Meeting in Normandy

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Along the base of the Normandy peninsula the fighting grew in violence.

British troops around Caen smashed a series of desperate German counterattacks and ground ahead slowly. To the west, U.S. troops, who had been building up for a new strike, launched their drive along a 40-mile front in drenching rain; on the first day they churned through for gains of as much as three miles.

The armies were not yet locked in the full shock of decisive battle. But the day was at hand; the war in western Europe was about to enter a fourth phase.

In Phase 1 the Allied armies had assaulted the coast. Phase 2 ended when the beachhead was firmly established. In Phase 3, Lieut. General Omar Bradley's First U.S. Army enveloped and captured the port of Cherbourg. Not until Cherbourg fell could General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, Allied ground commander in France, begin Phase 4: the crashing drive into the vitals of the enemy.

Meanwhile the Germans were tentative and irresolute, and hamstrung in trying to move men and supplies over a network of highways and railroads that had been wrecked with ruthless precision by superior Allied air power. While their main local reserves butted in vain against the British, they had been helpless to stop the American drive at Cherbourg.

A General Dies. During the week the German field commander, Colonel General Friedrich Dollmann, was killed in action, and tough, arrogant Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was reported to have taken personal command of the Nazi troops. That suited Montgomery down to the ground. Monty had met Rommel before.

General Montgomery's 21st Allied Arm group gathered itself--swiftly and accurately because its communications lines were free and open--to "hit" Rommel for another "six." At week's end, with the opposing troops still locked in bitter, indecisive battle around Caen, wry, spry, sharp-faced Monty made a quick tour of the front. He seemed satisfied with what he saw.

Not everything had gone perfectly with the invasion, but the general situation was good. Monty had hoped to be able to take the high ground beyond the Orne River before the Germans could move in much armor to oppose him. That plan had not worked out, mainly because the first and strongest German counterattacks came in that area. Monty was still driving for his immediate objectives, but his men were fighting hard for every foot of ground they took.

Slugging Match. Key to the battle was Caen itself, a historic Norman town of primitive Gothic churches (see ART) and thick-walled stone buildings. The first British drive had carried to the town's outskirts; then it was hurled back. The battle settled down to a slugging match between the British Second Army and a German army, apparently the Seventh. Best break for the Allies was that the enemy never collected enough armor for a solid breakthrough attack. He committed his tanks piecemeal until four Panzer divisions were engaged in the fighting.

Even Montgomery, a man with fanatical confidence in his plans and troops, might have had some uneasy moments in the early stages of the battle, as he pushed the thin beachhead inland, turned the Second Army eastward to invite resistance and hold it, then wheeled the American First Army west and north to Cherbourg. The plan worked: British infantry and artillery held the German armored attacks.

Tank Match. Now, even before Cherbourg's port was restored, the Allied armies had enough power piled up to begin an offensive in the Second Army's sector. They drove head-on into the Germans. British and Canadian infantry, following up the tanks, pushed their lines forward until Caen was encircled on three sides and the highways and railroads to the north and southwest of the city were cut.

The Germans had excellent defensive positions, along ridges and on the banks of the Odon River, which lies like an outer bastion to the west of the Orne. But the Allied attack stormed through southeast of Tilly-sur-Seulles, crossed the Odon and established a respectable bridgehead. Then they set methodically to work widening the salient. The first push of the drive was all but complete. The Germans began a series of violent counterattacks.

In 72 hours at week's end, British infantry and artillery beat off 24 separate German attacks on the salient, and smashed at least 100 tanks. The attacks indicated that Rommel might be somewhat out of balance, with more tank forces than he could economically use, and not enough first-rate infantry to use with them. Some of the assaults seemed poorly coordinated, and launched in hasty, haphazard fashion.

The enemy thrusts ran into British tanks, firing over hilltops, and high-velocity antitank guns, blasting from the hedgerows or forest edges. Heavier attacks were driven off by British artillery, which dumped shells like loads of coal onto the advancing Panzer formations. The Nazis could not crack the British positions. The enemy might delay Caen's fall; he could not prevent it.

The Plain Beyond. When Caen is passed, the Allies will have driven out of the broken, hilly, difficult Norman country and into open, fairly level ground. The next arena of battle might well be the Plain of Caen, an area about ten miles wide and extending some 21 miles south to Falaise and southeast to St. Pierre-sur-Dives.

This country is almost ideal for tank warfare. On that plain, a battle of armor may be shaping up on a scale great enough to determine the course of the war in the west; perhaps it will be the El Alamein of western Europe.

Rommel was unquestionably preparing for such a showdown. Besides the four Panzer divisions already identified, he was reported to have at least three more in reserve. Lieut. General Sir Miles Christopher Dempsey, commander of the Second Army, found that some prisoners were veterans from the Russian front. Their units had been moved to Caen within the last month.

Dempsey said the enemy was in a "considerable turmoil," and that Nazi communications were "in a very sticky state" from Allied air attacks. But he added a quiet warning: the Germans had evidently massed the heaviest weight of armor ever wielded in western Europe. There was no doubt about it: the battle ahead would be an Armageddon.

Road to Paris. Beyond the Plain of Caen, the road leads straight to Paris, 120 miles east. That fabulous prize was more than the hub of the whole intricate French rail network; it was the symbol of German victory and of French defeat. The Nazis would defend Paris as fiercely as Berlin. To halt an Allied drive on Paris they would throw in their entire strategic reserve--if they were sure that was where Monty was headed.

But Monty had not yet tipped his hand. The Germans fear another Allied landing in force somewhere on the French, Belgian or Dutch coasts, and they must hold out enough strength to meet it. They know that the Allies could well put another major port to good use, and might drive for Le Havre.

Or the Cherbourg maneuver might be repeated, with Allied forces striking away from German strength to cut off the Brittany peninsula, and seize the ports of Brest, Lorient and St. Nazaire.

Or an amphibious operation might possibly strike on the French Mediterranean shore; the resistance movement has flared up hottest in the south of France.

The General. These were contingencies for the Germans to worry about. They did not concern General Montgomery, who knew where the blow would fall, and when, and why. Meanwhile, he concerned himself with the fighting just ahead, when his troops break out onto the French plain and take up what an Allied headquarters spokesman called "Monty's kind of a war." By now, that "Monty kind of a war" distresses the Germans as much as it delights the British. It means the kind of war he fought on the open desert of North Africa: careful, precise preparation, control of the air, a murderous blow with every weapon in the lockers of his armor. Eccentric, unorthodox, picturesque Monty is the military idol of his country.

Monty has come a long way in the five years since he was a studious, all but unknown staff-college instructor, with a lieutenant colonel's crown-and-pip on his shoulders and an insufferable habit of talking down to his classes. But he was then what he is now, a completely dedicated professional, soldier, with a superb sense of the big things of war, and an utter contempt for the small.

Monty's father, an Anglican bishop, was a North of Ireland man, but Monty himself was born Nov. 17, 1887 in south London. He spent his early boyhood in Tasmania, went to Saint Paul's, one of the lesser-known English public schools, thence to Sandhurst.

In World War I he rose to lieutenant colonel and won the D.S.C. World War II brought him rapid promotion and com mand of a division in France. The Germans chased him out at Dunkirk. After the escape of the B.E.F., Monty was as signed to a defense command. Fate tapped him for glory in Africa as a second-choice man, after another general, William H. E.

("Strafer") Gott, had been killed in an air crash on his way to take command of the Eighth Army.

Monty's Methods. General Montgomery has some pet ideas about war. One is that army divisions have personalities, just as men do, and that no two divisions are quite alike. He explains:

"The commander who thinks divisions are all alike will lose battles. . . . One division does one thing well, another does another thing best. And it is the commander's responsibility to see that the right divisions are in the right places at the proper time."

Two divisions that rate highly with Monty are the soth Northumbrians and the 51st Highlanders, which were wiped out in glory before Dunkirk, were revivified to spearhead the breakthrough at El Alamein, and are with him today in Normandy. It was to troops of that sort that Monty made one of his famous proclamations: "Nothing has stopped us . . . Nothing will."

Contradictory Crusader. The soldiers' confidence in this pale-eyed, hawk-faced, intense man is rivaled only by Monty's fanatical confidence in himself. That driving sureness underlies all of his personality, which is subtle and contradictory, and by no means that of the bluff, simple soldier he likes to seem.

Monty is full of contradictions. He regards himself as a crusader and the war as a crusade. His headquarters staff wears a special invasion shoulder flash, a crusader's shield with crossed swords; he has chosen as his battle cry:

"Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered!"

On the other hand, in a moment of cynical disgust over army routine, Monty was heard to remark that the damned war would have to end by 1948, because all the paper in the world would be used up.

In the field he affects an unmilitary uniform: black beret, grey sweater, corduroy slacks. But this outfit, like his trailer headquarters, is always trim and neat as a pin. He invariably calls Winston Churchill "sir," most respectfully. But once he refused to meet Churchill for a midnight war conference because it was too long after his regular bedtime, 9 p.m.

Churchill, a shrewd judge of human nature himself, has paid public honor to Monty as "that austere, Cromwellian figure," but has said nothing--at least for publication--about the flamboyance which is the reverse side of the Montgomery austerity. Monty neither drinks nor smokes, but he occasionally serves drinks to his staff and guests in the evening, and he gives away cigarets to his troops by the million, buying them with funds subscribed by his English admirers.

Haste Slowly. His public reputation is that of a wildly daring and dashing commander. Actually he is one of the most conservative of generals in planning and preparing a campaign with an obsession for getting together all the needed resources before starting.

Once his "spring is coiled" and the battle is on, he is a swift and fluid tactician. At Mareth, when a stiff Nazi counterattack upset and stalled the British plan of battle, Monty revised the whole scheme in ten minutes at 2 a.m. attacked and routed the Germans.

Usually affable in conversation Monty has a way of passing brutal judgments on officers who have failed to measure up. He dismissed one subordinate with a curt: "You are a good officer--but you are not good enough for me." Of a high-ranking British general who bungled one phase of the Africa show, Monty rasped: "He's not a general, he's a cook--a good, plain cook who won't burn the toast but cannot make very good coffee." He has even offered his opinion that there are only six good generals in the British Army (but even Monty was too tactful to name his six).

He is loyal to his staff officers--and no general delegates more authority--but they must perform up to the limit or be removed instantly. He has been known to break two general officers during one battle, for failure to get things done right.

In preparation for the invasion he approved plans for a thorough sacking of

British officers who did not measure up. At headquarters one day two Colonel Blimps who had just been sacked met in the hall. Said one with rueful humor: "It looks as though the gentlemen are out and the players are in."*

As a result, Monty is hardly the darling of the elderly brass hats of the Army and War Office, whose rating of him--depending on what he has been up to most recently--varies from "upstart" to "bounder" to "cad." Monty, unabashed, goes his own way.

Most generals, he says, kill themselves with detail work; as for Monty himself, he always "works on the chief of staff." The operational planning brain of his "first eleven" is his present chief of staff, little-known, nervous, brilliant, squeaky-voiced Major General Francis Wilfred ("Freddie") de Guingand. Freddie handles Monty's Intelligence and operations. Personnel and supply problems go to Major General Miles William Arthur Peel Graham, who has virtually revolutionized British Army supply methods. Both men are with him now in Normandy.

Beyond the War. If Monty has any plans for after the war, he has not talked about them. In the light of his vast popularity in Britain, his keen mind and glowing personality, it is not surprising that there has been some speculation whether Monty may not take a whirl in politics.

It is an idea that certainly never occurred to him before last year; it is also one that might intrigue him. But he is not worrying about such matters now. His problems for the present are all in the fields and skies of France.

* In cricket, amateurs are "gentlemen," professionals are "players."

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