SUPPORT FOR INFANTRY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 67, 16 September 1943, Page 5

SUPPORT FOR INFANTRY

ALLIED TANK FORCES

LONDON, September 15,

A correspondent at Algiers amplifies the brief official news of the Salerno fighting. He says the heaviest of yesterday's German attacks were made at the lower end of the bridgehead, roughly 25 miles south-east of Salerno. There were many of these attacks, and nearly all of them were strongly backed by tanks, of which our gunners knocked out a great number. One American combat team alone accounted for thirteen. The correspondent says that the Allied force have now got some tanks ashore to give the infantry better support. He reveals that in some of the earlier fighting the Fifth Army penetrated as far as 12 miles inland before they were forced back again to the new positions they are now consolidating. • He emphasises that the whole line is intact and, as he says, bristling with fight. German news agency versions of the battle have considerably changed their tune today. After talking yesterday of a disorderly evacuation they now say that American resistance stiffened surprisingly last night. They give two reasons for this: new reinforcements, and the great weight of the barrage put up 'by the many Allied warships out in the gulf.

The barrage, according to a British correspondent, is hurling thousands of shells ashore, while overhead our air forces add to the punch with thousands of bombs. Never, he says, has so much naval and air support been concentrated into so small an area of intensive fighting.