Word: rhone
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Well up the Rhone valley toward Lyons, a U.S. motorized cavalry reconnaissance troop, feeling the way for the main body, was stopped before a German resistance pocket. After sundown, TIME Correspondent John Osborne dropped in at the troop's farmhouse command post, saw the following little scene in the great drama...
...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...
...Germany: 200 Miles. But it was northward that the Allied advance made the swiftest progress. Motorized units of "Butler's Task Force," commanded by Brigadier General Frederick B. Butler, kiting up secondary roads in the hills east of the Rhone valley, quickly reached Grenoble. They were now 150 miles from the coast, 230 miles from Lieut. General Omar N. Bradley's forces in the north, 200 miles from the German frontier. Three days later a party of correspondents, jeeping peacefully through Maquis-held territory, turned up on the Swiss frontier near Geneva, 200 miles from the beachhead...
This advance, by light, fast units, reached northward without running into any substantial trouble. Behind them the main Allied force turned to fan westward toward the Rhone valley, where the supply lines were better. In the south it seized Aries, Tarascon, and Avignon on the lower Rhone and crossed the river. Farther north it moved toward German garrisons at Montelimar, Valence and Lyons. By then the German escape route was a hopeless grid of Allied regulars and French irregulars...
...attack began, "Jumbo" Wilson stated its obvious aim. Said he in an official proclamation: the objective is "to drive out the Germans and join up with the Allied armies advancing from Normandy." Clearly laid out for his forces were two major routes to the north: up the Rhone valley through the eastern third of France, westward through the Garonne valley to Bordeaux, to meet the Americans ready to strike south from the Loire...