Richard D Mc Millan - North Africa

Soldiers of the press with the British 8th Army in Egypt. At an allied advance base in Libya. Those are date lines all of you have seen in your newspapers or heard on the air. And many of you undoubtedly are familiar with the name of the man whose byline appears above many of those stories.

The man whose story we bring you now. Richard D. McMillan, United Press staff correspondent accredited to the British 8th Army in North Africa. Macmillan has seen and reported action on six fronts of the present war.

Paris, the Low Countries, London, Gibraltar. He saw the British fleet smash Italy's Navy at Toronto. Then came assignments to Cairo to Albania. In Greece, Macmillan teamed with UP correspondent Henry Garell to scoop the world with the first vivid eyewitness story of the British withdrawal.

For the past two years, he has reported brilliantly on the seesaw battle for control of North Africa. I'm what my front office likes to refer to as a veteran war reporter. Well, looking back over the past three years, I guess the description fits.

But my own impression is that I'm more of a veteran's sandhog. You see, I've followed virtually every drive across Egypt and Libya in both directions, since the Germans and Italians elected to make the North African desert a battlefield.

I've eaten sand with my food and cursed it, and I've burrowed into it for safety from enemy shells and thanked God for it, many a time in the past two years. But that's a long story.

So suppose we start with June 27, 1942. That's a date that will stick in my memory for a long time. I had followed the British winter drive that pushed past Benghazi and had managed a narrow escape from capture to Brooke, when Field Marshal Rommel started rolling the 8th Army back toward the Libyan border.