"Operation Strangle"

From Femina Morta ("Dead Woman's Corner"), U.S. tanks and infantry on the Anzio front punched within two miles of the Appian Way. Along the whole beachhead front, attacks great & small flared up and died. The Allied forces were still stalled. But in the air, infantrymen saw some cheer.

Major General John K. ("Uncle Joe") Cannon's Twelfth (Tactical) Air Force was working harder than ever on a job hopefully christened "operation strangle." If Cannon's tacticians spoke medical terminology they might have called it "arteriotomy," for they were quite literally cutting the German supply arteries. His Mitchells, Marauders, Warhawks and Thunderbolts were trying, very forcefully, to bleed Marshal Kesselring's stubborn divisions to death by severing -- and keeping severed -- the marshal's difficult north-south rail communications.

Since February, destruction on the railroads has spread over an area 150 miles wide, from Rome to Pisa on the east coast, from Pescara to Rimini on the west. Uncle Joe's mediums and fighter bombers have smashed bridges, tunnels and tracks at scores, even hundreds, of places, and the fighters have gone back to shoot up repair crews.

Flat-Tired Take-Off. Major Gilbert Wymond, a Thunderbolt pilot from Kentucky, tried the unheard-of stunt of loading his P47 with two 1,000-lb, bombs. The load squashed his fully inflated tires nearly flat on the takeoff, but he staggered into the air. Since then P47 pilots have lugged two 1,000-pounders as a matter of routine.

Ace of tunnel-busters is Major William Benedict, who is the son of a San Quentin Penitentiary guard. He was credited last week with five railroad tunnels "destroyed" (i.e.,completely blocked). So dangerous is this work deemed to be that Benedict, a squadron commander, personally attends to all tunnel-busting required of his outfit.

Recently he approached a tunnel near Siena at treetop level, released his delayed-action bombs just short of the mouth, pulled away in a vertical bank. The bombs popped into the tunnel like peanuts into the mouth of an urchin, and when they exploded they left the south end of the tunnel an impassable mess of rubble.

Some months ago the bridge at Cecina on the west coast line was smashed. The Germans toiled for 78 days to build a new one; twelve hours after it was finished, Uncle Joe's flyers wrecked it as thoroughly as the first.

German prisoners have told their captors that practically nothing is moving south from Florence by rail. Prisoners' statements and intelligence reports indicate that Kesselring's 20 divisions in Italy are getting only 170 tons of supplies per day per division. While this is plenty during a lull, the Germans would need at least 200 tons per day per division if an all-out Allied blow forced them to rise up and fight. Still needed: the all-out Allied push, a seeming impossibility now, when reserves are few on the Italian front.* But if what Uncle Joe's pilots reported was true, if the German was being slowly bled to death, things must still be different.

* This week the War Department announced that 498 men had been lost in the sinking, by enemy action, of a U.S. transport in the Mediterranean.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.