“Our soldiers must have the fighting spirit. If you call that hating our enemies, then we must hate with every fibre of our being. We must lust for battle; our object in life must be to kill; we must scheme and plan night and day to kill. There need be no pangs of conscience, for our enemies have lighted the way to faster, surer and crueler killing; they are past masters. We musthurry to catch up with them if we are to survive.”
JULY 28, 1944
WE CHASE GERMANS
Race On to Trap Foe’s Army After Stunning U.S. Break-Through
By E. C. DANIEL
By Cable to The New York Times.
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS, Allied Expeditionary Force, July 28—A smashing tactical success has been achieved on the western sector of the Normandy battle line by a daring American maneuver which late yesterday was within five miles of cutting the escape lines of German forces defending that side of the Cotentin Peninsula. The German defenses were already being described from the field last night as “chaotic” and 2,408 prisoners had been counted at the end of the second day of this offensive.
By bold and swift employment of tanks, Lieut. Gen. Omar N. Bradley had thrust west from the St. Lo area to within artillery range of Coutances, forty-two miles south of Cherbourg. The capture of that town of 7,000 near the western coast of the peninsula would bar Field Marshal Gen. Erwin Rommel’s forces from using the roads leading south from Lessay and Periers, which the Americans occupied yesterday. General Bradley’s swift armor was last reported in dispatches from the front last night to have reached Camprond, about five miles northeast of Coutances.
SEVEN DIVISIONS THREATENED
If—and that “if” should be underlined in view of the Germans’ past powers of recovery—the First Army is able to extend and hold this line it will have trapped the best part of seven German divisions, including the Elite Second and Seventeenth Armored Divisions within the triangle from Lessay to St.Lo to Coutances. The destruction of that force, the Eighty-fourth German Army Corps, which represents roughly half the divisions facing General Bradley’s army, would materially reduce opposition to a further American push southward through the heartrending “bocage country” to the base of the Cotentin Peninsula.
Space is still needed within the peninsula for Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery to deploy his numerically superior weapons and men, and the Germans reported last night that the British Army on General Bradley’s left had also set out to gain more ground. “The Allies have launched a new major offensive on the whole British front,” said the German Trans-ocean News Agency. This front runs from around Caumont to Troarn on the eastern end of the line.
While Allied verification of this report was awaited, there was little doubt of the tremendous import of the multi-pronged American advance slicing south and west through German defenses and communications. It was the greatest battle the Americans have yet fought in France.
JULY 30, 1944
COMMAND POST HAS WILD GUAM DAWN
25 Marines Led by Senator Chavez’s Son Kill 68 Japanese Intruders
By ROBERT TRUMBULL
By Wireless to The New York Times.
WITH THE FIRST PROVISIONAL MARINE BRIGADE, on Guam, July 24 (Delayed)—An audacious Japanese who walked boldly into an American command post near Agat and picked up a box of grenades touched off a dawn battle in which twenty-five Americans commanded by Lieut. Dennis Chavez Jr., son of the New Mexico Senator, slew sixty-eight Japanese.
The story is all the more remarkable because Lieutenant Chavez’s outfit is part of a headquarters and supply company, which is not ordinarily expected to engage in rough-and-tumble combat, although it happens—in fact, Chavez’s platoon sergeant, John Green, a big rugged West Virginian, was commended for a similar mix-up on Eniwetok in February.
The headquarters and supply company, commanded by Capt. Elliot Lima of Fallon, Nev., the night of D-Day dug in on a level stretch between two rugged knolls north of Agat. During the day they captured a Japanese Hotchkiss machine gun. Toward dawn a dark figure strode boldly past the sentry. Challenged, he said, “Watcha say, mate?” laid hold of a box of grenades and started to walk off toward the Hotchkiss.
A JAPANESE IS BLOWN UP
A marine noticed that the newcomer was a Japanese and fired. The bullet struck and detonated the grenades in the box, obliterating the Japanese. Captain Lima said a Japanese flag was found the next morning torn to small bits and ribbons and the Japanese’s notebook was strewn like confetti over a fifteen-yard circle.
Shortly afterward, as the sky began to lighten, the marines relaxed, thinking they soon could get out of the wet foxholes. A group of men approached bearing boxes of ammunition. When they were almost inside the line guarding the command post of Col. Merlin F. Schneider someone spotted Japanese leggings on these men and opened fire.
Immediately the Japanese dropped into tall grass and deployed for an attack.
“Our position was good,” Lieutenant Chavez said. “We were in foxholes, the Japanese in an open field of fire. But we had only two light machine-guns and a few automatic rifles, while they sounded like a full machine-gun company.”
‘LAST REEL OF HORSE OPERA’
The Japanese suddenly rose and charged, some swinging swords and bayonets. One officer ran toward Pfc. William Hurst yelling, “Marine, you die.”
Hurst replied “The hell I will,” and cut him down with an automatic rifle.
Another officer, “a story-book Jap with buck teeth,” rushed at Lieutenant Chavez.
“He grinned kinda toothily just as I shot him,” Chavez said, “and I kinda hated to do it.”
“The end of it was like the last reel of a horse opera,” Captain Lima said. “Two wounded Marines crawled to me and said Lieutenant Chavez’s outfit was running out of ammunition, lobbing grenades from foxholes and shooting like wild men. Meantime I had sent in another platoon under Lieut. Reginald Fincke of New York to back em up. By sun-up there were sixty-eight dead Japs against one Marine killed and five wounded.”
Lieutenant Chavez, who is 31 but looks 25, discussed the engagement modestly and kept switching the conversation to New Mexico politics. It was some time before the writer wormed from him the reluctant admission that he had personally killed at least five Japanese with a tommy-gun.
Guns on a U.S. Navy battleship shell the island of Guam during the Pacific campaign, July 1944.
JULY 31, 1944
GUAM PROCLAIMED UNDER RULE OF U.S.
By ROBERT TRUMBULL
By Wireless to the New York Times.
GUAM, July 27 (Delayed)—United States sovereignty was reestablished today on Guam through a proclamation by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz at a flag raising ceremony.
In the shadow of Mount Alifan the American flag was raised over the rich red and black soil of Guam at 4 o’clock this afternoon after two and a half years of Japanese occupation. As the Stars and Stripes were unfurled atop a white metal pole in the sultry air, artillery fire crashed from a meadow near by and shells whistled overhead into the Japanese lines near Sumay, two miles away, where marines on a muddy plateau were poised for a drive on the Orote Peninsula airfield.
A PAUSE AMID BATTLE
It was a simple, affecting ceremony, witnessed by marines in mud-caked green uniforms, some with bandaged wounds suffered on this ground. Seabees, stripped to the waist, climbed off trucks and bulldozers to watch the historic ceremony.
On a deeply rutted highway along the beach, other trucks and tractors continued hauling ammunition and supplies to the fighting line.
Watching the ceremony from a tent nearby was a native of Guam, Juan Mateo, who joined the Navy at Guam four years ago. The bugle call ended, the grimy residents of this crude camp went back to work, utilizing the three remaining hours of daylight at dull, dirty, muscle-straining labor—the digging, moving, shoving, lifting and hauling that goes on in alternate rain and heat, and mud, always mud, just behind the fighting line.
Chapter 20
“PATTON LASHES OUT”
August–September 1944
The progress of Allied forces in France after weeks of frustrating combat was impressive during August and September. On August 1 the U.S. Third Army was activated under General Patton, who had been chomping at the bit in Britain as commander of “First Army Group,” a phantom operation used before D-Day to fool the Germans about the destination of the invasion. Patton needed no second chance. After a feeble German armored counteroffensive was defeated at Mortain on August 7 and 8, Patton raced eagerly into Brittany and then turned east toward Paris. “Patton Lashes Out” ran The Times’s headline, as he left cleanup operations “to other commanders and to history.” Bradley and Montgomery, who had finally passed beyond Caen, closed in on the retreating Germans in a drive toward the small town of Falaise. On August 19 the “Falaise Gap” was closed between the two Allied forces with the capture of 45,000 enemy troops, but most of the German Army escaped and hastily retreated any way it could back to the Seine River and beyond. In southern France a smaller Allied force landed on the coast on August 15 in Operation Dragoon, and a French force liberated Marseille and Toulon by the end of the month. Maj. General Lucian Truscott’s Seventh U.S. Army pursued the retreating Germans toward Alsace-Lorraine.
Although Paris was not strategically important, it symbolized the liberation of France and Eisenhower detailed the French General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc to divert his division from the pursuit of the retreating Germans in order to take Paris. Three Times reporters entered the capital with French forces on August 24 under sniper fire, but with no large-scale resistance. The German commander surrendered the following day and the population flooded the streets, “shrilly and hoarsely hysterical” with the liberation according to The Times. The European war seemed to be nearing its final days. On September 1 The Times reported that Eisenhower, “brimming with confidence,” thought “Germany could be beaten in 1944.” The enemy army had been pushed back to the German frontier and into Belgium by the sudden rout, encouraging widespread hope in the West that the Allied advance would continue all the way to the Reich headquarters in Berlin.
The optimism was evident as representatives of the three major Allies began the conference at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C. on August 21 to determine the shape of the organization needed to secure world peace after the end of the war. Times correspondent James (Scotty) Reston was secretly given the outline of the proposal and The Times published it on August 23. Arthur Sulzberger was asked to suppress further news of the negotiations but refused, since he saw the reporting as a matter of public interest. On August 30 a formal communiqué was issued from the conference, confirming the shape of what was to become the United Nations Organization.
The prospect of an imminent Allied victory encouraged resistance forces in occupied Europe to fight for their own liberation. In Yugoslavia, an estimated 300,000 pro-Communist partisans, led by Tito (Josip Broz), stepped up their campaign against the large German garrison there, holding down troops that might have been used on other fronts. In Warsaw, the Polish Home Army launched an uprising against the Germans on August 1 in hopes that the approaching Red Army might help to liberate their capital. The relationship between Poland and the Soviets, had become increasingly complex after the Soviet recognition of a Communist “Lublin Committee” as the future government of Poland, instead of the Polish government-in-exile in London. The Polish Home Army took its orders from London, not from the pro-Soviet Poles. This doomed the uprising, since the West could do little to help, while the Red Army claimed to lack the means—and certainly lacked the political will to advance any farther. By October 2 Polish resistance was over and Warsaw was systematically destroyed by the Germans. The incoming Communist political regime shackled the possibility of a Polish democracy and the country would vanish behind the Iron Curtain until the Solidarity Movement of the late 1980s bloodlessly brought down the Communist government.
Meanwhile, farther south, the Soviets advanced into Romania and Bulgaria, which surrendered in August and early September and then switched sides to the Allies. In the west, Montgomery planned a flanking attack to seize the Dutch city of Arnhem and open the way into northern Germany. But the operation that began on September 17 known as “Market Garden,” was a costly failure for the Allies. Defeat there made it clear that the war would not be over by Christmas.
AUGUST 1, 1944
SELF-RULE IN INDIA PRESSED BY GANDHI
Agreement to Confer with Jinnah On Moslem Autonomy Indicates Determination
By TILLMAN DURDIN
By Cable to The New York Times.
NEW DELHI, India, July 30 (Delayed)—The agreement between Mohandas K. Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, president of the Moslem League, to meet in Bombay on Aug. 8 to discuss the Moslem demand for an autonomous Moslem State in India has added momentum to Indian efforts to reach political settlements between themselves and with the British that would bring about an increased measure of self-rule for this country. Mr. Jinnah will confer with Mr. Gandhi in response to an invitation from the latter.
The arrangement for the Gandhi Jinnah talks follows closely debates on India in the British Parliament, during which L. S. Amery, Secretary of State for India, announced that the British Government would not reopen formal negotiations with the Indian Nationalists on the question of Indian independence on the basis of the recent Gandhi proposals for a settlement.
Mr. Amery indicated that the Gandhi proposals, which advocated post-war independence for India, and in the meanwhile a regime in which Indians would control civil affairs and the British military, with a cabinet responsible to the Legislature and not to the viceroy, did not constitute a starting point for a profitable discussion and were “in no sense a response to Field Marshal Viscount Wavell’s recent invitation to Gandhi to produce constructive proposals.”
PROPOSALS REJECTED BY WAVELL
Mr. Gandhi’s invitation to Mr. Jinnah indicates his apparent determination to continue pushing for a settlement of India’s relationship with Britain despite evident British reluctance at this time to reopen the matter. Since his release three months ago, Mr. Gandhi has become steadily more active politically.
After an exchange of correspondence with Lord Wavell during which he received negative answers to requests for a meeting with the Viceroy and for release from prison of members of the All India Congress working committee, Mr. Gandhi advanced his plan for increased wartime Indianization of the national Government and post-war independence. Both Lord Wavell and Mr. Amery have now rejected the Gandhi plan even as basis for discussion.
AUGUST 3, 1944
GERMANS ON RUN BEFORE AMERICANS
Tanks and Infantry Overrun Makeshift Defenses in Normandy
By DREW MIDDLETON
By Wireless to The New York Times.
WITH AMERICAN FORCES, in Normandy, Aug. 2—Churning up thick clouds of white dust, tanks and infantry of the American First Army rumbled across the bridge at Tessy-sur-Vire today and plunged into the base of the German salient between the First Army and the Second British Army.
The blow was prepared and struck within twenty-four hours of the repulse of a German counterattack made by some of the troops that were on the run today. And run they did as our shells shattered their hastily built defenses and our armor swept around behind the strongpoints, knocking them out with cannon. There is an electric quality to this advance. Its progress may slow down, as it did once or twice today, but, when the enemy position is broken, as it inevitably is, the columns leap forward and new plumes of dust rise above the roads.
TANK AND INFANTRY TEAMS USED
Tanks have “made” the fighting in the advance into Brittany, but in this sector it is the old reliable teams of tanks and infantry that make the fighting. Walking slowly and solidly, the infantry fanned out from the bridge across the Vire River at Tessy and pushed into the rolling farmland beyond.
The whole front was moving forward. Two columns striking out from the Percy-Gavray line rolled up the Germans afte
r some savage fighting. One reached a point a mile north of the road into Juvignyle Tertre while the second force, farther south, also made considerable progress. The great Forest of St. Sever has been by-passed and German ammunition and fuel dumps in it are being hammered by artillery fire. Tongues of flame are leaping skyward as a result of the hail of shells that has fallen on the forest.
At intervals today the front was unpleasantly like that of 1940 in this same area. The Germans, trying desperately to halt the destruction of their divisions, sent planes over in groups of twenty or thirty fighter-bombers. They skimmed in over the poplars to drop anti-personnel bombs and strafe our infantry. The bullets raised little puffs of dust as they spattered along the road.
U.S. infantrymen take a brief respite in the taproom of a deserted house in the French town of Tessy-sur-Vire.
Strafing is not the gay old game that it once was for the Germans. Streams of machine-gun bullets met the planes and I saw one suddenly plummet, flaming, into the midst of a field populated by angry cows and angrier American soldiers.
AMERICANS USE PLANES, TOO
Once three Mustangs dropped out of the sun on two Focke-Wulfs. The German planes were smoking when all five aircraft disappeared in the distance. This was all very nice, but, as one infantryman said while we lay in a ditch, “it sure scares hell out of you.”
It seems unlikely that the Allies will be able to draw a noose around the Germans in the salient. The enemy formations there are first-class troops with plenty of mechanized equipment, which should enable them to withdraw swiftly. Some movement out of the salient has already been reported by our observation planes.
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 122
