War Without Pattern

Of the German armies shattered in France, none was in worse plight than the Nineteenth, which had had the job of holding the Mediterranean coast and the great Rhone-Saone highway to Dijon and the Rhine. Hamstrung by Allied air power before it could even get into action, the Nineteenth has never had much of a chance.

This week Lieut. General Alexander M. Patch was still driving northward from the Riviera toward a junction with the northern armies of General Eisenhower. So badly disorganized was the opposition that much of the time it did not know where its own units were. To avoid helping the enemy, Allied commanders let their communiques lag days behind developments in the field.

The Damndest Ever. There was no orthodox pattern to the campaign through Provence and Languedoc, passing the Massif Central, toward the southern Vosges.

Some U.S. and French units of the Seventh Army met bitter resistance even after the great ports (Toulon and Marseilles) and inland centers (Toulouse and Aix) had fallen. These units had no illusions that the German collapse was total. Their casualties were destructive of all illusions.

But for other units--perhaps for most-- it was a mop-up. TIME Correspondent Will Lang, accompanying casehardened veterans of a division which had fought through Sicily and Italy, cabled that its soldiers found the southern France campaign "the damndest one ever: all marching and little fighting, through some of the prettiest mountain country most G.I.s had ever seen, chasing Germans through lovely villages unscarred by war."

This division flanked Lyons. Its rapid advance was sped by Maquis scouts, who did most of the Americans' patrolling for them (at a base-pay rate of $2 a day). The Maquis did much of the fighting, too, when it was confined to skirmishes with Germans who had only light weapons, and they brought in stragglers as prisoners. The Americans cracked the toughest Nazi nuts, rounded up the growing bag of prisoners (55,000 on the southern France front by week's end), and pushed on to the next flag-decked, cheering village.

Before & behind them companies, battalions, regiments and divisions of the Nineteenth Army still scurried this way & that, like bugs uncovered by the lifting of a stone. On a battlefield long isolated by one of the most precise air operations of the war, they were all but bereft of tanks, bitterly short of food, cut off from all help from their carefully laid supply systems.

It was only D-plus-19 when the Americans rolled into Lyons, France's dull, straight-laced third city (pop.580,000), long the world's silk capital. There was no telling how far beyond the city advance guards had penetrated, no telling how far beyond that the Maquis were solidly at work. The Nineteenth was kaput.

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