S. armies to hurl into western Germany, plus the British 2nd and 1st Canadian Armies to throw against the enemy’s northern flank.
The Allied headquarters’ communiqué gave no new details on the bloody battle of the Moselle River, where Gen. Patton’s 3rd Army troops were meeting their bitterest opposition since the start of their “end run” around Paris.
Front dispatches received last night said the Americans lost some ground in the Corny area 5½ miles southwest of Metz, but established new bridgeheads across the Moselle and hooked deep into the outer defenses of Nancy, capturing Fort de Villey-le-Sec, 8½ miles west-southwest of that fortress.
Seize Maginot forts
Gen. Patton’s men also seized a large portion of the old Maginot Line forts around Trieux, 18 miles northwest of Metz, and Aumetz, seven miles farther north, where they found the fortifications intact and ready to be used against the Germans if necessary.
At the opposite end of the Allied assault front, British 2nd Army troopers fought into Holland after forcing a bridge across the Escaut Canal from Belgium in the Groote-Barrier area, nine miles north of Bourg-Léopold.
Other British units pushed out from their bridgeheads across the Albert Canal farther south meeting fanatical resistance.
On the British right flank, elements of Gen. Hodges’ U.S. 1st Army thrust 10 to 20 miles east of Liège along the two main roads to Aachen. One force occupied Hevre, 10 miles east of Liège and 15 miles southwest of Aachen, while the second moved along the south road to Eupen, five miles west of the Nazi border and nine miles almost due south of Aachen.
U.S. 75mm cannon poured a drumfire barrage into the enemy positions across the German border, while mobile field guns pounded a bypassed garrison pocketed in the Limbourg area, four miles west of Eupen.
Other columns fanned out southeast of Liège to captured Spa and cut the Liège–Arlon road south of Aywaille, while another force hammered out a gain of about 15 miles through the Ardennes Forest from Saint-Hubert to Bastogne, four miles from the Luxembourg border and 17 miles west of Germany.
