NOTES ON THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 54, 1 September 1944, Page 4

NOTES ON THE WAR

BRITISH ADVANCE

2ND ARMY AT AMIENS

For the first time in a long period of hard fighting since D Day General Montgomery's British Second Army takes the spotlight of the news by a spectacular advance in two dayi from the Seine to the Somme. The British have reached and passed through Amiens on the Somme. Their comrades of the Canadian Army moving in parallel further west have taken Rouen and cut the road north of it to Dieppe. General Bradley's Americans are moving north of the Aisne and east over the battlefields of the last war between the Marne, the Aisne, and the Oisne. Columns of the Riviera army, with the F.F.1., are clearing the area between the Rhone and the Pyrenees, while others are advancing west of the Rhone into Central France. In the Alpes Maritimes department, behind and beyond Nice, other columns are nearing the Italian frohtier. In Italy the Eighth Army has reached the Gothic Line in the Adriatic sector. The Russians have entered Bucharest. General Montgomery, in his spectacular career in this war, has had to play, at different times, two essential, but opposite roles in military operations aimed at victory. In the strategy of envelopment he has been the hinge on which the wheeling arm rests its weight, and he has been part of thej arm itself. At Alamein he began his] flight to fame by the double' role, coupled with a drive through. At the Mareth Line and El Hamma, with his Eighth Army, after the long pursuit of Rommel from Alamein to Tunisia, he repeated the feat, holding and pounding the enemy hinge, while the free arm, led by the New Zealand Division, swung round to the enemy's rear. In the final battle in Tunisia, where the Eighth Army had become a part_ of the Allied group of armies, British, American, and French, i£ fell to Montgomery to hold the hinge at Enfidaville, while the Americans and British swept through to Bizerta and Tunis, gaining thus the spotlight in a crowning victory. In Sicily and Italy. It was the same in Sicily and the autumn campaign in Italy. Montgomery on the right of the Allied armies engaged the main body of the enemy on the Catania plain south of Mt. Etna, while the Americans swept round the west of the island and back by the north to the Strait of Messina in Italy, Montgomery's' Eighth Army marched from the toe to the heel,' and up to the ankle of the bootleg peninsula, from Messina Strait to the Adriatic, beyond Foggia, to strike increasingly heavy resistance towards Kesselnng's "winter line." At this stage, as the result of the plans discussed and settled at the Teheran conference between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalm he was called to Britain, along with General, Eisenhower, and Shw r, ls£ aJ? d American service chiefs, like Bradley and Tedder, for Fnvlo^i 61' 3°b Of inva<3ing western iuiope then in preparation. The intention was obviously to get the best Possible team together for the most formidable operation in the history of mar> With the leaders went also i?aiy y Veterans of AMc *> Sicily, and Role of the Hinge. It fell to General Montgomery's lot "■ as commander in the field in"France under General Eisenhower/^ f play r??L m?VB th^ part of the hinge, 5? rather hinge-pm or pivot,' in the Caen area, bearing the weight and toe brunt of main enemy pressure, while the Americans took Cherbourg and thl Cherbourg Peninsula, and after a I** 11 °* h*y fighting broke TlSugh into the rest of France for the beeinmng of a tremendous sweep which S? e T do, he + i whole ,aspec! °* the «*?- paign. On the surface, to the superficial observer, it would look as if t>,meS- Y as winning the war; while the British under Montgomery were so to speak '.'stuck in the mud" round Caen. So Montgomery was criticised. The answer to all this is General Eisenhower's soldierly tribute to another great soldier, given in the announcement today of a change in the military set-up in France. Such a change was inevitable as the campaign developed from beyond the narrow confines of a bridgehead in Normandy into operations spread over all France. • ■ The Command Set-up. It. had been foreseen long before D iJay and provision made accordingly. v would have been impossible for General Montgomery, with the heavy burden on his shoulders of directing the operations of a large AngloCanadian army group, with divisions from the smaller United NationsDutch and Belgian—to direct also the larger American armies under General Bradley, ranging over France from Brest to the Loire, and from the Loire to the Seine, the Marne and the Aisnef With Pans into the bargain and a new army entering France from the south So very properly General Eisenhower, as Supreme Commander of all the forces in France, takes over the responsibility of co-ordinating all operations, with headquarters trans-' ferred from Britain to France. No other course was possible or could nave been contemplated. Apart from any other consideration, General Eisenhower was obviously the man for the job he holds, after his perr formance in co-ordinating the Allied effort in North-west Africa and producing the finest team of allies ever known in world history. A Jqb for American. It was fit and proper th.at this task should fall to an American, not only on account of the magnitude of the American effort in Europe, but because every European nation looks on America as a disinterested crusader in the war of liberation under whom all can serve without loss of dignity or prestige and without reviving sore memories. Apart from Mr. Churchill himself, hardly any Briton capable of exercising such a role, without: undue friction, springs to mind. The experience of the last wai- oh the; Western