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Show Exclusive War Story: (Ray Brock, war correspondent, 4'2 years in the Ualkans for the N. Y. Times and practically en route at this moment to the European theater for International Interna-tional News Service, spellbound soma of us with this breathless story. W e asked him to jot it down.) Dear Walter: Here's the story precisely as Bea Tolstoi gave it to me the other night. I think it's one of the great, hitherto unwritten chapters in the war. Scene: Shep-heards Shep-heards Terrace, Cairo. Time: Late afternoon, November 15, 1941. Ken Downs, then an ace war correspondent correspond-ent for Int'l News Service (he's now a It. col. on Terry Allen's staff in Europe), was finishing a Scotch and the last five pages of "For Whom The Bell Tolls." Geoffrey Keyes interrupted in-terrupted him. Geoffrey, a lieutenant-colonel at the age of 24 (son of Admiral Roger Keyes), had ducked a desk job in England to come out to Egypt, join the British desert commandos com-mandos and raid the German and Italian rear dynamiting airdromes, blowing bridges, playing general hell with the enemy, etc. But now Ken Downs told Geoffrey Keyes to go 'way. Ken was absorbed in the fictional fic-tional last few minutes of Robert Jordan's life in the Bell, the unforgettable unfor-gettable last few minutes when Jordan, Jor-dan, with a smashed thigh, props himself against a tree and levels his tommygun on an approaching column col-umn of Fascist cavalry . . . Keyes was off with Capt. Colin Campbell and his commando's on the raid to kill Rommel, the raid that missed Rommel because the Afrika Korps general was in Rome on a birthday party but it was one of the most daring operations of the war and won Keyes his Victoria Cross posthumously. Keyes landed his commandos two hundred miles behind the German lines, beached his landing craft by night near Sidi. Rafa. They hid two days and nights in a wadi (gully), trekked twenty miles on D-night and snaked up to the Afrika Korps GHQ. They attacked with grenades, tom-myguns tom-myguns and machine pistols, Keyes leading. Keyes killed the first sentry, sen-try, kicked down the outer door and led his raiders in, spraying the corridor cor-ridor with tommygun and pistol. Startled, frightened German staff officers poured from their billets. Keyes' men blasted them down. The sirens went, a general alarm being sounded. ' The Germans got to their arms, began to fight back. Keyes' small force got smaller. But Geoffrey, still leading, took seventeen men through the last defenses in the inner in-ner stockade to Rommel's own quarters. quar-ters. Rommel's staff aide got Keyes, a machine pistol fusillade which almost al-most tore Keyes' right leg off. Keyes fell in the doorway. Colin Campbell, Camp-bell, behind him, dragged Keyes back from the threshold and hurled two grenades inside. Then he sprayed the room with his tommygun. Had Rommel been there he'd have caught it. Campbell and a sergeant dragged Keyes back to the outer stockade,, firing as they fell back. Then Campbell Camp-bell was hit. "Get out!" Keyes ordered. or-dered. ' "Take him out. Leave me here." They had reached the door of the outer stockade. "Give me that tommygun." Keyes took the sub-machinegun sub-machinegun and propped himself in the door. Well. The rest of it came from Downs' report as he got it from the sergeant and from Colin Campbell, who wrote from a German Ger-man prison camp. They dragged Campbell to a tree nearby. His wound was pretty bad. They gave him morphine and he began to go under. But he could still see Keyes, in the first gray streaks of daylight, propped in the doorway and blasting away at the Germans in the stockade. The sergeant ser-geant ran back to Keyes, but Geoffrey Geof-frey refused aid. He simply demanded de-manded more clips for his tommy-gun. tommy-gun. The sergeant got them. "Listen " Keyes fired a burst. "Not more than two or three of you will get away. Some of you " he fired again, a long, choppy burst that drove the Germans back to cover. "Some of you must get back to report " he fired again and rammed home a fresh clip. "Tell them" "Yes, sir!" snapped the sergeant. "Get word to Ken Downs," finished fin-ished Keyes. "Tell him, if you will, that it happened this way. Good-by." Good-by." The sergeant saluted and ran, zig-zagging, for a wadi and safety. Campbell began to pass out. As he went under he could see Keyes firing, reloading, firing . . . Memos of a Midnighter: When an ad agency told Henry Ford that Tommy Dorsey was the next Ford Hour star, Mr. Big replied: "Who's he? What's the matter with Earl Godwin?" . . . It's a girl for the Everett Sloanes at Drs. Hosp. Pop's the Crime Doctor . . . Bob MuseL the New York newspaperman (now in England), has written the song hit of London: "The Homecoming Waltz" . . . The mystery murder (of a diplomat's wife in that Chicago hotel) is the exact plot (so far) of a Universal film starring F. Tone. |