Word: allens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Oran, where the 1st landed and met some of the hardest fighting of the early campaign in North Africa, Allen demonstrated the quality which had sometimes been confused with casual impetuosity. The French held a strong position at St. Cloud, a suburb of Oran. Rather than lose men in frontal assault, Allen, on a spur-of-the-moment decision, sent two units around the town, into Oran. As his men told it later, it sounded obvious and easy, but they knew it was the act of a resourceful and flexible commander...
Once the landings were over and consolidated, Allen entered the blackest period of his Army life. The 1st Infantry Division found itself in a situation remark ably similar to that which the ist of World War I faced in early 1918. It was broken up. Its battalions, with those of other divisions, were scattered over a 100-mile defensive front, under British and French command. These arrangements may have been unavoidable at the time, but they graveled Terry Allen. "I blooded them, didn't I?" he would say in aggrievement when he thought of his lost battalions. Finally, fuming...
...March he did get in with his division, intact once more. At Gafsa and El Guettar, on hills held and bloodied by the men of the 1st, Terry Allen and his division did superlatively well (TIME, May 24). After he had taken Gafsa, he was ordered to "hold" the town as a supply base for the British Eighth Army. "But the orders don't say anything about what steps to take to hold it," said Allen with a grin. So he attacked...
...Hundred Thousand Years. Correspondents with Allen at this period discovered a commander whom his prewar acquaintances at home would have hardly recognized. At times he was shy, quiet. He never bragged, in public, of his own division; he never slighted the others. Once, when the 1st Armored Division was late on one of his flanks, Allen said: "I guess they had motor trouble...
...interim afternoon, during El Guettar, Allen sat at tea with another officer and a TIME correspondent in the oasis that was his headquarters. He talked of home, of his wife, of Terry Jr. and of how he wanted the boy to be a polo player, of his men and of how "all this talk about Division spirit just means that the men won't let the other men down." His philosophy of the war he gave in four words: "It's crazy, this war." The correspondent jotted down these notes...