THE UNDERGROUND IN CHERBOURG

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 234, 30 June 1944, Page 5

THE UNDERGROUND IN CHERBOURG

First-Hand Experience Of, British Pressman WATCHED MAIN ASSAULT LONDON, June 28. “I’ve just come back from Cherbourg —the Cherbourg -nobody knows —and I’ve seen Cherbourg become part of free France again,” said the well-known commentator Colin Wills today. “My colleagues have been rather worried about me and wondering where I had got to. I got right underneath Cherbourg. I do not mean among the secret tunnels and dug-outs of the Germans; I mean in underground Cherbourg with the French resistance movement. “I have done nothing particularly brave or unusual, though 1 was there while the Germans still remained. I have done nothing like Robert Dunnet, who broadcast frbm one of the galleries of the Fort due Roule while the Germans were still firing frotn another part of the fort; like Bob MacMillan, who was wounded by shrapnel in the head, but still insisted in going up to the front line and remaining with the troops. “These people of the French underground have been showing me hbw they lived under Nazi rule. They have been bombed and shelled, short of food, and short of many things they longed for under the hated rule. Nevertheless, they have had a tremendous resistance movement in Cherbourg. They have maintained the character of the city, and maintained it, intact in spite of many arrests. How it was done is not yet safe to tell —that would endanger members of the movement still under Nazi domination, “They have taken many prisoners, aud cleaned out many snipers’ nests. I have even taken a prisoner myself; at least, I did not take him myself—-I am a noncombatant —but he was handed over to me by some of the underground people, and I led him along to where the Americans were rounding up a lot more meu in grey uniforms. “He was a young German, 20 years old. His name was Hans, and he came from Duisberg. He told me that he had an old mother waiting for news of him in Duisburg. I could almost have been sorry for the old mother in Duisburg, but Hans forbade al Ithat. He was completely stubborn and sullen. He was dazed by the bombardment and overcome by the swift American victory, but there was only one good thing that could happen for him, a German victory. “There seem to be a lot like that among the prisoners. They will learn.

Heroic Americans. "Frenchmen took me along to see some of the snipers’ nests they had cleaned, out, or the Americans had after they had guided them to them. There were carpets of cartridges and the German dead. These Germans were cleanly dead, not with the violence that comes from shellfire, but from small-arm bullets. "As we moved round this city, at one point a sniper pinned u& down, and we had to make a detour. We went down into long tunnels filled with stores of all kinds which the enemy had laid up for a siege. They never got time to use them. The speed of the American attack overwhelmed them. “I cannot describe the speed at which the Americans worked, I saw some of it from the back of their lines. The area ahead w-as a mass of flame—no place for a war correspondent. But it seemed just like nothing to those Americans. They tore into it. "The Germans had built up an amazingly strong fortress, but the Americans didn’t mind. Cherbourg is a town about the size of Watford, in Hertfordshire, and the damage done to it is more, as if it had suffered from blast rather than from a direct hit The Americans took it blockhouse by blockhouse, pill-i|?ox by pill-box. and street by street. I have seen men from all three of the American forces who took the town, and I would say they were all equally heroic and their work equally glorious. They faced the unbearable and achieved the impossible. "These French people could not take part in that big assault—that was longrange work—but they had to take it from the other end. They did, and when the time came for guidiug their liberators, they took their part magnificently, for France and freedom.”