British Launch Attack on German Lines Near Caumont
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| "Infantry rush past a burning farmhouse near Le Beny Bocage, 2 August 1944" (source) |
The Allies flood forward, ebbing under counter-attack, slamming back with new advances. Robot planes begin to pound London. On June 27 the United States Seventh Corps took the surrender of Cherbourg. July 9 the British took Caen. Bastille Day saw the United States Army from St. Lo to the sea "on the move." Four days later it had cleared St. Lo. On July 20, Hitler was unfortunately not killed by a bomb. By July 29, the Allies had passed Coutances. Fifty-six days of the fiercest enemy resistance to an irresistible combustion from the swollen beachhead brings us to . . .
July 31
9:05:20 a.m.
DOWNS (from the British sector of the Normandy battlefront):
British tanks this morning have expanded their latest wedge into the German lines another three miles, making a total advance southward from Caumont of six miles since they started this new attack yesterday morning. Infantry and tanks are now fighting in the town of St. Martin, some six miles south of Caumont on one of the main lateral German supply roads, between Avranches and Caen.
This British wedge points southward like a finger, some two miles wide, with German troops on both sides of it.
For the first time in this Normandy fighting . . . infantrymen and machine gunners who usually advance on foot found the going too slow and found that they cluttered up the narrow farm lanes over which the tanks were passing. So the situation was solved by allowing the foot soldiers to climb aboard the tanks and to ride into battle with them. It is by no means a new idea but it has worked very effectively in this difficult battle country.
Several hundred prisoners have already come in and more are arriving. Many of these prisoners say they are members only of outpost German battle groups. They say that their main forces have been drawn back a few miles where a strong defense line is being constructed . . .
You have no idea just how hard it is to get around in this close country. With men and materiel, guns and tanks crowding roads to the front, it's like trying to fight a war in the middle of a holiday traffic jam. I spent two hours trying to reach one divisional headquarters this morning and the dust is so thick that it coats everything like a layer of talcum powder. Visibility is sometimes less than three feet along the road. You literally have to use your windshield wiper to clear the dust from the windshield. You come back from these trips looking like an unbeaten rug and when you move you leave a small cloud of dust behind you as if some dusty spirit were following you.
We were held up for more than a half hour on one narrow dusty lane by a huge American-made truck. Tempers are short under such conditions and it didn't do mine any good when after a half hour I found that this truck, stopping us from going forward, was loaded only with hundreds of pick handles. Now, what they want with hundreds of pick handles this close to the front I couldn't and still can't imagine.
