GENERAL CAPTURED

Grey River Argus, 18 February 1944, Page 5

GENERAL CAPTURED

LONDON, Feb. 15. The Germans seriously wounded and took prisoner British Brigadier Edmund Frank Davies, Chief of 'the Allied Military Mission to the Albanian guerrillas. Reuter’s Cairo correspondent says that early in January, when living with a band of partisans, Davies was attacked by the Germans north-east of Tirana. Davies and his staff officers and a small group .of partisans retired north-eastwards. Albanian Quisling troops there surprised them and Davies was injured in the ensuing actiqn. Later he was taken to hospital at Tirana.

In this he had some blunt things to | say. He commented that he was surprised at the amount of rubbish he had been reading about the beachhead. General Alexander said: “There is no comparison between this beach-head and that of Dunkirk. There is no Dunkirk here. Face reality! We have pulled off much tougher jobs than this. ' We have not lost a battle since El Alamein. We will certainly not lose here. It is no use blowing hot and then cold—in,firstly) saying that we will be in Rome in twenty-four hours, and then swinging round. You are responsible ) people. Your work is vital, because it is meant to give people at home a true picture. But I have received an urgent telegram that the reports from the beach-head area are alarming people. I beg you not to take that attitude. lam convinced that the Germans have lost the battle, even if things have not gone as fast as we would have liked. I have found during my tour of the beachhead that morale is extremely high. I have full confidence in this beachhead second front. The beach- t head I battle, in which the Germans have gathered forces in an effort to drive us off, is on. The second round is more than half over. In fact it is nearly over, and we are winning it. The third round will come when we gather our forces. Fighting has been hard, but I can assure you that the Germans have in this beach-head area a very unhappy) lot. They do not like it. They are suffering many dead.” , General Alexander concluded by recalling Marshal Kesselring’s dictum: “Battles are lost when a beach-head cannot be driven into the sea. At the conclusion of the address, the war correspondents pleaded that their reports were objective and were not alarmist. The correspondents had “invited General Alexander in order that they could describe events at first-hand.

ALLIED NEWS CENSORSHIP AT THE BEACH-HEAD LONDON, Feb. 16. An Allied ‘ correspondent reports war correspondents at the beachhead have been placed in an irttri-| cate position regarding their despatches. News messages; are. no longer transmitted by radio from the beach-head. Apparently it is thought correspondents have been guilty of unwarranted scare news. Their radio facilities have been cut off. They are in .a position wherein it is technically impossible to file a news story from the beach-head 'without being beaten by at least twenty-four hours by correspondents as far away as the main Fifth Army front, Naples or Algiers. They are also profoundly disquieted by the introduction of what is called “censorship” for the policy of their messages. We all hope I the situation as the army sees it' will soon be confined as before tomatters of military security.