PORTENT OF DISASTER

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 282, 25 August 1944, Page 5

PORTENT OF DISASTER

New Move On Seine x LONDON, August 23., “The pattern of major disaster” is how the military correspondent of me Times" comments on the news irom France. “It portends, ’he says, the creation of a new pocket on the lower Seine, with columns beyond the river ready to swoop on Germans who do succeed in crossing. It begins to look as though the Seventh Army may be considered as, in General Montgomerys words, ‘written off.’ ” The correspondent adds that it now appears that progress beyond the Seine will depend less on the enemy’s reactions than on the power of the Allies to keep their columns supplied. - xn. The military correspondent of the “Daily Express” says: “It is true to say that von Kluge has utterly lost any coordinated control over the battle, lain about defence on the Somme, Marne, or subsequently the Maginot and Siegfried Lines does not amount to much, because the enemy would need half a million men to stand at any of these obstacles. The result of the Battle ot I rance —-and that means western Europe, since Belgium and Holland could not be defended for loug—has become a mathematical certainty. General Montgomery said it The correspondent thinks it might be possible to trap the remains of the German military power before it could even start on the long trek to the Rhine, in the vast pocket formed by Houlgate, the Seine estuary. Gaillon, and Laigle. Alan Moorehead says m a dispatch to the “Daily Express”: “If I were allowed one only more dispatch from this front, this would be it, not because it was important, but because I think I have seen the end of Germany here in this village of St. Lambert.” Panzers Obliterated. “The best of von Kluge's army came here cn masse,” he continues. Iney converged on the village to fight their way out. It was the sort of panzer battle array that the Germans used to terrorize Europe for four years, and now here in the apple orchards and village streets one turns sick to see what happened to the panzers. They met British and Allied troops head-on, and were just obliterated “It began in the back streets of St. Lambert, where the German columns first came within the range of British nre. Three hundred horses stampeded and lorry-drivers panicked in the same. way. As more and more shells kept ripping through the apple trees they .collided their vehicles one against the other witn such force that some of the lighter cars were telescoped with their occupants inside. At some places for stretches of oO yards vehicles, horses and men were jammed together in one struggling, shrieking mass. Engines and petrol-tanks took fire and the wounded pinned in the wreckage were suffocated, burnt ana 10 Moorehead adds: “The Germans made no attempt to man their guns. They either huddled beneath them or ran blindly for the futile cover of hedges. They‘ran in the direction of the fire, shouting that they surrendered. They gave up in hundreds on hundreds. The correspondent says the scene he saw was exactly like those crowded battle paintings of Waterloo and Borodino, except that the kind of wreckage is different. The battlefield stretches for about a mile up the Falaise road. “I say again I think I see the end of Germany here,” he added. “This was their best in weapons, their strongest barrier before the Rhine. It has been brushed aside and shattered into bits. Beaten, the ’Wehrmacht is a pitiful thing.” __________