INVASION OF EUROPE

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 2, 31 January 1944, Page 18

INVASION OF EUROPE

Commanders of the Allied Forces

z fter the recent conversations between President Roosevelt and

Mr. Churchill it was announced that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces in Italy, had been appointed Supreme Commander of the British and United States Expeditionary Forces organizing in Britain for the liberation of Europe. Other appointments announced were :— Deputy Supreme Commander : Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder. Commander-in-Chief of the British group of armies under General Eisenhower : General Sir Bernard Montgomery. Naval Commander -in - Chief under General Eisenhower : Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay. Air Commander-in-Chief under General Eisenhower : Air Marshall Leigh-Mallory. Commander of the Strategic Bombing Force operating against Germany : Major-General Carl A. Spaatz. Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean theatres : General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson.

Deputy Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean and Commander of the U.S. forces in the Mediterranean : Lieu-tenant-General Jacob L. Devers. Commander-in-Chief, Middle East : General Sir Bernard Paget. Commander of the Allied Air Forces in the Mediterranean : LieutenantGeneral Ira C. Eaker. Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies in Italy : General Sir Harold Alexander. Commander of the British Bth Army : Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese. General Eisenhower, now fifty-three, has been an officer in the United States Army for twenty-eight years. He went to West Point, the famous military training college, when he was twenty-one, and was commissioned as second lieutenant in 1915. Three months after the Japanese struck at the United States of America, General Eisenhower, then a Major-General, was appointed Chief of the War Plans Division of the American General Staff at Washington and later Assistant Chief of Staff in charge of the Operations Division. Here he would survey broadly the proposals for using

the resources of the United States and become acquainted with much of the detail.

In June, 1942, General Eisenhower went to London to take command of the U.S. forces then being assembled and trained in the United Kingdom. It was from this appointment that he was transferred to the Supreme Command of the Allied force which landed in North Africa in November, 1942, and went on with the Bth Army to take Sicily and land in southern Italy.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, General Eisenhower’s deputy, and formerly Air Officer Commanding in Chief in the Mediterranean, has served in the army as well as the air force. Before he joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1916 he had already served in France as a subaltern of the Dorsetshire Regiment. Then, in 1928, he attended the Imperial Defence College. He also attended, in 1923-24, the Royal Naval Staff College ; so, in addition to the opportunity which his own recent experience has given him to study the co-ordination of all services in warfare, he has had a training which should help him in his present command.

To Air Chief Marshal Tedder is given the credit for welding the R.A.F. battle forces into the army as a single striking force. You may remember General Montgomery’s statement last month :

there used to be an accepted term ‘ Army Co-operation.’ We never talk about this now. The Desert Air Force and the Eighth Army are one.” Sir Arthur Tedder also introduced the functional division into tactical and strategic air forces, the first as flying artillery and the second to isolate the enemy on the battlefield from his supply bases. Ihis division was so successful that it was later applied in Britain and India. New attack methods for the tactical air force were also introduced by Sir Arthur Tedder. You will probably have read how pattern bombing enabled the R.A.F. in the Western Desert, by bombing simultaneously in formation, to ensure a hit on every 50 square yards of the target area. Against targets like moving tank formations this method gave a higher proportion of hits than precision bombing. Pattern bombing has also been used recently to pit flat ground with craters as cover for advancing infantrv.

Again, Air Chief Marshal Tedder invented the “ cab rank,” which newspaper correspondents in Italy have recently been writing about. Fighter-bombers patrol the battlefield for twenty minutes each, attacking targets specified by the Army below on gridded maps. Air Chief Marshal Tedder exploited the quality of British aircraft in other ways, such as using the Hurricane as a tankbuster and apparently he will have new

scope for his inventiveness in Britain since, according to newspaper reports, for the final smashing of the Luftwaffe “ the R.A.F. will have new fighters and bombers which will assert once and for all the superiority of British design.” General Sir Bernard Montgomery, who commands the British group of armies under General Eisenhower, became known to the world as the commander of the Bth Army, whose drive from El Alamein to southern Italy is described in another article in this issue. He is fifty-six years old. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the naval Commander - in - Chief under General Eisenhower, organized the landing in North Africa and was decorated for his part in planning the operations for the landing in Sicily. He is sixty. Air Marshal Leigh-Mallory, Air Commander -in - Chief under General Eisenhower, was the chief of the R.A.F. Fighter Command. He organized the air operations during the Dieppe raid. Major-General Carl Spaatz, who commands the strategic bombing force under General Eisenhower, is fifty-one. He served with distinction with the American Air Force in the last war, and on America’s entry into this war he was Chief of the Air Staff. He was sent to England to command the U.S. Air Force in Europe, and from there to North Africa to command the Allied air forces. General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, whose Middle East Command has been extended to that of Com-

mander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean theatres, is sixty-two. His war service goes back to South Africa. Active commands he has held in this war have been in Egypt, 1939; Cyrenaica, 1941 ; Greece, 1941 ; Allied forces in Palestine and Trans-jordan and later Syria, 1941; General Officer Commanding the 9th Army in Palestine '• and Syria, 1941 ; the 10th Army in Persia in 1942; and the Middle East from February of last year.

General Wilson’s deputy, LieutenantGeneral Jacob L. Devers, who has commanded the United States forces in Britain since last May, will lead the American forces in the eastern Mediterranean. General Sir Bernard Paget, Com-mander-in-Chief, Middle East, was commandant of the Staff College, Camberley, when the war broke out, and in 1940 he became Chief of the General Staff, Home Forces. In 1941 he was appointed Commander-in-Chief, South-eastern Command, and when later in the year General Sir Alan Brooke became Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Paget succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces. Lieutenant-General Ira C. Eaker, who will lead the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, was formerly chief of the United States Bth Army Air Force in Britain. General Sir Harold Alexander, who succeeds General Eisenhower in command of the Allied armies in Italy, is fifty-two. When the war broke out he was a Major-General and little known outside the service. Most people heard of him for the first time when he was given the task of organizing the last defences at Dunkirk. In March, 1942, he succeeded Lieutenant-General Hutton in command of the forces in Burma, and the retreat he was compelled to conduct has been described as a brilliant operation. His appointment as Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, was made

after Rommel’s push to El Alamein, and when the Eighth Army had driven the Germans out of Libya he became commander, under General Eisenhower, of the Allied armies converging on the Germans in Tunisia. Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese, the new commander of the Eighth Army, commanded the 30th Corps with General Montgomery from El Alamein until his appointment as successor to General Montgomery.