RESTORATION OF PORT UNDER WAY

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 237, 4 July 1944, Page 5

RESTORATION OF PORT UNDER WAY

.Difficulties’At Cherbourg LONDON, July 2.

The chief deep-water berth in Cherbourg harbour is blocked by large sunken ships, it is stated at Allied headquarters. A tremendous amount of debris will have to be removed, , Reuter’s correspondent at Cherbourg says that Commodore W. A. Sullivan, a United States Navy expert, who cleared Naples for Allied shipping and salvaged the sunken, burnt-out Normandie from New York harbour, is the naval commander of the port of Cherbourg. He says: “Things are already under way here.” Minesweepers are constantly working in both the inner and outer harbours. General von Schlieben. the captured military commander of Cherbourg, and Admiral Hennecke, who was also captured at the saine time, are full of admiration for the destructive power of our artillory, says British Official Wireless. They told Major-General Moore, chief engineer of the United States Army in the. European theatre of operations, that it was superior to anythin" they had seen, even on the Russian front. Revealing that almost all the enemy shipping in Cherbourg harbour had been sunk. General Moore gave a comprehensive picture of the Allied planning for the reconstruction of the port, which was made long before D-Day. and of the extensive demolitions by the Germans, and told how the operations of the Allied engineers are being carried out to put the facilities into working order as speedily as possible. “We had been getting information about the port for some two years, and were not strangers when we walked in,” he said. “The Germans did a very clever job in their demolitions. They went very strongly after the deep-water facilities. The walls of the berthing dock between th.e Quay de Normandie and the Gare Maritime are very badly damaged, and to repair them will be a very difficult job. There is a 26-foot tide in Cherbourg, compared with two feet at Naples. With the railways they again picked out things difficult to repair. They wrecked the signal installations to various points and went after the longest bridges.”