Bombers attack French targets
Widespread sweeps by Fortresses and Liberators
SHAEF, London, England (AP) –
A force of between 1,000 and 2,000 U.S. Fortresses and Liberators and escorting fighters swept over France this morning, bombing airplane plants, airfields and railroad facilities in a dozen places.
Berlin radio reported an attack on the great industrial city of Hannover in Germany while lighter Allied warplanes from bases in Normandy and Britain continued their widespread support campaign in a smashing follow-up to an 1,100-bomber operation overnight.
As a part of the latter operation, several hundred Lancasters blasted E-boat pens at Le Havre with six-ton “factory busters” in daylight.
Twenty-eight hundred tons of explosives were dropped on the port in two separate attacks, the first, just before dusk, being the RAF’s heaviest daylight bombardment of the war and its first high altitude daylight precision effort.
Targets of the U.S. “heavies” today ranged from Nantes, La Possonnière and Angoulême to Beauvais, La Frillière and Bordeaux. The force comprised 1,090 bombers and several hundred more fighters, possible approximating yesterday a record 1,500-bomber force.
The multiple attack, the deepest penetration of France since the invasion, took the bombers over a 300-mile expanse from Beauvais, 40 miles north of Paris and 100 miles east of the battle line, to Bordeaux, 300 miles south of the battle zone.
Angoulême is 70 miles northeast of Bordeaux, La Possonnière 50 miles east of Nantes, which is 120 miles south of the battle zone. La Frillière is eight miles east of Tours.
A force of Mosquito bombers attacked the synthetic oil center of Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr last night to keep the increasing assault on Hitler’s war machine going around the clock.