Bradley Breaks Loose

On a day in late July Lieut. General Omar Nelson Bradley briefed war correspondents and made them a promise. His pledge: give him three hours of good flying weather any forenoon and he would break out of Normandy. The pent power of his U.S. forces back of Saint-Lo, like a gigantic rocket, would be loosed into the chute carved by a 2,000-plane air bombardment. After the breakthrough--the General made no promises.

Omar Bradley got his good weather on July 25 and touched off his rocket. It swooshed through the chute, burst out of Normandy, burned a path to Avranches and the north corner of the Breton peninsula.

But even the most optimistic of the war correspondents had not anticipated the rocket's carrying power, the astonishing speed it had developed by this week. It had burst again & again, had shot out spectacular and stunning bolts in all directions. The rocket's red glare lit up these accomplishments in a historic victory of U.S. arms:

P: Sweeps that shot across the 100-mile base of Brittany to the Bay of Biscay in four days; a 138-mile thrust westward that reached into the tip of the Breton peninsula. Brittany was cut off, then cut in two from end to end.

P: Thrusts that pierced to the Loire, a natural flank barrier for the coming drive into central France.

P: Swift strokes that reached into Brest. drove close to all of Brittany's other main ports (Saint-Nazaire, Lorient, Nantes, Saint-Malo).

P: A separate swing, pointed boldly eastward, that could be developed into a concentrated drive on Paris.

P: Elimination of 13 enemy divisions. (German casualties in two weeks, including prisoners, were close to 250,000 men).

Westward. Omar Bradley, the infantryman's general, was using the greatest U.S. striking force in World War II. In the Normandy stalemate after the brilliant capture of Cherbourg, he had used it tentatively, so G.I.s seemed to think, among the baffling hedgerows of the bocage country. But when the breakthrough came there was nothing tentative about it: Bradley kept plowing ahead without giving the Germans a chance to recover their balance.

Brest. Saint-Nazaire, Lorient were the fattest of the prizes now within his grasp. Brest (pop. 74,000) and Saint-Nazaire (42,000) were deep-water ports the Americans sorely needed. They had been there before--in 1917 and 1918. From Saint-Nazaire's riverside wharves a vast flow of heavy material had been run to the front over a U.S.-built railroad 27 years ago. At Brest many a U.S. division had poured ashore. At least two of those divisions--the 4th and the 79th--were close to Brest again this week.

Brest and Saint-Nazaire might be speedily put to use. The swiftness of the American advance had probably given the Germans little time to clog their harbors with destruction. But even if these ports and Lorient had been blocked and shattered, they were prizes of immediate value. They were the Germans' chief Atlantic U-boat bases. The Battle of the Atlantic, already beaten down to nuisance proportions, might be close to an end.

Eastward. But the thrust into France was the big battle for which Omar Bradley's Brittany campaign was the preparation. The world would soon see how the Allied ground commander in France, General Sir Bernard Montgomery, would fit the campaign into his strategic pattern.

Already the Americans had anchored the Allied flank on the Loire near Nantes. To the east was open, rolling country, interlaced with direct roads to Angers, Le Mans, Tours, Alengon, Paris. To the north the Germans still held hard to their Norman anchor below Caen. But they saw the threat. To consolidate against a possible swift U.S. flanking envelopment, the Germans quickly made an orderly withdrawal behind the Orne River. Below Caen the weight of British and Canadian armor was still poised for a breakout. Its obvious first use would be to punch the Germans back against the Seine.

In the center of the new line Bradley had already exploited his speed to get a frontal offensive going, headed east. He had pushed armored and infantry columns out of Rennes to the highway junction of Laval, 148 miles from Paris. Other columns swept down from Fougeres to Mayenne, 137 miles from the capital. To the south another had cut to the east.

Cornerward. The Germans were now direly threatened in a vital strategic triangle: its base, the line across Brittany; its sides, the Seine and the Loire; its apex--Paris.

Perhaps the German High Command had decided that Brittany would have to go. Brittany was not heavily held, and the deadly Allied air superiority made reinforcement impossible. U.S. armor passed over & around the defense like a freshet foaming over rocks. Inside his once-vaunted "wall" the enemy was incredibly soft.

Observers of the German collapse were also beginning to believe that there was no hard German line of defense to guard the roads to Paris. The U.S. tank columns found the propagandized Rommel Line thin and brittle: there seemed to be no fixed line of solid defenses west of the Maginot and Siegfried forts.

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