London hears Rommel has been removed
London, England (UP) –
A dispatch from the 21st Army Group’s headquarters to the Evening Standard today that it was believed Marshal Erwin Rommel had been removed from command of German troops facing the Allies in France.
No definite news about Rommel has reached the headquarters since the invasion started, but all indications are that he is no longer in command, the dispatch said.
The dispatch said:
Detailed reports beginning to arrive from the front showed that Rommel’s plan for the defense of Hitler Europe had even graver consequences than at first believed. It is now known that when Rommel was in Normandy shortly before the invasion, he moved forward coastal defense zone troops which Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Western Europe, had placed some distance behind the frontline.
He was so confident that by strengthening the coastal defenses, he could make the landings so costly that the invaders would be thrown into confusion.
Then he would bring up panzer divisions and hurl the invaders back into the sea. This was the plan that Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery anticipated.
Claim three U.S. soldiers tortured by Germans
NBC correspondent Stanley Richardson reports that Army officers have authenticated at least three cases of U.S. paratroopers being tortured and murdered by Nazis in the early hours of the Normandy invasion.
In one instance, the bodies of three paratroop enlisted men were found piled against a wall of a former German command post near Carentan. The men had been stripped to the waist and their hands had been bound before they had been executed.
Richardson says that many other cases are under investigation.