The Grey River Argus FRIDAY, August 18, 1944. TABLE-TURNING IN FRANCE.

Grey River Argus, 18 August 1944, Page 4

The Grey River Argus FRIDAY, August 18, 1944. TABLE-TURNING IN FRANCE.

This month has seen in France a military transformation so rapid as vividly to recall that before the counltry collapsed in the middle of 1940. Its liberation is already making great strides. The ■ month has in the interior brought the trebling of a new native army till there now are three-quarters of a million standing between the enemy forces in the south and those in the north. Indeed, much more is happening than the official Allied reports reveal. The southern invasion is over 120 miles wide, perhaps 30 miles deep in places, and the latest report is that Marseilles is likely soon to be cut off by the Allies. Further inland along the Rhone and to the eastward are General Koenig’s 750,000 men of the Army of the Interior ready to block the routes whereby the enemy would, retreat. An Allied move against southwestern France is being reported. But the most vital changes are doubtless those in the direction of Paris itself and along the arc extending from Falaise in the northwestward towards not only Orleans, but also Tours in the northwest. As heretofore, the enemy’s mostxintense concentrations remain facing the British and Canadians and the Americans on their western flank. Here progress has been kept up this week till Falaise is now west of the Allied left spearheads; the town itself is about to fall; and the best enemy army (the Seventh) is still large ly pocketed and also is in peril of being overtaken insofar as it has escaped from the pocket. AU this is defined in the latest Allied communique, showing a six miles advance in some pllaces on Wednesday. But what does not at all appear in that communique appears equally as important, and even more sensational than what it does record. There have, indeed, been several unofficial allusions to an American wheeling advance from a line extending south from Argentan to Le Mans, one apparently by-passing Alencon. There followed an American conjecture that, upon their pivot .in the region of Falaise, the Allied armies might wheel laitei 1 in a great sweep eastwards to Paris, possibly with support from the invading forces of the south, But it has been the Germans themselves who have now disclosed that such a sweep, or some thing very like it, has not merely commenced, but progressed until American forces to-day may be actually within forty miles of the French capital. The Germans admit Americans have now entered bhartres, 55 miles south-west of Paris; and also have reported the presence of Americans in the vicinity of Dreux, 40 miles west of Paris. At the same time the enemy is reported, by air reconnaissance, to be collecting river craft in the vicinity of the Seine, over which no bridges remain, with an eye to the early possibility of having to beat a general retreat. Moreover, some of the Americans, hitherto covering the -move in the direction of Chartres and Dreux, are stated now to have turned towards the LoireRiver in the direction of the great city of Tours, indicating that the Allies, "if they do not go meantime any further in the direction of linking with the southern invaders, are at least ready to oppose the Germans on that river which extends inland to and beyond Orleans. Thus from the Seine to the Loire the Allies would hold a very great part of northern France, gaining the bulk of it in only a fraction of the time that was required to consolidate the hold on Normandy. In the not distant future, therefore, names that were familiar not only in the last war, but in the earlier stages of this war, may be expected again to figure prominently in the news ,unless, of course, the? enemy either has to withdraw from France, or else to throw up the sponge. The centre of gravity has thus moved from the eastern to the western front, and probably will so remain until there is a decision.