September 10th and 11th the tide of the war was quickly turning. Allied forces had liberated Luxembourg and were now on German soil for the first time. Patton’s troops were moving so quickly that the technical difficulties encountered made it almost impossible for reports to be delivered to anxious listeners back home.
A sample of this difficulty (and just one of the difficulties in covering a war at the time) is this report featuring an address to the American people by Grand Duchess Charlotte on the occasion of Luxembourg now back in Allied hands. Between scheduling broadcasts, arranging shortwave relays and the atmospheric conditions at any given time, it was a miracle any reports were delivered. No doubt, aside from Charlottes address, the subsequent later broadcast was in all likelihood not broadcast because the reception from Shortwave transmitters and the frequent blasts of interference would render large parts of it unlistenable.
But that didn’t stand in the way of history being made and the war. A dispatch from Lieut. Gen. Omar N. Bradley’s U. S. 12th Army Group headquarters in France estimated that the U. S. 1st, 3d and 7th Army had killed, wounded or captured more than 500,000 Germans since D-Day. The British 2d Army was revealed to have taken 12,135 prisoners in three days. Among them were men from 46 different Nazi divisions.
The 1st Army, in scoring the greatest advances on the 200-mile front now curving across France, Luxembourg and Belgium, liberated the third western capital in 18 days by its reported occupation of Luxembourg, a city of 50,000 in the southern part of the 999-square mile Impeded duchy. only by road blocks. mines and half-hearted enemy resistance, the 1st Army drove through the Ardennes Forest on 8 53-mile front to enter Luxembourg. Headquarters, continuing its partial blackout of news which would aid the Germans, did not specify where the entry was made. Before reaching the border the Americans captured Marche, 27 miles southwest of Liege and 26 miles from Luxembourg; Rochefort, 17 miles east of Givet and 32 miles from Luxembourg; St. Hubert, 20 miles from Luxembourg; Neufchateau, 15 miles from Luxembourg, and Ecouviez, on the Franco-Belgium border 14 miles from Luxembourg. It appeared that the column which took Neufchateau was one which crossed the border and then, according to the unconfirmed 1st Army report, drove on 10 miles southeast to enter the capital city, also named Luxembourg, which is 10 miles from the German frontier.
And while radio and the Press were struggling to keep up, that’s what was going on this day in 1944.
