Match Game

Washington tried hard to play down the first U.S. visit of British Field Marshal Viscount Bernard Law Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Just a friendly call, said Harry Truman. Uneasy Monty, whirled through a hectic tour last week of U.S. military posts, donned his chattiest air of idle curiosity. But the yen to talk turkey about U.S.-British strategy was as plain as the eight rows of ribbons on Monty's chest.

For a man with no reputation for tact, Monty acquitted himself nobly. At West Point he studied a practice session of the Army football squad. "I hope your team wins all its matches," he ventured. "Your West Point," he commented later, "is absolutely the cat's whiskers."

When his C-47 reached Kansas City, Monty confessed his astonishment over the local skyscrapers: "An amazing country, this America, you know." Local boosters in Montgomery, Ala., ("a city named after me") were equally delighted. "Stonewall Jackson, there's a man for you. That quick nipping backwards and forwards across the mountains; that resolution; that nerve."

That's an Island. But the veteran of rugged North Africa and Normandy campaigns nearly came a cropper while inspecting Fort Benning, Ga. Enthusiastic Master Sergeant Hugh Cook cornered the Marshal with a tale of the battle for Okinawa. Monty, magnificently insular, looked blank. "That's an island in the Pacific, sir," prompted Lieut. General J. Lawton Collins, Army Public Relations chief. Monty looked relieved.

To while away the time on long air hops Monty took a fling at an old U.S. pastime. "Your people have been showing me a new game with dice. They call it shooting craps. It's been a lot of fun. We've been shooting craps for matches in the air." Added the hero of El Alamein: "I've lost all my paper matches."

Between junkets Monty endured the full rigors of official Washington. Monty looked distressed at a Pentagon press conference when the New York Daily News's snippety-snappety Ruth Montgomery asked if he really had an aversion to "women. "Oh, I'm very fond of the ladies," he retorted with a chuckle. On the south lawn of the White House he joshed with the President over the burning of the Executive Mansion by the British in 1814. Said Monty: "I'm really very sorry about it. I think we ought to pay for it. ... Or perhaps you might send some American soldiers to burn down Whitehall."

Banter aside, the Montgomery visit was a serious reconnaissance of the present stage of U.S. military weapons and training. Before 100 U.S. General Staff officers, personally selected by Eisenhower, Monty gave in return his own off-the-record evaluation of the tension in Europe. When he returned to Britain this week, Monty would take back something more lasting than paper matches.

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