Editorial: Organizing the peace
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Sgt. Cote: The Lost Battalion of World War II
Through four days and three nights of hell, Yank infantrymen battled against overwhelming odds
By Staff Sgt. Roland W. Cote
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The Pittsburgh Press (August 21, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
We ran to the wrecked British plane, lying there upside down, and dropped on our hands and knees and peeked through a tiny hole in the side.
A man lay on his back in the small space of the upside cockpit. His feet disappeared somewhere in the jumble of dial and rubber pedals above him. His shirt was open and his chest was bare to the waist. He was smoking a cigarette.
He turned his eyes toward me when I peeked in, and he said in a typical British manner of offhand friendliness, “Oh, hello.”
“Are you alright?” I asked stupidly.
He answered, “Yes, quite. Now that you chaps are here.”
I asked him how long he had been trapped in the wrecked plane. He said he didn’t know for sure as he had got mixed up about the passage of time. But he did know the date of the month he was shot down. He told me the date. And I said, out loud, “Good God!”
For wounded and trapped, he had been lying there for eight days.
His left leg was broken and punctured by an ack-ack burst. His back was terribly burned by raw gasoline that had spilled. The fool of his injured leg was pinned rigidly under the rudder bar.
His space was so small he couldn’t squirm around to relieve his own weight from his paining back. He couldn’t straighten out his legs, which were bent above him. He couldn’t see out of his little prison. He had not had a bite to eat or a drop of water. All this for eight days and nights.
Yet when we found him, his physical condition was strong, and his mind was as calm and rational as though he were sitting in a London club. He was in agony, yet in his correct Oxford accent he even apologized for taking up our time to get him out.
The American soldiers of our rescue party cussed as they worked, cussed with open admiration for this British flier’s greatness of heart which had kept him alive and sane through his lonely and gradually hope-dimming ordeal.
One of them said, “God, but these limeys have got guts!”
It took us almost an hour to get him out. We don’t know whether he will live or not, but he has a chance. During the hour we were ripping the plane open to make a hole, he talked to us. And here, in the best nutshell I can devise from the conversation of a brave man whom you didn’t want to badger with trivial questions, is what happened…
He was an RAF flight lieutenant, piloting a night fighter. Over a certain area the Germans began letting him have it from the ground with machine-gun fire.
The first hit knocked out his motor. He was too low to jump, so – foolishly, he said – he turned on his lights to try a crash landing. Then they really poured it on him. The second hit got him in the leg. And a third bullet cut right across the balls of his right-hand forefingers, clipping every one of them to the bone.
He left his heels up, and the plane’s belly hit the ground going uphill on a slight slope. We could see the groove it had dug for about 50 yards. Then it flopped, tail over nose, onto its back. The pilot was absolutely sealed into the upside-down cockpit.
“That’s all I remember for a while,” he told us. “When I came to, they were shelling all around me.”
Thus began the eight days. He had crashed right between the Germans and Americans in a sort of pastoral no-man’s-land.
For days afterwards the field in which he lay surged back and forth between German hands and ours.
His pasture was pocked with hundreds of shell craters. Many of them were only yards away. One was right at the end of his wing. The metal sides of the plane were speckled with hundreds of shrapnel holes.
He lay there, trapped in the midst of this inferno of explosions. The fields around him gradually became littered with dead. At last American strength pushed the Germans back, and silence came. But no help. Because, you see, it was in that vacuum behind the battle, and only a few people were left.
The days passed. He thirsted terribly. He slept some; part of the time he was unconscious; part of the time he undoubtedly was delirious. But he never gave up hope.
After we had finally got him out, he said as he lay on the stretcher under a wing, “Is it possible that I’ve been out of this plane since I crashed?”
Everybody chuckled. The doctor who had arrived said:
Not the remotest possibility. You were sealed in there and it took men with tools half an hour to make an opening. And your leg was broken and your foot was pinned there. No, you haven’t been out.
“I didn’t think it was possible,” the pilot said, “and yet it seems in my mind that I was out once and back in again.”
That little memory of delirium was the only word said by that remarkable man in the whole hour of his rescue that wasn’t as dispassionate and matter-of-fact as though he had been sitting comfortably at the end of the day in front of his own fireplace.
Reading Eagle (August 22, 1944)
Pegler: Robot
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
The word robot which we have applied to that German flying bomb is not pronounced roe-bot, as so many of us think. Nor roe-boe as though it might be French, but rubbut. It was introduced to this country in the early 1920s by the theater guild in a play presented at the Old Garrick, which has since burned down, called R.U.R., meaning Rossum’s Universal Robots.
The author was Karel Čapek, pronounced Chapek, of Prague, who later surpassed R.U.R. with another called, variously, The World We Live In and The Insect Play, in which the whole disgusting human race, reduced to the scale of insects, went to war because the red ants and the black ants got into a dispute over the pathway between two blades of grass.
Čapek, being himself a Czech, or anyway a citizen of Czechoslovakia, lived right in that very pathway, but when I suggested this to him during a call at his office, in a newspaper shop in Prague in the winter of 1936, he patronized my alarms in a lofty way. I believe he figured that Russia and France would prevent the Nazis from overrunning his country. Anyway, it was his good luck to die of natural causes before it happened.
R.U.R. was a little scant on logic but so noisy and exciting that it took a few days for our intelligentsia to get over their shudders and detect the little flaws.
Miss Theresa Helburn, the administrative director of the Guild, has filled me in with some offhand recollections of the story and with her own stab at the moral which Čapek was trying to make. The scene was an island where the Rossom Company was manufacturing a soulless, subhuman, flesh-and-blood creature roughly in the form of man and, generally very dumb, docile and durable, to take over the laborious tasks of the human race. Miss Helburn’s idea of the moral is that Čapek wanted to say that labor is necessary for the wellbeing of man. This seems inconsistent to me, however, if I am correct in my belief that Čapek was, if not a Communist, then anyway a great friend of their philosophy which constantly promises a world of longer and longer vacations, shorter working hours and increasing luxury. The ultimate goal would be a life of effortless ease never interrupted by toil. And here, if Miss Helburn is right, Čapek was warning the human race that man would degenerate and destroy himself if he quit work.
The robots were a great success. They were shipped all over the world to relieve the human race of physical work but Helena, the heroine of the piece, there on the island where she married the manager of the robot factory, felt sorry for them and wanted to give them souls. Her father was president of the company, incidentally.
Encouraged by Helena, a scientist in the plant continued to improve the robots who then began to have ambition and to resent their status in the world. However, the human beings were overconfident and slow to take alarm because about the nearest thing to an expression of emotion of which a robot was capable was a kind of fit. And when a robot got too temperamental, the practice was to send him to the stamping mill and pulp him, so to speak, as we melt down the scrap metal of an old car, and use the material over again. The girl thought this a very unprepossessing practice.
In the end, there was an awful uprising, with blood all over the sky and the people on the island wiped out, all but an old gardener. At his age, and in the absence of any human mate, he was in no position to get the human race off to a fresh start but, thanks to the scientist’s experiments, a couple of very tasty young robots, male and female, appeared who actually were human and he sent them forth at the close of the show, saying “go man, go woman” or something very close to that.
They might have found another human race, but, as I said, the logic was loose like an old union suit. They and their progeny wouldn’t stand much chance in a world of robots and the secret formula for the creation of the superior robot with a soul had been burned in the revolution.
It is Miss Helburn’s recollection that robot was a word that Čapek just made up, but it just happens that I asked him about that and was told that it was a Russian word meaning, approximately, a very low grade of serf with no rights whatever. A strong back and a weak mind, if any.
We have had a robot pilot or automatic flying device which relieves the human pilot of much of his strain and now this flying bomb, also called a robot. But, as you will see, the name is only roughly appropriate in either case.
Anyway, the pronunciation is not roe-bot nor roe-boe. This is official. It is rubbut.
U.S. State Department (August 21, 1944)
740.00119 EAC/8–2144: Telegram
The Ambassador in the United Kingdom to the Secretary of State
London, August 21, 1944 — 8 p.m.
[Received August 21 — 3:20 p.m.]
6763. Comea 75.
The Russian Ambassador just called and left me a letter stating that his Government has resolved to confirm the terms of unconditional surrender for Germany agreed and signed by the European Advisory Commission on July 25.
WINANT
U.S. State Department (August 22, 1944)
840.50/8–1444: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in the United Kingdom
Washington, August 22, 1944 — midnight
6711
Reurtel 6512, August 14, 6 p.m.
We share your doubts that rapid progress could be made on reparations through EAC and doubt the advisability of having them discussed by a subcommittee of the proposed European trade committee. We see certain definite advantages in having them discussed in Moscow but would first like to have an indication of the views of the Russians and Ambassador Harriman. As a first step would you please discuss the matter informally with Gousev without implying any commitment or views on the part of this Government.
HULL
Völkischer Beobachter (August 22, 1944)
Terrorflieger bombardierten deutsches Lazarettschiff –
Deutscher Protest in London und Washington
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Innsbrucker Nachrichten (August 22, 1944)
Erbittertes Ringen im Westen und Osten
Über das Nordufer der Seine gesetzter Feind zum Stehen gebracht – Harte Kämpfe um Toulon – U-Boote versenkten 40.000 BRT
dnb. Aus dem Führerhauptquartier, 22. August –
Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht gibt bekannt:
In der Normandie wurden weitere Teile unserer aus dem Raum nördlich Argentan durchgebrochenen Kampfgruppe hinter unserer Linie aufgenommen. Bei Lisieux und südlich Évreux griff der Feind mit starken Infanterie- und Panzerkräften an. Nach hartem Kampf gelang ihm im Raum westlich Lisieux ein Einbruch in unsere Abwehrfront, gegen den Gegenangriffe angesetzt sind. Westlich und nördlich Dreux konnte der Gegner erst nach erbitterten Kämpfen wenige Kilometer nach Norden Boden gewinnen.
Der bei Mantes auf das Nordufer der Seine übergesetzte Feind wurde durch unsere Gegenangriffe zum Stehen gebracht. Gegen den Seineabschnitt südlich Paris vorfühlende feindliche Kräfte wurden von unseren Sicherungskräften in den vorgeschobenen Stellungen abgewiesen.
In Südfrankreich drängt der Feind unseren Absetzbewegungen zwischen der Küste und der Durance nach Westen scharf nach. Um Toulon toben erbitterte Kämpfe. Bei Aix und im Tal der Durance wurden feindliche Kräfte im Gegenstoß geworfen.
Im französischen Raum wurden bei mehreren Säuberungsunternehmen 229 Terroristen im Kampf niedergemacht.
Schweres „V1“-Vergeltungsfeuer liegt auf London.
In Italien nahm der Feind seine Durchbruchsangriffe im adriatischen Küstenabschnitt in den gestrigen Mittagsstunden nach starker Artillerievorbereitung wieder auf und konnte sich in den Besitz einiger Höhenstellungen setzen.
Im Süden der Ostfront stehen deutsche und rumänische Truppen südwestlich Tiraspol sowie zwischen Pruth und Sereth in schwerem Ringen mit starken Infanterie- und Panzerkräften der Sowjets. Im Verlauf dieser Kämpfe wurden bisher 200 feindliche Panzer abgeschossen.
Südwestlich Mielec dauern erbitterte Kämpfe an.
In den Weichselbrückenköpfen sowie nordöstlich Warschau, beiderseits Wilkowischken und bei Raseinen wurden feindliche Angriffe zerschlagen.
Erneute Angriffe der Bolschewisten bei Bauske und im Einbruch westlich Modohn brachen am entschlossenen Widerstand unserer Divisionen zusammen.
Westlich des Pleskauer Sees setzten die Sowjets ihre heftigen Angriffe fort. In den wenigen Einbruchsstellen wird noch gekämpft.
Durch Jagdflieger und Flakartillerie der Luftwaffe wurden an der Ostfront 43 feindliche Flugzeuge abgeschossen.
Bei Angriffen feindlicher Bomber auf ungarisches Gebiet brachten deutsche und ungarische Luftverteidigungskräfte neun feindliche Flugzeuge zum Absturz.
Unterseeboote versenkten aus Geleitzügen und in Einzeljagd sieben feindliche Schiffe mit 40.000 BRT sowie drei Bewacher und ein Motorkanonenboot. Außerdem wurde ein feindliches Flugzeug abgeschossen.
Ergänzend wird zum heutigen OKW-Bericht mitgeteilt:
Bei den Kämpfen im Raum von Modohn zeichnete sich die rheinisch-westfälische 263. Infanteriedivision unter Führung von Oberst Hemmann durch besondere Standhaftigkeit aus. Westlich des Pleskauer Sees bewährte sich eine Kampfgruppe der SS-Sturmbrigade „Wallonien“ unter Führung des SS-Sturmbannführers Leon Degrelle durch Zähigkeit und Angriffsschwung in besonderem Maße.
Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force (August 22, 1944)
Communiqué No. 136
Good progress has been made between LISIEUX and the sea, where Allied troops have captured DOZULÉ and DIVES-SUR-MER and advanced to ANNEBAULT and BONNEBOSQ. West of LISIEUX, we have taken CAMBREMER, while an advance north of SAINT-MARTIN-DE-LA-LIEUE has brought our troops within a mile of LISIEUX itself. Fighting is going on in the vicinity of VIMOUTIERS.
Further south, an advance has been made east of CHAMBOIS, and GACÉ is in our hands.
Determined enemy efforts to break out of the encirclement were again checked effectively. Mopping-up continues.
There is nothing further to report from the remainder of the front.
Weather severely restricted air operations yesterday, but during the evening, coastal aircraft attacked enemy shipping near the mouth of the GIRONDE River.
U.S. Navy Department (August 22, 1944)
CINCPAC Press Release No. 521
On August 20 (West Longitude Date), two Navy Liberator search planes of Group 1, Fleet Air Wing Two, found two enemy ships proceeding toward Marcus Island and carried out attacks at mast head level which resulted in setting fire to a medium cargo ship, left dead in the water and burning, and a small cargo ship, which was noticeably slowed and left heavily smoking. One Liberator suffered minor damage from anti-aircraft fire.
On the same day, Liberators of the 7th AAF bombed Yap Island, causing large fires and explosions among bivouac areas and buildings near the airfield. Anti-aircraft fire was meager.
Truk Atoll was attacked on August 20, Liberators of the 7th AAF bombing warehouses and anti-aircraft batteries at Dublon Island and other buildings on Moen Island. Seven to eight enemy fighters intercepted. Two enemy fighters were damaged and two of our bombers were damaged. All of our planes returned.
Pagan and Rota Islands in the Marianas were bombed and strafed by our aircraft on August 20.
Search planes of Group 1, Fleet Air Wing Two bombed Wake Island and the airstrip at Ponape on August 20. On the same day, Mitchell medium bombers of the 7th AAF dropped twelve tons of bombs on the Ponape Airstrip.
Nauru Island was attacked by Ventura search planes of Group 1, Fleet Air Wing Two, hitting runways on August 20.
Catalina search planes of Fleet Air Wing Two and Corsair fighters and Dauntless dive bombers of the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing continued neutralization raids against enemy positions in the Marshalls on August 20, hitting Maloelap, Wotje and Mille Atolls.
The Wilmington Morning Star (August 22, 1944)
AMERICANS STORM ON ROCKET COAST
Seine crossed twice near Paris; Germans fleeing French capital
U.S. soldiers go across historic river near scenes of World War I battles
SHAEF, London, England (AP) – (Aug. 21)
U.S. troops stormed toward the rocket coast of France tonight after planting bridgeheads across the Seine both northwest of revolt-torn Paris and southeast of the city near the Marne battlefields of the World War I.
The Americans crossed the Seine near Fontainebleau, which is 55 miles southeast of Belleau Wood, where Americans halted the Germans in the Second Battle of the Marne in June 1918, and less than 30 miles from the area of the First Battle of the Marne where the French and British checked the German drive in September 1914 – a drive which had carried to within 17 miles of Paris.
“The end of the war is in sight,” declared Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery in a triumphant message to the four Allied armies under his field command in recognition for their “definite, complete and decisive victory” already achieved in northwestern France.
The U.S. 3rd Army, striking across the Seine 25 miles northwest, lent emphasis to his words as it fanned out and threatened to drive the German 15th Army and the battered 7th Army back to the borders of the Reich or roll them up against the sea.
The Berlin radio said the Americans enlarged this bridgehead “in small measure” and were attacking with strong forces “continuously strengthened by bringing up new troops.”
The U.S. 1st, the Canadian 1st and the British 2nd Armies were herding the remnants of the enemy’s 7th Army before them west of the Seine, where elements were crossing – some in the very barges in which in their days of victory they looped to invade England.
The gate to Paris itself seemed open, with patriots fighting the Germans inside the capital and mobile U.S. patrols ranging virtually unopposed around Versailles, 100 miles from the city’s heart.
Allied reconnaissance pilots from seats above the capital watched Germans flee the city in such a tremendous exodus that they were bumper to bumper in a road east of Paris.
Only the rain and clouds that again plagued Allied air forces protected these highway targets from a storm of bombs and shells.
Far back of this swift-moving front, some 10,000 Germans left behind by the retreating 7th Army writhed in the Argentan trap of Normandy, and in the parade of prisoners coming out of the shell-churned pocket were three generals.
It was announced that these were Gens. Elfeidt, commander of the 84th Corps, Badinsky, commander of the 276th Infantry Division, and Menni, commander of the 84th Infantry Division. Three complete field hospitals were also captured.
FRENCH TROOPS FIGHT INTO TOULON
Advance forces near Marseille
U.S. armored, infantry columns head inland in drive for Rhône Valley
Rome, Italy (AP) – (Aug. 21)
French troops have fought in to Toulon, France’s No. 1 Mediterranean naval base, and other Allied forces are sweeping down a broad highway within nine miles of Marseille, France’s second city, Allied headquarters announced tonight.
Reports in London early today (Tuesday) placed Allied spearheads about six miles east of Marseilles and said the invasion was so far ahead of the timetable that field commanders were Improvising strategy as they go along.
Front advices declared the French troops which crashed into Toulon’s northern and western sections at dusk yesterday were engaged in mopping up pockets of German resistance within the naval stronghold, where the French fleet was scuttled in 1942.
At the same time, a swift U.S. infantry column, lancing due north from Toulon, has enveloped the city of Valensole, 50 miles inland and approximately a third of the way to Lyon, and sent scouting columns fanning out into the Asse River valley, the Allied announcement said.
U.S. troops and French patriot forces which surrounded a German garrison in Pertuis, 41 miles north of Marseille, captured that town. The total of Nazi prisoners taken in the whirlwind invasion of southern France swelled to more than 14.000.
The momentum of the French drive on Toulon carried Maj. Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s troops west of the naval base. They captured the towns of Le Beausset and Cuges-les-Pins on Highway No. 8, main road to Marseille, and only four miles from the secondary coastal highway which is the last escape route for the German garrison of Toulon.
The French entered Toulon through Les Quatre Chemins, Les Routes and Valbourdin sections after establishing a steel ring around the eastern, northern and northwestern outskirts.
Other Allied troops thrusting were reported approaching Aubagne, nine miles east of Marseille, at nightfall yesterday.
French forces also made progress along the coast east of Toulon, where the Nazis had been offering their stiffest resistance. Naval forces joined ground troops in capturing Mont Redon and the Hotel de Golf, about a mile from Hyeres, which the enemy had made into a strongpoint.
Preceding their smash into Toulon the French gained dominance of the 2,000-foot Mont Faron just north of the city.
U.S. armored and infantry columns, leaving the French to deal with Toulon, spread out in a many-pronged drive through the Durance Valley north of Marseille and headed for the great Rhône Valley against crumbling enemy resistance. One Yank unit was in the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, key road junction 15 miles north of Marseille.
Republicans claim New England sweep
Albany, New York (AP) – (Aug. 21)
The prediction that the Republicans would carry most, if not all, of New England was made to Governor Thomas E. Dewey today as the GOP presidential nominee awaited the outcome of his foreign affairs talks by proxy with Wendell L. Willkie.
The Governor spent nearly three hours with Horace A. Hildreth, Republican candidate for Governor of Maine, who later told reporters that either Dewey or his running mate, Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio, would visit the state on a campaign trip.