Yanks reported over Marne
Alsace-Lorraine told to prepare for Allied invasion armies ‘soon’
By Virgil Pinkley, United Press staff writer
Racing toward Germany, German forces today were being pounded on all fronts in France, as Allied troops hammered the Nazi pocket south of the Seine (1) and closed on Le Havre, while the enemy troops (2) were threatened in their race toward the border by U.S. columns fanning out from Paris.
SHAEF, London, England –
U.S. armored spearheads were reported striking for the German border beyond Troyes and Reims today as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters warned the people of Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine that Allied invasion armies may “very soon” roll through their lands into Germany.
Slashing almost unopposed through the rear of the disintegrating German armies in northern France, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s U.S. tank columns were reported barely 100 miles from the German frontier after crossing the Marne River below Reims.
Headquarters announced that one U.S. force broke into the railway hub of Troyes, 65 miles south of Reims, and about twice that distance from the Reich.
Fan out from Troyes
The Yanks fanned out beyond the city and, according to a still-unconfirmed German report, raced northward to Reims in a thrust pointed straight at Sedan and the Ardennes Forest where the German Army broke through the French “hinge” in 1940 and won the first Battle of France.
Luxembourg was barely 80 miles beyond the American spearheads and Alsace-Lorraine only about 65 miles away, and the allied warning made it clear that Gen. Eisenhower’s armies were on their way into the Reich itself.
A high staff officer broadcast the invasion proclamation early today, warning residents of the threatened areas against helping the fleeing enemy or exposing themselves to the Allied air attacks which, he said, will be carried on by night and day wherever the German armies are to be found.
Battle decided
He said:
The elimination of the German 7th Army as a fighting entity has decided the battle of France. The survivors of the Normandy battle and a handful of German divisions north of the Seine can at best fight a series of delaying actions on their retreat into Germany.
The areas in which you live are already today in the rear area of military occupations. Very soon they may become a theater of war.
There was no immediate indication of the strength of the U.S. columns now pounding toward the Nazi frontiers, but they were believed to be operating in considerable force with the aid of French Partisan units known to be prowling through the countryside.
Cut across escape path
Their dramatic thrust carried squarely across the path of the German 15th Army, now in full flight eastward from the robot bomb coast.
The Stockholm Dagens Nyheter said that Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, commander-in-chief of German forces in northern France, was reported to have been killed. The report, said to have come from Germany, gave no details and a spokesman for the Nazi Legation in Stockholm was quoted as saying that he was unable to confirm or deny it.
The first word of the reported thrust into Reims came from German military commentators, who said the Americans crossed the Marne yesterday and lunged on 15 miles northward into the cathedral town.
Report unconfirmed
Allied headquarters refused to confirm the German report but it was admitted probable that Gen. Patton’s rough rider had turned north from Troyes over the excellent hard-surfaced roads running through Châlons, Epernay and Château-Thierry into Reims.
The capture of Reims would place the American armor within 50 miles of the Belgian border and completely outflank the German 15th Army pulling back at top speed from the Dieppe–Amiens–Beauvais triangle above Paris.
Imperils Nazi escape
Couple with the seizure of Troyes, which appeared to have fallen almost without a fight, the American breakthrough into Reims imperiled the entire German position in northern France and the line of escape for the Nazi forces in southern and central France.
Official sources confirmed the headlong flight of the German 15th Army from the Channel coast, and aerial reconnaissance reports said the main highways leading eastward to the Rhineland were jammed with retreating Nazi troops and transport.
Allied warplanes bombed and strafed the fleeing enemy columns all day yesterday and on into the night, while other aerial formations piled the Seine River crossings high with Nazi dead and the wreckage of enemy tanks and equipment.
Wreck 270 trucks
About 270 German trucks and 56 tanks were destroyed by low-flying U.S. fighter-bombers and rocket-firing British planes, along with 29 troop-packed barges caught on the Seine yesterday.
Allied ground forces crowded in from the west and south on the Seine pocket, moving in for the kill on an estimated 90,000 Germans squeezed against the river in a triangle measuring less than 300 square miles.
U.S., British and Canadian forces linked up just south of Rouen and threatened momentarily to break into that key river port, while British and Canadian units from the west broke across the Risle River at a half-dozen points and fanned out along the Seine estuary within artillery range of Le Havre.
Le Havre itself was reported a “dead” city, and Allied troops moved freely along the opposite bank of the Seine without drawing fire from the big German coastal batteries there.
Swarms of German minesweepers, torpedo boats and coastal craft jammed the harbor, however, in a desperate and apparently doomed effort to evacuate part of the garrison.
U.S. and British warplanes smashed repeatedly at the Nazi evacuation fleet, sinking a number of vessels and turning most of them back into port.
Fan out from Paris
Below the vanishing Seine pocket, U.S. and French troops fanned out on all sides of liberated Paris, sending armored patrols across the Seine between Corbeil and Melun south of the city and on northward toward the Marne.
Far to the west, heavy fighting flared up around the besieged Breton port of Brest as U.S. troops launched a climactic assault on the city under cover of shattering air and sea bombardment. Swarms of bombers pounded the cornered enemy garrison while Allied warships, including the British battleship HMS Warspite, poured round and round of high explosive shells into the port.
