NOTES ON THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 103, 3 May 1945, Page 6

NOTES ON THE WAR

ITALY FREE

ENEMY YIELDS IN NORT

The war is ending to, Europe^ Whether by unconditional surrender of! the enemy in toto or piecemeal, or by) the spread of Allied occupation and the liquidation of sporadic resistances the end is very near. Berlin has finally fallen to tire Russians, and the British have reached the Baltic from the Elbe, cutting off all Germans ia Schleswig and Denmark, but the great news is the unconditional surrender or the remaining German forces in northern Italy and western Austria in at formal capitulation to representatives of Field-Marshal Alexander, as Allied Commander-in-Chief in the Mediter^ ranean, at his heaeUjuarters at Casertel near Naples. This, covering » wide area of territory and forces estimated at nearly a million men, is the greatest single surrender so far in the war, ana may presage the final surrender of Germany.

The news today describes the scene at the surrender, gives the tributes of Field-Marshal Alejcander and General Mark Clark to their men of the Allied forces in the Mediterranean, soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and also the trij foutes'of Mr. Churchill and President Truman to the Allied leaders. They will be read with a vthrill of pride bM all New Zealanders, with thought o$ especially, the great part played Jjy the New Zealand lads in their long and glorious campaigns on the ancieni battlefields of history round the MediJ terranean. There is no feeling like that of victory and the march througn country liberated from the enemy, as veterans of the last war well know. Alexander's Career. But it is to Field-Marshal Alexande* that today a special word is due. From the very beginning of his military, career in this war Alexander has never had the vast preponderance oi force behind him that is still one oi the chief assurances of victory. It has been his role to do much with little, to get the Allies out of holes and to make the best of what slender resources he has sometimes had to handle. In so far as this is a cardinal quality of good generalship, Alexan-; der's record reveals this supreme qua--lity in the highest degree and marks him as one of the greatest commanders in this war. The type of warfare which has fallen to his lot is not like that of the gigantic campaigns across Europe from the English Channel t<j the Volga, with vast armies numbered by the million, under separate conn mands, as in the German invasions and conquests, north, west, south, and east', and, later in the equally vast campaigns of the Allies for the liberal tion of oppressed peoples and th* crushing of Germany. v Such .large*; scale warfare is apt to" dwarf the in 4 dividuality of the subordinate commanders. • In the Hour of Peril. Alexander began in Burma in 1942 with one of the great retreats of history, withdrawing the outnumbered British forces from the Irrawaddy Valley over the trackless mountain jungle to the safety of India. This retreat was the.one redeeming feature in the British debacle in South-east Asia. Thus Alexander shone in. retreat, always the test for the true soldier, from the ranks to the highest command. Alexander's triumph in North Africa, which he more than shared, in the public eye, with Montgomery, of the Bth Army, is history, but there was a particularly perilous period in Tunisia when the AngloAmerican armies were on the very brink of disastrous defeat and were saved only by Alexander's energetic restoration of the situation by personal intervention at many points. This episode, not disclosed clearly in the news at the time, is worth recalling from the pages of "The End in Africa," by Alan Moorehead, whose "Mediterranean Front", is considered the best unofficial account of the first and second Libyan campaigns. The time was-the middle of February, 1942, when Rommel had reached Tunisia, pursued by Montgomery, who was near the Mareth Line. The American forces were pushing across southern Tunisia to meet Montgomery in somewhat loose order and in no great strength. On February 14 Rommel fell with his tanks on the Americans, and, overwhelming them, pushed through the Kasserme and threatened the whole Allied position in Tunisia by a drive to Tebessa, the Allied base, and another to Le Kef on the coast. The story continues: "General Alexander had just taken over the field command at this time when the critical situation arose. He knew that General Montgomery would not be able to attack for a month. He knew that once through Thala there would be no forces at all to prevent the Axis march on Le Kef. Personal Effort. "You can judge the seiuousness of the situation by the'fact that Alexander himself left his headquarters at Constantine (Algeria) and ran along the line looking for someone—anyone —to throw into the gap. He grabbed a battery of guns here, a battalion of infantry there, a fighter squadron in the other place, and rushed them ..to the danger point. ... Commanders addressed their staffs on the field on the eve of battle, telling them frankly: 'The situation is desperate.. We are outnumbered and out of position, and your chances of surviving are not very good. But you have got to stop the Germans.' On the very outskirts of Thala the decisive tank battle was fought. The German, forward units were smashed, and before reinforcements could be brought up, the British Guards and the Americans rushed upon the field and turned the German thrust into a local but headlong retreat. The Allies were left in command of the battlefield, and the Germans withdrew to Gafsa and Feriana. It had been ? near thing." Reorganisation. ' Alexander' then proceeded to reorganise the whole front in this area, which was in an appalling mess, all mixed up, British, French, and Americans. Alexander separated them, and bunched his four British divisions in the nQrth, .his two French in the centre, and his two American" in the [south.

Rommel, also regrouping, struck suddenly south to throw Montgomery's preparations out of gear. But his tanks fell into a cunning trap laid by the Eighth Army. Fifty tanks were destroyed in their tracks and the rest fled. "This action," says Moorehead, ''was, I believe, the turning point of the Tunisian campaign. It is not too much to say that the Battle of Mareth was won in this preliminary tank action, and from Mareth flowed all the rest." On May 12, 1943, the Axis armies in Tunisia surrendered unconditionally, nearly a quarter of a million men. It was, perhaps, the clean-est-cut triumph of the war, up to this recent and far larger capitulation of the enemy in North Italy, which sets the seal on the reputation of one of Britain's greatest soldiers. '