McMillan: Yanks save day for Tommies after battle rages in chateau
By Richard D. McMillan
With British-American forces, France (UP) –
Welsh Tommies chased the Nazis from the dining room of their chateau headquarters into the gilded Louis XIV salon and then into the bedrooms.
They almost had control of the situation when German reinforcements arrived with 88mm guns and opened fire. The Welsh retired into the undergrowth outside the building. Their situation was critical.
Then, just in the nick of time, a battalion of veteran U.S. infantrymen appeared unexpectedly from the west, slogging through the underbrush. They swarmed into the chateau with machine guns. They smashed up a lot of furniture, and drilled a lot of holes in the walls and windows and also in a lot of Germans. Soon there were no more Germans.
That was how U.S. and British invasion troops made their second junction today west of Bayeux.
The Welshmen had a hard fight to get the chateau in the first place. Their thrust west from Bayeux was preceded by a night-long barrage by British long toms and field guns.
Shortly after starting out, the British turned a corner and ran into a formation of German 88s. The Germans were more surprised than the British. A few bursts of gunfire destroyed the gun crews.
This action cleared a path across a stream for the British. Fording it, the British brought up more munitions and prepared for the attack on the German command post.
The chateau proved a tough nut to crack. It was like Indian warfare. Posting themselves at windows, the defenders sniped at the Tommies. A machine-gunner told me the Nazis first tried to make a stand in the cellar. Dislodged from there, they made a fighting retreat upstairs. Then the room-to-room battle developed.
Scribe in low-flying plane sees bombs blow Nazi tanks sky-high
By Collie Small
Aboard a Marauder over Cherbourg Peninsula, France (UP) –
A moment ago, this plane dove low on a German panzer formation hiding in a forest southeast of Caen and I watched tons of high explosives blow the German tanks sky-high.
We apparently caught the Germans by surprise. Not a single tank turned its turret upward as the flight swept in with bomb bays open. We weaved through a light flak barrage thrown up by mobile ack-acks as easily as if the shells were popcorn bulbs.
Just had time to note that the tanks were camouflaged to avert just such an attack as this. Then the bombs shrilled downward and the entire wood area burst into flames. We were so low by then that this plane leaped violently with every explosion of its own bombs.
Looking back, I saw blotches of fire melting into each other. One patch of woods had vanished in a puff of smoke. Columns of black smoke, rolled up from the green woods as if a fuel dump had been hit. Not a single German tank was moving.
As we swerved off over the trees, I saw Caen burning fiercely directly ahead and three coastal villages smoking off to the right. Near one shell-wrecked village, I made out a line of American trucks shuttling along a tree-fringed country road, their white stars plainly visible. Farm buildings on the road were flattened where the battle had rolled past.
As we approached Caen, I saw leaping flames make ugly red patches in the gray blanket hovering over the city. Five minutes farther on, captured Bayeux was quiet and although the cathedral town appeared to have been shelled heavily, no smoke or fire was visible. However, a junction on the main rail line to Cherbourg off to the left was burning furiously.
As pilot 1st Lt. Garland C. Oliver of Sacramento, California, turned the plane toward the Channel, I saw hundreds of Allied ships ranged like a summer regatta in a crescent-shaped bay. The early morning sun was glistening on their barrage balloons.
The shoreline presented a striking contrast to D-Day, when it seemed to be erupting in great spouts of smoke and flame. Today, it was quiet except for a scattering of men, trucks and barrages. The German shoreline batteries were silent.
Ambassador to Spain predicts new landings
Barcelona, Spain (UP) –
Additional Allied landings on the continent will be made soon, Carlton J. H. Hayes, U.S. Ambassador to Spain, predicted in an address here last night.
He said:
The huge military operations will develop soon from all sides – operations whose nature will not be invasions but liberations. We Americans have no doubt of the outcome.