From William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary:
[Aachen, May 19, 1940:Â Shirer is one of a group of Berlin journalists invited to the front to see firsthand the German Army’s astonishing rapid advance through the Low Countries into France.]
Almost a full moon… it was very beautiful driving into Aachen along a road arched with trees… endless columns of troops, in trucks and on foot, were moving up to the front, singing and in good spirits.
(An example of the German army’s terrific attention to detail: For three hundred miles along the Autobahn from Berlin to Cologne, broken-down farm implements made to look like anti-aircraft guns fromany altitude at all were placed every two hundred yards. Ploughs with the shaft pointed to the sky to look like a gun; rakes, harrows, wheelbarrows, sewing-machines — every conceivable old implement had been carefully arranged…so that an Allied pilot flying along the road would get the idea that it was suicide to swoop down…. Another purpose of the farm amachines of course was to impede the landing of Allied planes on the highway. Telephone posts driven into the narrow strip of ground between the double lanes also served this purpose.)