FORCES ENTER CITIES

Press, Volume LXXIX, Issue 23943, 10 May 1943, Page 5

FORCES ENTER CITIES

Warm Welcome At Tunis BIZERTE ALMOST DESERTED (N.Z. Press Association —Copyright) (8..0. W.) RUGBY, May 8. “In the midst of machine-gun fire and exploding ammunition dumps, we had a tremendous welcome from the people of Tunis,” declared a commentator broadcasting from North Africa this afternoon. “They were so excited and so deeply moved that they did not hear the firing at all. “They pressed bunches of flowers on us. They filled our car with flowers. They wrung our hands and hugged us. They all said they had been waiting for us with such impatience, and now they say, ‘lt is all over and we can live again.’ "There was no mistaking the warmth of the welcome. Flags were being waved everywhere. Even roadr ways were strewn with flowers before the tanks, and in the main avenue of Tunis women with babies in their arms rushed into the streets. From the youngest to the oldest inhabitant there were cheers going up.” The commentator, describing the advance on Tunis, said: “We came along the road from Mejez el Bab towards Massicault, and were told it was being heavily shelled. So we branched off over a dusty t track which had not been cleared of mines—sappers were working on it as we came through. When we came out on the Massicault road again, shells were bursting on both sides of the Mejez plain. The Germans were still in the hills, still fighting, and our thrust at Tunis had gone through them. There were still a lot of them to be cleared up. “We were .driving to Tunis through battles all the way. We stopped to watch the shelling of a farm where 50 German parachutists were holding out. Then we pushed on to the corner of a road just short of the last ridge of hills the Germans could hold before Tunis. They were still holding it. Just to the right of the road, not far ahead, two German guns were firing at a squadron of our tanks. Apparently the Germans were still checking us. I climbed to the top of a windmill which made an excellent observation post. I could see the tanks manoeuvring for position and the spitting flash of the German guns, and our tanks replying, just below me in the fields. Then suddenly we scored two direct hits and the firing ceased. “Even so. the position was obscure. There were Germans on both flanks of the hill; but we heard that our armoured cars were in the outskirts of Tunis, so we drove on along the quiet road. As we came over the crest of the hill where the Germans had just been firing at the tanks we saw the white city of Tunis stretching before us.” “It was a push over,” says a correspondent who entered Bizerte with the leading United States reconnaissance company. “There was scattered fire from German 88-millimetre guns. The Americans entered the deserted city, and at dusk American tanks with the seventy-fives were picking out and cleaning up a few scattered and isolated pockets of resistance, from which the enemy was firing his last ammunition.” “The entry into Bizerte and Tunis was an example of what can be achieved by unification of the Allied Army Command,” said General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, in a statement issued in Algiers, He could not exaggerate the admiration everyone had for the Ist Army, which had been fighting for six months, he said. Many members of the Ist Army had not left the line for a single day. General Eisenhower revealed that since April 16 Major-General O. M. Bradley had been in command of the 2nd American Corps, replacing Lieu-tenant-General Patton, who had been transferred to another important command.

dealing only with a detachment. Where, then, is what is left of the enemy’s main body? I suggest that it is already in the mountainous Cape Bon peninsula, where von Arnim hopes to stage another Bataan."