ORTONA COCKPIT

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 62, 14 March 1944, Page 4

ORTONA COCKPIT

FIGHT FOR KEEPS

GERMANS BEFORE BTH ARMY

(By JOHN LARDNER)

WITH EIGHTH ARMY.

The new arrival from the west coast of Italy finds Germans fighting just as fiercely and bitterly here along the Adriatic as they do before Rome. Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese, just appointed Commander of the Eighth Army, to succeed General Sir Bernard Montgomery, finds in this first week of what may be the war's final year, that the Germans here are fighting as fiercely and as bitterly as they have at any tune during the war. General Leese is a big ruddy soldier, with much previous experience of Eighth Army campaigns. The Eighth Army has seen some of the best German units fight at their best.

"With Everything They Had" "Three times in our career opposite the German Army," the General said to-day, "I have had a feeling that they were truly fighting for keeps, resisting with everything they had. The first time was ot El Alamein. The next was at the Maretli Line in Southern Tunisia, and now again in the fighting from the Sangro River through Ortona they are digging down and giving us. all they have. The weather and the terrain help them to make this the hardest sort of battle. I should like people at home to know just what our soldiers are up against."

General Leese commanded the 13th Corps of the Eighth Army from the famous kick-off at El Alamein through to the end of the Sicilian campaign. Then he continued his association with his leader to the end of 1943. Some few hours later General Montgomery said his farewells.

You do not need a protracted look at this front to understand that the Germans have dedicated themselves here to making the flavour of the Italian campaign linger on the bruised lips of the British and Canadians as well as of the Americans to the westward. Perhaps it is a swan song as the students of "the broader picture" are indicated. If so, it is a song that would sound much sweeter from a greater distance. Small Scale Stalingrad Ortona was a small scale Stalingrad. There "defending" a neat, ordinary little seaside town of 12,000 inhabitants, German machine-gun-ners fired to their last round as they drew back from house to house or from pile of rubble to another pile. Little knots of them refused to come out from their cellars and rubble caves. They were blown out, but not until they had made a crossing of the town a bloody passage of seven days and eight nights for the Canadians who took it. They used flamethrowers for the first time in Italy. They sowed the mines and booby traps as thick as corn in a New England garden patch. Thus from the little village of San Pietro in Fine in the Cassino Valley, where last week I saw the peasants unable to find their houses because one house was mingled with a dozen others in a grey fluid pyramid of rock and plaster—from San Pietro to General Leese's new bailiwick on the Adriatic a thin line of Germans is fighting for each square mile as though the fate of the world depended on it. The fate of acres for which they fight is already settled for some, time to come.—Auckland Star and N.A.N.A.