Pilgrimage to Mareth

(See Cover)

The Road is a ribbon along the fair, azure sea. It wanders past graves inscribed "This is hallowed ground. They died in the service of their country." It twists up arid escarpments. It streaks, hot and straight, for miles across the desert sands.

The Road is long. It would zigzag from Cape Henry, Va. to Dayton, Ohio, to Paducah, Ky., to St. Joe, Mo. Along its length it is littered with the broken materiel of war and the stiff, broken bodies of German and Italian dead.

At the Road's end last week stood a wiry man with pale, piercing eyes, hawk's nose and cadaverous cheeks. General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery had traversed half the continent of Africa, leading a victorious army on the heels of a beaten one. To his troops he had proclaimed: "Nothing has stopped us. ... Nothing will." This week he was in Tripoli and driving on.

End of an Empire. The last days of his march across Tripolitania had been climactic. Eight days before, 200 miles from his goal, he had arrayed himself before Rommel's thin crust of defense at Wadi Zemzem.

The tanks went in at dawn. While a bitter wind swirled the sands of the Sahara the infantry waited in slit trenches for their signal. Faces and clothes were grimed with the dust. They were in full battle kit. Their weapons glinted in the bright sun. These were Montgomery's shock troops. They had done the job before at El Alamein where the long trek had started. They were eager to do it again for the harsh, implacable man whom they adored.

The signal came that night. There was the moan of aircraft in the moonlit night, bombs began to rain on the enemy's position. For half an hour shells screamed overhead, throwing up a bright light of flame when they landed.

(TIME Correspondent Harry Zinder, shivering in a slit trench, as he watched the infantry go forward, reported:" They stood up, held their guns easily, moved out of their trenches fanning out slightly so that the line was almost dead perfect in the moonlight as far as I could see. When they moved a bright green flare went up and dripped down behind, then two more and then another, and in that eerie light all you could see were soldiers shuffling toward the enemy. . . . There was little left in doubt except the speed with which Tripoli would be reached.")

Throughout these eight days Axis rearguard troops backed up, fighting desperately while the remnants of Erwin Rommel's once-great African army streamed on ahead. German artillery blazed away, rocked back, blazed away again from the mountains that surround Italy's loveliest African seaport. Futilely the Luftwaffe rose to ward off the blows of a superior enemy. At last they gave up. Tripoli fell in flames and smoke, much of its harbor facilities, many of its military installations demolished by the fleeing Nazis. They continued to flee as light British warships crowded in and shelled them from the sea; as Allied planes strafed them, turning wild-running trucks into long fiery columns; as British artillery barked at their heels.

Montgomery had shattered Mussolini's last vestige of Italy's African Empire. He had opened up a new base for British naval operations and a southern base for Allied ground and air forces from which the Axis' slipping grip on North Africa could be pounded and attacked. He had ended the longest chase in military history--1,300 miles in 13 weeks.*

The Mandate. It was a sweltering summer's day, some five months ago, that Bernard Law Montgomery had walked into Cairo's crowded Shepheard's Hotel. Few people noticed the man who had come from England to boss the demoralized Eighth Army. He had been second choice for the job, after the death of Lieut. General William Henry Ewart ("Strafer") Gott. Outside military circles, the scrawny, gimlet-eyed little man was unknown.

The Eighth was holding a thin, 40-mile front between the Qattara Depression and the sea. For two years the troops of the Eighth had waged a seesaw desert campaign. Sometimes they had been badly led, never had they had adequate equipment. They had retreated before Graziani singing: "Oh, Sidi Barrani--Oh, Mersa Matruh--The Eyties will get there, then what will we do?" Then under Wavell they had driven Graziani westward to El Agheila. Rommel had punched them back. Under Auchinleck, Cunningham and Ritchie had recovered that ground. Again Rommel had punched them back, this time destroying most of their armored force and driving them eastward to within 70 miles of Alexandria. There was doubt that they could hold the line much longer against Rommel's increasing weight. They were whipped, weary, maligned, discouraged. The whole Middle East faced a Nazi invasion.

Montgomery did not stay long at Shepheard's. At 5 o'clock in the morning the day after his arrival, he rode into the desert with a young cavalry aide.

Weeks went by while he mercilessly pounded his army into shape. In London and Washington the High Command conferred. Egypt must beheld. Supplies poured in to the Eighth. On Oct. 23 Montgomery attacked.

His troops knew his plans. Montgomery made sure that every man down to the last blue-eyed boy private understood his intentions. In his Order of the Day he declared: "When I assumed command of the Eighth Army I said that the mandate was to destroy Rommel and his army, and that it would be done as soon as we were ready. We are ready now. The battle which is now about to begin will be one of the decisive battles of history. It will be the turning point of the war."

An hour before the Eighth let loose its first shattering artillery barrage, the General went to bed. He read his Bible, as was his custom, and slept. At 1:30 a.m. an aide awoke him to make a report. Montgomery listened, issued some orders and, as far as anyone knew, went back to sleep. He rose at his customary hour of 6, while the British barrage was splitting open the sky.

Across the sands of Egypt the bagpipes of the 51st Highlanders skirled. By the Hill of Jesus, by the Hill of Evil Men, military policemen in white gloves waved yellow lanterns to guide the tanks along the paths which sappers, many of whom gave their lives, had cleared through German minefields. British armor and infantry poured through.

Twelve days later his Eighth Army, after some of the bitterest fighting that Egypt had seen, had cracked the Afrika Korps.

Newsmen met Montgomery in his desert headquarters. He sat through the interview with a fly whisk balanced steadily on one finger. "I have defeated the enemy. I am now about to smash him," he asserted flatly, relaxed and asked: "How do you like my hat?" Then wearing a tank corps beret which he had picked up, he climbed into a tank and rumbled off after his troops like a skinny avenging angel.

Pilgrim's Progress. He rode across the bloody sands of Egypt. He rolled through Matruh, where Rommel's overturned guns and tanks lay like beetles on their backs in the African sun. He did not destroy Rommel there. Rommel with the fleeing fraction of his army escaped through Hellfire Pass, where a few New Zealanders routed his rear guard.

Montgomery swept past the white, empty shells of Tobruk's ruined houses. He rumbled through Ain el-Gazala, Derna. He roared on past El Gubba, where the Silesian father in a flowing beard, who had clung to his parish through five occupations, intoned: "Religion is above wars."

In the green mountains of the Cirenaican hump sudden torrential rains slowed his progress, but he pushed on. At Bengasi invasion-wise Bedouins in flapping sheets now snapped the British thumbs-up. He reorganized at El Agheila, where German engineers had sown the dead with booby traps. He was off again, rolling under the Marble Arch on which was inscribed: "O beneficent sun, thou seest nothing greater than the City of Rome." At Wadi el Chebir wild camels and gazelles pranced across the dreary ditch-scarred land. At Wadi Zemzem the pilgrim drew himself up.

Ahead of him, behind him, was his army. They were Englishmen, Irishmen and Scots who had fought and been beaten in France; the Australian 9th Division (Morshead's Marines), which had held Tobruk in an eight-month siege; the South African 1st Division, whose countrymen had surrendered Tobruk after one devastating day; New Zealanders who had fought and fled from Greece and Crete. It was a purposeful army behind an impassioned, man who was avenging Dunkirk (where he had led the 3rd Division) and all of Britain's North African defeats.

The Cloud by Day. Rommel, through the 13 weeks of the pursuit, kept carefully out of reach. He abandoned hundreds of tons of new and tip-top materiel. He lost thousands of not so tip-top Italians. Parts of his rear guard vanished in shreds. But his retreat was orderly and he managed to keep intact a great part of his Panzer division and Afrika Korps, for he could move back more swiftly than Montgomery could move forward across scorched countrysides, dragging behind him his ever-lengthening supply lines. That Montgomery was able to move as fast as he did was a wonder of modern war.

On Nov. 4, when he broke through at El Alamein, trucks of General Sir Wilfrid Lindsell's service of supply had poured westward in a vast caravan. Cannonading was still audible when the white-gloved soldier-policemen waved them along the Road. For days an almost solid line of vehicles packed the highway--perhaps 100,000 motor vehicles--from El Alamein to Tobruk. (Comparable distance: New York to Buffalo.)

The Road became a cloud of dust by day, reeking with the stench of hot metal and gasoline. Bumper to bumper, crawling at five miles an hour, humping along at 25, went outsize lorries, gasoline and water transports, trailers laden with tanks, ten-ton Whites, ten-ton Macks, three-ton Fords and Chevrolets (75% of the wheeled traffic was U.S.-made), staff cars, jeeps, moving westward, returning eastward for more supplies.

Laborers worked night & day on the stone and macadam highway along the coast. A railroad to Tobruk carried some of the load after engineers restored it. Ships edged along the shore. Rush orders had to be carried by giant transport planes. Supply trucks, given priority, frequently moved ahead of all but the very advanced troops. One story was told of a bakery unit dashing into Matruh, where a German officer stepped forth and growled: "You arrived too soon."

God and John Bunyan. Around Shepheard's rococo hotel last week the name of Montgomery was better known. To the desert headquarters of the busy little General poured fan mail from around the world. His two most prized: one from an Egyptian girl who thanked him "for saving Egypt"; one from an Atlanta Sunday school teacher, signed by all her pupils, who "pray for you every night."

Like the Confederacy's "Stonewall" Jackson and England's Cromwell, he is a devout man himself. Nightly he reads his Bible. He carries with him a copy of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

In his austere character there is a curious, flamboyant streak. Somewhere along the way he picked up a German officer's suit of silk underwear, which he wears. His outer clothes are informal: sweater and pants. To his troops he became a familiar and spectacular sight, touring the front line in a tank, his hawk's head in a beret protruding from the turret. Sometimes he wore an Anzac's broad-brimmed field hat, on which he pinned the insignia of all the units fighting under him, including the Greeks. Occasionally he put-putted through the sky in a Fieseler Storch reconnoitering plane left behind by the Germans. His headquarters was an elaborate caravan of trucks captured in 1941 from Italian General "Electric Whiskers" Bergonzoli. There, seldom breaking his schedule of up at 6, to bed at 9, he met with his staff.

His sleeping quarters were the rear end of one of the trucks fitted out with a desk, two chairs, couch, wash basin, toilet and shower. Along the route he added a porcelain bathtub. Over his bed he pinned a picture of his enemy, Rommel.

England's hero is Irish, born in County Donegal, 55 years ago. His father was a bishop of the Anglican Church, who carted Bernard off to Tasmania when he was an infant and proposed that Bernard follow in his churchly steps. Bernard preferred to be a soldier. He went to Sandhurst, served in World War I, later commanded a battalion of Royal Fusiliers during the Sinn Fein trouble. But he did not enjoy that. "It was my home and my people." At the age of 40 he married. A son, aged 13, goes to school in Hampshire.

In 1937 Montgomery mourned the death of his wife and for a whole year vanished from his friends. He came back a hard, severe man preoccupied with the business of soldiering. He has no other interest. "My wife and I used to do things together," he admits. "Now . . ." He peers vaguely down his nose, brightens up, says "I like birds."

The Knot. Whether godly, heroic Montgomery is of the same military caliber as godly, brilliant "Stonewall" Jackson is a question unanswered. As a military man he appears to be more of the caliber of persistent Ulysses Grant.

But he destroyed the Rommel myth. Crowed the Eighth Army's official magazine: "[Rommel] lost his old dash, was badly rattled, and could devise no plan. The legend of the invincible Afrika Korps and Panzer forces has been shattered." But Montgomery did not destroy Rommel, as in his supreme confidence he had announced three months ago he was about to do. Rommel probably saved some 63,000 of his soldiers. In Tunisia, Rommel can expect some surcease behind the deep, scattered pillbox defenses of the Mareth Line. There is little chance that the Allies can prevent his making a junction with an estimated 70,000 troops of Colonel General Juergen von Arnim, who recently succeeded Nehring. The knot of Axis strength will be hard to unravel, especially with Montgomery's old enemy in the middle of it. Rommel remains a wily tactician. It may be a knot that will tie the Allies up so long that operations against southern Europe will be impossible this summer. Last week in the midst of his Tripoli drive Montgomery flew to Casablanca to confer on that subject (see p. 11).

At week's end, as Allied planes pounded Sfax, Sousse, other Axis supply ports, Arnim exploded into a frenzy of activity, driving against French-held positions near Robaa and Kairouan below Tunis. His effort was to make room for Rommel to crawl in beside him and to divert Allied strength from the southern end of the Axis corridor. For a while his powerful tank attack looked as though it would develop into a full-scale offensive until Giraud's Frenchmen, supported by British and U.S. troops, stiffened and hung on.

At the end of the Road Montgomery has achieved an adaptation of a classic situation: he has the devil between him and the deep. And there he may have to fight another battle as bitter as that which he fought at El Alamein where the Road began.

* Xenophon's 10,000 Greeks retreated through hostile territory for 1,500 miles from the Tigris, but they were not chased; Charles X of Sweden retreated 1,000 miles from Yaroslav to Warsaw, sometimes chased; Napoleon was haphazardly chased 500 miles from Moscow; Chief Joseph and 600 Nez Perce Indians were chased by the U.S. Army 1,300 miles from the Wallowa Valley in Oregon to the Canadian border, but 600 Indians could scarcely be called an army.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.