The Bishop's Son

Bernard Law Montgomery is an abstemious, godly and implacable man. With the zeal of the godly he went to work. Hour after hour, for twelve days, his Eighth Army had surged against every foot of Rommel's defense, pummeling the Axis Army with artillery and aircraft, clawing a way forward through barbed wire, minefield and booby trap.

The constant pressure against the 40-mile front had had its effect. Rommel in alarm had begun to withdraw his stores and supplies. To counter what seemed to be the greatest threat, at the end of his line which was anchored to the seacoast, he had swung the 21st Panzer Division north. That was when the inexorable Montgomery struck.

Not at the coastal end, but farther south, near the Hill of Evil Men, Montgomery's 51st Highlanders streaked across the moonlit, wreck-strewn desert. What was left of Rommel's artillery tried to hold them back. The British infantry swept on. Dazed and shell-shocked Germans surrendered, turned and ran, or died in the sand beside their 88-mm. guns. Rommel's dam had burst.

Flood Tide. Through the breach thundered the British tanks, engaging the flank of the German armor which had let itself be drawn too far north. For six hours the armed columns fought and maneuvered. Now it was no longer a question of hurling the Axis line back, but of fanning out behind it and engulfing it.

While units of the British armor hacked and widened the breach, advance units roared on, swung north to cut off the columns of the Afrika Korps retreating pell mell along the coast. Abandoned by their allies, left stranded in the south, Italian divisions fought hopelessly, finally quit (see p. 31). The British did not even bother to round them up. Their main objective was the Afrika Korps.

Rommel was trying to keep the nucleus of an army intact, trying to hold together what was left of his once superb 15th and 21st Armored and 90th Light Motorized Divisions. Somewhere, perhaps at Matruh, perhaps at Hellfire Pass, he might be able to make a stand. But faster than Rommel's flight was the R.A.F.

The Coast Road. The world read with horror, two years ago, of Nazi planes strafing helpless civilians as they fled in panic along the roads of France. Along those French roads, the same 51st Highlanders who last week broke Rommel's line had fought a rear-guard action, cut to ribbons by the Stukas. Now the Scots and the dead of France were avenged. Over a wildly retreating Nazi army swooped Allied planes.

The Nazis were naked. For weeks the Allies had dominated Egypt's skies, and last week they were supreme. Messerschmitts rose to meet them and were shot down. Between their bases and their targets, Allied planes, with one mission in life, shuttled back & forth.

A British squadron leader described the carnage: "As we came in to drop the first stick, trucks careened madly off the road. It looked absolutely crazy. I saw one overturn and troops run like cockroaches--colliding, jumping headfirst into patches of scrub or any hole they could find." Said General Auby Strickland, chief of U.S. bombers in the desert, who led one formation of planes in pursuit of the German columns: "[Our bombers] turned and sailed down the road, spilling their bombs on vehicles and men. I never saw such a scene of destruction."

At night the road was lighted by fires set by the Allies and by the Germans themselves, who tried to burn what they could not carry.

In the wake of the far-ranging planes, British armor attacking the German column on its flanks cracked off segments of it and pinned them against the sea. Slain was monocled George Stumme, second in command to Rommel. In the midst of one melee, when a man darted from a crippled Nazi armored car, a British Hussar leaped from his tank and collared him. "I am a general," the captive said severely. He was Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, Commander of the Afrika Korps.

Past Daba, past Fuka, the Afrika Korps fled. At Daba they left their dead strewn across an airfield. German and Italian transports and gliders, not yet unloaded, lay on the ground, smashed by the machine guns of Allied planes. At Fuka dead Germans began to turn black in the desert sun. Beside the road that was pocked with bomb craters lay the ruined trucks and cars in which the Germans tried to escape. From the air, from the flanking desert, the British chased and harried as the whole terrible cavalcade of attackers and attacked rolled still farther westward.

A Battle Lost. What had caused the debacle of Rommel? He had probably lost the battle weeks before it was joined. He had lost it at sea as Allied planes and British subs choked off his supplies. Reuters reported that in the past six weeks not a single Axis tanker had been able to cross the Mediterranean Sea. During the battle itself the Allies had sunk more than 50,000 tons of Axis ships that were trying to carry to Rommel oil and materiel. Rommel may have known that the battle was lost when he went to Berlin a month ago, presumably to plead for help.

Nourished by longer but better guarded lines, the Eighth Army had grown apace. From Britain had come the cannon and munitions that had softened the dam. From the U.S. had come M-4 (General Sherman) * tanks mounting high-velocity, 77-mm. cannon that outranged the lower velocity German 755 by more than 700 yards. At 1,000 yards they tore holes in the frontal German armor, at 2,000 yards pierced side armor. A Seaforth Highlander reported that Italian shells bounced off his General Sherman "like tennis balls."

The British had learned from disasters in the past. In Cairo the astute Alexander and his R.A.F. chief Tedder (TIME, Nov. 9) had planned with exquisite care. Montgomery gave his orders, the day the battle began, that the enemy must be destroyed. This was to be no mere chase across the desert, as in the past, when the British had dissipated their tank strength. This time they kept their armor intact and used it for annihilation.

Through the long feverish days and nights while Montgomery's heroic troops, sleepless, unrelieved, kept pressing against the enemy's deep positions, no counterattack made a single dent in their line. Montgomery likes to say: "Every man in the Army must have the light of battle in his eye." The Eighth Army had the light in its eyes.

Veni, Vidi, Vici. Bernard Montgomery was the hero of Britain last week. He was the man who, for the first time in World War II, had routed a German Army. He is an austere man, the son of a bishop and the grandson of Dean F. W. Farrar, who wrote a life of Christ. An Ulsterman, born in County Donegal, he was marked for the clergy. He went into the Army, but the mark of his religious upbringing is still deep in him. His hero is Oliver Cromwell, who also smote his enemies and praised God. At Dunkirk Bernard Montgomery told his men: "If you run out of ammunition, tear the enemy to pieces with your hands." Fittingly, he reads the lessons at church parades.

He is a stern disciplinarian, but he has the devotion of his men. Famous are his orders to his staff at the beginning of a conference: "I do not approve of coughing or smoking. There will be no smoking. For two minutes you may cough. Thereafter coughing will cease." Nor does he drink.

Last week the lean, 54-year-old Ulsterman sat down at dinner in his tent with the captive Thoma. On an oilcloth table cover he showed his rival how the battle had been won. "I told him," Montgomery reported afterward, "that I came to the desert in August. In September I met Rommel. In October I beat him."

Caparisoned in a tank-corps beret, ensconced in a tank, the avenging Montgomery rode on deep and dangerous tours of the battlefield, his pale blue eyes and his thin beak of a nose turned west, farther west. Methodically, ruthlessly, he followed up the bloody, broken trail of the Afrika Korps.

The Germans fled on towards the Libyan border. Early this week there was a chance that Rommel might try to make a stand at Hellfire Pass. But with U.S. forces now in the west and Montgomery in full cry on his heels, his position looked hopeless. Six divisions of his Italians had surrendered: between 72,000 and 80,000 men, with their equipment. Uncounted were the dead and the wounded. British estimates were that Rommel had only some 20,000 troops left to him. Knocked out were his air forces, so that he could no longer even weakly parry the ferocious air attacks of the Allies. Seized or smashed were from 900 to 1,000 of his guns, at least 70% of his tank strength.

Said the Bishop's son: "It's been a fine battle."

*Formerly, and erroneously, referred to in newspaper dispatches as General Lee, which is a version of the M-3 (General Grant).

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