SPEEDY DRIVE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 34, 9 August 1944, Page 5

SPEEDY DRIVE

AMERICANS IN BRITTANY

LONDON, August 8. The speed of the American drive in Brittany is stressed by Reuter's correspondent in a dispatch filed at Vannes yesterday. He says: "This morning I was with the American forces in Normandy west of Avranches; tonight I swam in the Bay of Biscay, 100 miles away. I drove across the Brest Peninsula from coast to coast and back, chasing the American armoured forces, and never heard a gun fired in battle. I saw Germans, but they were all prisoners, grinning happily like kids because they heard they were going to leave France for England. "American tanks left a flaming path of enemy vehicles across Brittany— and some of their own, too. Powerful enemy artillery positions were overrun or blotted out in frontal attacks. Road blocks were removed with lightning speed by motorised engineers, and sometimes tanks just blew them off the highways ..with their guns. "There was; none of the stunned silence in Vannes that greeted the first beach-head landings in'Normandy, or the violent conflict and bitterness that characterised the liberation of Rennes. I never again expect to see such a wild and exuberant welcome as greeted the American tank- forces which liberated Vannes. Frenchmen overran the jeeps, buried them in flowers, and tore pieces from the Americans' clothes. Women held up children to kiss embarrassed tank men.

"The most impressive cermony I have seen in France came in the evening, when all the children of the town marched through the square carrying French, American, and British flags and singing the 'Marseillaise.'"