The Brooklyn Eagle (June 10, 1944)
Four French towns fall in Cherbourg drive
Report Yanks 10 miles from port; Isigny stronghold seized
By Virgil Pinkley
SHAEF, England (UP) –
Allied forces advanced on all fronts on the Norman Peninsula, it was officially announced today, and German sources reported that a U.S. armored column had driven to within 10 miles of the prize port of Cherbourg.
U.S. forces captured Trévières, nine miles west of Bayeux, the Allied announcement said. It was the fourth town to be taken by the Americans, who previously had taken Sainte-Mère-Église, Isigny and Formigny, as well as assisting in the capture of Bayeux.
Advancing U.S. patrols in the northern Cherbourg peninsula cut the Carentan-Sainte-Mère-Église-Valognes road at a number of places, it was announced.
The coastal stronghold of Isigny and Sainte-Croix had fallen earlier in the Allied drives to link up their beachheads along a front of nearly 60 miles.
Use air bases in France for first time
It was also announced that the Allies, for the first time since 1940, were using air bases on French soil, with heavy transports and U.S. Spitfires operating from two airfields on the peninsula.
The opening of landing strips increased Allied air control over the peninsula and also permitted the evacuation of wounded by air for the first time since the invasion began.
The capture of Trévières east of Isigny late this afternoon gave the Allies another foothold on the extensive flooded area on which the Germans had relied to cover Carentan and the approaches of the Cherbourg Peninsula.
The invading troops, by closing the sluices against the strong channel tides, have already been able to clear some small stretches of land to the east of water which covers the low-lying terrain up to as much as seven feet.
However, the main sluices just north of Carentan must be taken and put into use before the main inundations can be brought under control.
In the general offensives today, some of the heaviest fighting raged the Canadian-held sector due west of Caen and in Caen itself, where the Germans had thrown in additional tank forces.
Bradleys’ forces seize Isigny
Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley’s U.S. forces seized Isigny and six miles to the west battled fiercely for Carentan, bastion of the German defenses athwart the base of the Normandy Peninsula, while the right wing drove toward Cherbourg.
The U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes said the Americans were only 17 miles from Cherbourg, the big port vital to the buildup of the invasion foothold. A later Stockholm dispatch quoted German sources as saying the most advanced column of U.S. armor – evidently that striking northward from captured Sainte-Mère-Église – was 10 miles from Cherbourg.
British and Canadian forces drove through Sainte-Croix, about seven miles southeast of captured Bayeux on the highway to Caen, and pushed nearly two miles south of the highway to the vicinity of Condé-sur-Seulles, 11½ miles west of Caen.
Berlin: Landing repulsed
The German High Command said the Allies tried to land directly south of the mouth of the Seine near Trouville, 25 miles northeast of Caen. The attempt failed “in the face of the fire of our coastal batteries, with heavy losses for the enemy,” a Berlin communiqué reported. It said one warship was sunk and others turned away.
The communiqué conceded reverses in the Bayeux-Caen area, where it said heavy tank fighting continued. In that sector, “after a bitter struggle, the enemy succeeded in pushing back our covering lines, behind which our reserves are taking up position,” it reported, claiming that in the first three days of the invasion, more than 200 Allied tanks were knocked out and “several thousand” prisoners taken.
Front dispatches said the German 21st Panzer Division was assembling in the Caen region, while the 12th SS Panzer Division was moving into positions west of Bayeux and south of the Bayeux-Caen railway.
U.S. Thunderbolt fighter-bomber pilots returning from Normandy told of miles-long German supply convoys clogging the roads leading to the battlefront from the south and east. One Thunderbolt formation left a 10-mile trail of blasted and smoking German trucks on a Normandy road.
Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, is now “with his men in France,” another war correspondent revealed in an undated dispatch.
The correspondent said the Allied beachhead at that time was “similar in size to the Anzio beachhead before it was extended” and contained 20 villages, hamlets and “clusters of houses.”