FRONT WIDENED

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 133, 7 June 1944, Page 6

FRONT WIDENED

GERMAN ADMISSIONS

PARATROOPS IN ACTION Rec. 11 a.m. LONDON, June 6. Reports from the German news agency stated that the invasion front has widened. A vicious battle is raging north of Rouen, where the German anti-invasion forces are engaging powerful Allied paratroop formations landed behind the West Wall defences. Algiers radio quoted a Berlin radio report that the Allies made landings at Calais and Boulogne. The military spokesman of Berlin radio said this evening, "The Allies now hold a strip of the French coast between Villers and Trouville, 13 miles long and a few miles deep. The Allied troops in this beach-head —it is too much to call it a bridgehead—are still being fiercely opposed." The Germans report that an enormous Allied naval squadron is cruising off Cherbourg, where the sea is still very stormy. Berlin radio said that very strong naval formations participated in the landings on Jersey and Guernsey, and that the parachutists who landed on the islands are engaged in a bitter combat with the defenders. NARROWING OF BEACH-HEAD. The German overseas news agency claims that nearly all the Allied airborne troops and paratroops which landed in France were wiped out after the first twelve hours of invasion, and adds that the Allies' beach-head between the Vire and Orne Rivers has been sealed off from all sides despite the fact of the Allies • bringing up a heavy battle fleet from the vicinity of Le Havre. "The Germans are now narrowing down the beach-head locally," it stated. "Our coastal guards, in powerful counter-attacks, eliminated all the other landing heads between the Vire and Orne Rivers. "The Germans' greatest success of the day was the smashing of a large Allied landing attempt at St. Vaast. The Allies here operated on the assumption that their paratroops dropped near Barfleur and St. Vaast would succeed in neutralising the German defences, thus clearing the way for a huge landing operation. One particularly strong formation of Allied paratroops which was dropped between Le Havre and Cherbourg gained hold of both sides of the road running be-

LONDON, June 6.