FONTENAY FALLS

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVI, Issue 22935, 4 July 1944, Page 5

FONTENAY FALLS

Liquidated House By House Operations Described By Telegraph—N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright LONDON, July 2. Describing the operations leading to the capture of Fontenay, a correspondent in Normandy says that the noise of the guns was like the Morse code tapped out at high speed and magnified a million times with the screaming of shells as a background. Within a quarter of an hour a light signal on the left flank showed that the first objective of the troops there had been attained. Then the enemy seemed to divine the approximate position of the startling line and brought down mortar fire while the British barrage was still light. Many explosions occurred within 50 yards of where the correspondent had gone to ground. Other occupants of the slit trench were wounded. Still our guns blazed away but by now the flashes of exploding shells were made invisible from where the correspondent was by clouds of dust and by morning mist.

Then the enemy played a new card. He laid a smoke screen to make the infantry sections lose contact. But he reckoned without a commanding officer —a giant of a man who sorted out his platoons time and time again. “Tne bravest man I know,” one of his officers called him.

In spite of the blasting the place received, many enemy remained at Fontenay. As they got into the town the infantry, not without cost to themselves, had to liquidate it house by house as fire was opened from strongpoints. Other barricades had to be pinpointed on various sections and in the country beyond as small arms and mortar fire brought the infantry temporarily to a standstill. Tanks and even light anti-aircraft guns joined in the latter, firing almost horizontally to drive snipers from the hideouts. The prisoners brought in were docile. All the fight seemed to have gone out of them. One said he had previously received two wounds in Russia.

Although the enemy had plenty of time to prepare defensive positions at Fontenay the sappers found few mines. Behind the infantry and armour came civil affairs personnel to look after what was left of the place and any refugees there might be. It was as if all branches of the service were queueing up along the routes to the place—most of them little more than tracks—to play their part in the liberation.