Word: fifteenths
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When the Americans reached Alençon, Field Marshal von Kluge recognized the mistake he had made. After Omar Bradley broke into Brittany (TIME, Aug. 7), Kluge had a choice to make. He could have brought his Fifteenth Army down from Flanders and his Nineteenth Army up from southern France and drawn the Seventh Army back so that the three could form a new front along the Seine and the Loire. But this would have involved leaving the Pas-de-Calais and Belgian robomb coasts and southern France open to attack...
...pushed between the Canadians striking south toward Falaise and the Americans striking north 12 miles below, the Seventh Army finally began to pull back. By this time Kluge was bringing part of the Fifteenth Army down to hold the line of the Seine but it was a question whether the Seventh Army could reach the Seine. The tattered Seventh might wriggle out of its corridor but the roads all the way back to the Seine were being strafed, and the bridges across it had been bombed out. In a coffin-shaped area roughly outlined by the Seine, Falaise, Argentan...
...same morning, 200 miles to the east, another U.S. fleet of more than 500 heavyweights, sent out from the Italian bases of the Fifteenth Air Force, pounded three more synthetic oil plants southeast of Breslau and not far from the old Polish border...
While in Italy the shuttle bombers made two missions with the Fifteenth Air Force-an oil refinery at Budapest, railway freight yards in Rumania. They flew back to England, on the way bombed the Beziers railway yard near Montpellier in southern France. On this swing the shuttlers met spotty and confused Nazi air resistance. They shot down at least 45 German planes, lost only three Mustangs, not a single Fortress...
...combat losses. By this estimate the precision-bombing Eighth U.S. Air Force, assigned a year ago to the job of knocking out Nazi aircraft plants, had won one of the war's greatest victories. Said the statement: in one week in February, the Eighth (plus the newly formed Fifteenth, operating from Italy) had bombed factories producing "more than 60% of known single-engine fighter manufacture, more than 80% of the known two-engine manufacture." "For three successive months," said the statement, "the German fighter force has lost more planes than its plants could manufacture. In March their production...