CLOSING OF THE SEINE TRAP

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 283, 26 August 1944, Page 7

CLOSING OF THE SEINE TRAP

Enemy Now Face Disaster

NO STAND LIKELY ON RIVER

(By Telegraph.—Press Assn. —Copyright.) (Received August 25, 11.15 p.m.)

LONDON, August 25.. In the battle of the Seine the British and Canadians have made a number of swift advances. The Germans’ covering line between LLsieux and the coast failed to hold the Canadian First Army. British forces on tbe coast yesterday were within sight of Le Havre. A correspondent says the Germans are facing disaster. The Americans from the DreuxMantes area are only a few miles from Rouen. The National Broadcasting Company’s Normandy correspondent says that the British and American forces have linked up west of the Seine, closing the trap against the remnants of 10 German divisions in that area. . Algiers radio’ said that British airborne troops have been landed on the Seine estuary near Le Havre, and the Germans have begun to evacuate the port. No Major Stand.

“The enemy is leaving bits and pieces to try to delay us, but there is no major stand anywhere before the Seine,” a field headquarters officer told the Associated I’ress correspondent. The correspondent proceeds: I travelled SO miles by jeep to the front yesterday through and sometimes over the wreckage of von Kluge’s Seventh Army. It w:s a nightmare scene, as incredible to view tts a chapter of Dante’s “Inferno” transformed into reality. Over mile after mile we were sometimes forced to drive over enemy corpses squashed in the mud as we bumped along the deeprutted roads where the Germans made their last frantic attempt to escape. In the ditches and newly-harvested wheatfields and behind the hedges lay hundreds upon hundreds of slain ( jack-booted Germans, dead horses, burnt-out tanks, and charred bodies.” Correspondents doubt whether the Germans are preparing for any strong stand on the Seine itself.