MONTGOMERY READY FOR MIGHTY ASSAULT

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 70, 23 March 1945, Page 5

MONTGOMERY READY FOR MIGHTY ASSAULT

LIKENED TO D DAY Massive Convoys Moving Up To Front Lines N.Z. Press Association—Copyright Rec. 11.30 a.m. LONDON, March 22. As the greatest air assault of the war gathers momentum German troops manning the Rhine opposite Field-Marshal Montgomery's front are showing increasing nervousness, report agency correspondents with the Twenty-first Army Group. Intensified German patrolling of the river was reported to-day. British and American patrols were also active, resulting in several sharp and bitter clashes. The German news agency to-day renewed its predictions that FieldMarshal Montgomery is preparing a mighty assault to synchronise with a full-scale drive to the north from the Remagen bridgehead. The German news agency this afternoon broadcast the following message preceded by the word urgent: "The military spokesman at the Wilhelmstrasse states that the First Canadian, Second British and considerable elements of the First American Armies are lined up on the Lower Rhine between Dusseldorf and Arnhem on a 60-mile front ready to intervene in the offensive." A virtual security cloak has been dropped over the whole of the activities of the Twenty-first Army Group —activities which the troops believe will be Field-Marshal Montgomery's greatest effort ever, says the British United Press correspondent at FieldMarshal Montgomery's headquarters. Not since Caen have they seen such a massive build-up, not since D day has there been such an aerial pageant overhead. - Thousands of planes roar over in brilliant weather while roads and tracks are crowded with massive convoys of armour, infantry, amphibious vehicles, guns and millions of rounds of shells. Every form of transport has been pressed into service in order to move supplies, men and material to the front. The great build-up has been going on for weeks. The flow of material includes some of the latest products of the war factories 1 . Vehicles, moving forward in an incessant stream, have on them the first dry dust of spring. "Field-Marshal Montgomery s tireless smoke projectors are doing" their iob so well that it is impossible to see anything," the correspondent adds.- "The enemy cannot see us and we cannot see him. The sun is shining but we cannot see it. We hear the planes overhead but cannot see them. The Rhine Valley to the men in those planes must appear to be a great cloud, which has suddenly descended on the earth."