Proof of the Pudding

"One shouldn't," wrote Britain's crack war correspondent Alexander Graeme Clifford, "pay too much attention to Mr. Ingersoll.... But one must pay attention to what he stands for--an American point of view. History is in the oven now and soon it will be ready to serve."

Fearful lest history's pudding smack too bitterly of the gall, wormwood and Bromo-Seltzer dropped into it by PM Editor Ralph Ingersoll's war report, Top Secret* (TIME, April 22), Correspondent Clifford last week began adding his own salty seasoning.

In a series of articles for London's Sunday Dispatch, the tall, shy, young Oxford-bred newspaperman who traveled and argued with Britain's Field Marshal from El Alamein to Germany, flatly denied Ingersoll's charge that Monty lost the battle of Caen while the British outnumbered the enemy. He dismissed the Ingersoll version of the battle of the Ardennes, "which represents Montgomery as panicking and screaming ... as putting the British Army into full retreat, as nearly losing the battle by abandoning the offensive . . . and finally as trying to scoop all the credit for himself. . . ."

"The point is," writes Clifford, "we were split. The front wasn't just dented, it was punched right through. . . . How can you think you have any offensive when you are reeling back with two Panzer armies at your throat? . . . Montgomery made a plan, carried it through and the battle was won. There is no getting away from that. Happily, there is no need for us to fling any mud back. The Americans were magnificent. . . . Monty says without qualification that the battle of the Ardennes was won primarily by the staunch fighting qualities of the American soldier."

Correspondent Clifford readily admitted that the cocksure, prissy, teetotaling Field Marshal was not always popular. "The older Desert veterans, in particular, resented him. . . . He is not a good mixer--he can't slap backs and drink with the boys and tell dirty stories." About his staff, says Clifford, there was "an atmosphere of amateurishness, almost of school-boyishness. ... Some of them ... looked as though they were certainly playboys in private life. Others were surprisingly youthful Fellows of Universities. . . . But the proof ... is in the battle. . . . The important thing is to avoid arguing that the General and his staff can't have won the battle, because they don't look capable of it."

* Wrote ex-PM Correspondent Kenneth Crawford last week in the Progressive: "This book is a compilation of the latrine talk. . . . Anyone who saw or took part in the campaigns described . . . will be irritated by distortions and inaccuracies in detail. I have underscored so many in my copy that it is practically mutilated. . . . What astounds me is the willingness of many reviewers who know the facts to accept this stuff."

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