OCR Text |
Show Willi Montgomery, 1 On Rommel's Heels By Chester Morrison (WNU Feature Through special arrangement arrange-ment with Collier's Weekly) Last August Wendell Willkie, visiting visit-ing in Egypt, made an astonishing statement about General Montgomery's Montgom-ery's recent skirmishes with Rommel's Rom-mel's army west of Cairo. Willkie, in terms that seemed at the time to be extravagant, announced an-nounced that the Axis armies in North Africa had been thoroughly beaten, that the threat to Egypt had been removed for all time! Mr. Willkie called it a victory "comparable "compar-able to Nelson's at Abukir bay." To the correspondents who had covered the war in North Africa since its beginning, it was less like a victory won than like a battle that had never been fought. They were disappointed, and among the people of Egypt there was only the accustomed accus-tomed feeling of tenuous momentary security. Willkie, however, got his information informa-tion from a cocky little Irishman, who had taken over the British Eighth army two weeks before. A month later at the end of October Octo-ber Montgomery swung again, this time with power so tremendous that the German and Italian armies reeled and broke, reorganized clumsily clum-sily and fled in what seemed like panic. . They fled out of Egypt into Cyrenaica, fled back through their own mine fields, fled westward on the one main highway along the Mediterranean coast, fled along desert des-ert tracks hub-deep in sand. And Montgomery stayed on their heels. Montgomery, in his tent or in his dugout, riding in his tank or his jeep in the field, talking of ."my plan," with other generals putting his plan into effect. Now, without question, the enemy was beaten. An Interview With Montgomery. I interviewed him one day at his headquarters in a cave. He was wearing a gray home-knit sweater with a silk scarf knotted about his throat, khaki pants, unscuffed brown calf desert boots1 and the jaunty black beret of the tank corps. The beret seemed somehow too large for his small gray head. There were no ribbons on his chest. None of these articles of clothing was strictly uniform, but uniform regulations were seldom closely observed in the field. Always cocky, he was cockier than ever that morning. His small, sharp blue eyes flicked over the correspondents corre-spondents and his close-clipped gray mustache twitched. Suddenly such was the magnetism of the little man himself one noticed another figure standing beside and a little behind him. It was Coningham chief of the RAF in the western desert ordinarily ordi-narily a commanding figure; tall, heavy and solid, with a hawk nose of the kind which belongs to a man commanding the RAF in the field. Coningham wore the proper uniform witn riDDons. 'Complete, Absolute Victory. "It was a fine battle," Montgomery Montgom-ery began. Here was that past tense again the same way Willkie had spoken two months earlier as though the battle was already over. "It was a fine battle," he repeated, and now he no longer could suppress the smile that had been making his mustache twitch. "Complete, absolute abso-lute victory," he snapped. "Boches finished. Finished! Completely smashed!" And it turned out that the enemy was smashed. Not completely smashed, not yet, but Montgomery has the knack of reading the future. fu-ture. "He's like the conductor of a great orchestra," one of his most respectful re-spectful minor subordinates told me once. "He's always at least one bar of the score ahead of the players." play-ers." While Montgomery fought on the ground, Coningham fought in the air. The RAF and its adjunct, the USAAF fought by day and by night, with fighters and bombers, and they achieved a triumph such as has never nev-er been achieved by any Allied air force in any other theater of war. It wiped out in Coningham's own words, it annihilated the Luftwaffe on the ground and in the air. Banked today along the sides of airfields which were German in October are piles of junk junked German and Italian planes, wrecked before they could leave the ground. It was simply done, a simple thing to do, given the weapons with which to do it. For the first time since the battle of North Africa began in 1940, Montgomery had them. In the battle of August and September Sep-tember the battle so disappointing for the spectators Montgomery had won a passive defensive victory. He massed his tanks, his anti-tank guns and his field guns in fixed positions. The enemy came, his pnnzer divisions divi-sions nosing eastward. The oncoming oncom-ing panzers met the massed fire of Montgomery;; positions, met it nd fell bad:, and tne battle was over. |