Blenheim? Waterloo?

(See Cover)

For the first time British and Empire troops will meet the Germans with ample equipment in modern weapons of all kinds. The battle itself will affect the whole course of the war. . . .

The desert Army may add a page to history which will rank with Blenheim and with Waterloo. The eyes of all nations are upon you. . . .

Officers read Winston Churchill's order of the day to small detachments of troops scattered across the desert--to men standing under a downpour in the darkness of a desert night, split repeatedly by furious lightning.

Blenheim and Waterloo. To men standing with their rain-soaked kit, conscious that in a few hours they might be dead or maimed, those words gave a little more pleasant feeling.

Here if anywhere was Britain's second front to help the Russians. Here if anywhere was Britain's chance to knock the Eyeties out of the war. Churchill and his Cabinet, after spouting about a Blenheim and a Waterloo, would very likely stand or fall by what happened. Failure here would put the whole Empire into an awful funk. Even the U.S. might shy back out if Britain came another cropper here. The Imperial General Staff, shaken around on the eve of this attack (see p. 22), would be in a pretty bad stew to find a next move. . . .

Then the officers snapped commands and the detachments in the desert began to move.

Ready. . . . The average Tommy was as braced for action as a slightly frightened man could be.

He had stripped his kit to get the weight down as much as possible, but it was still pretty heavy. He had put on his oldest shorts and his worst shirt, his newest socks and soundest boots. He had traded a trophy stolen from a fallen Eyetie for an extra water bottle--the only item of weight he would enjoy carrying.

He had pulled the paper stuffing out of the grenade pouches in his belt and stuck the newly arrived "pineapples" in place. He had limbered up his new gas mask, which he would need more than legs in case of a heavy dust storm, and he had tucked away half a dozen pairs of flimsy Cellophane dust-goggles. He had pinched a piece of netting from a truck's camouflage to drape over his helmet--both for his personal camouflage and for swishing away flies. He had bound up the desert sores on the backs of his hands.

Usually he shaved in leftover lukewarm tea, but this morning, knowing he might not shave again for a fortnight, he had allowed himself the luxury of heating water to shave.

Get Set. . . . For several days unprecedented numbers of trucks had been moving up by night, many of them new. Complete regimental units had streamed up in far greater force than usual. By day, vehicles were kept unusually well camouflaged with netting and desert scrub; by night their lights were more scrupulously dimmed than usual; at all times they were more carefully and widely spaced in convoys. Roads had been given new shoulders, officers new maps, airfields new fuel caches.

Naples, Brindisi and other southern Italian ports of embarkation for Africa had been mercilessly bombed. The Mediterranean Fleet had stopped about half of the supply ships headed for Tripoli and Bengasi. The R.A.F. had pasted docks and stocks in assembly ports behind the Axis lines in Libya.

Go! The ordinary Tommy knew only his assignment, had a very narrow view of the attack. To him the entire war was compressed into instructions to clear out a certain wadi, knock out that machine-gun post, help corner those infantrymen. But the force of which he was a part moved with a vast sweep. The first day it covered nearly 50 miles; the second it traveled 30 more. On the third it was within ten miles of Tobruk, where the British garrison had withstood siege since last April.

The R.A.F. seemed definitely to be gaining command of the air. In Greece and Crete the mere sound of an airplane was equivalent to a command to take cover: the machine was inevitably a Jerry. But now much of the aircraft was friendly. There were the familiar Hurricanes, refitted as light attack bombers, the big twin-engined Beaufighters. And there were plenty of Yank types--Tomahawks, Marylands, Martlets, Bostons and even a few high-Flying Fortresses. They said there were more R.A.F. planes in Egypt now than in the whole Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940.

At first the enemy air force seemed to be relatively earthbound--perhaps partly by a fuel shortage, but partly because the attack was launched in a heavy rain which turned the Axis airfields in the coastal lowlands into mud holes.

Besides, there were plenty of tanks for a change, an abundance of men, enough of everything to match Jerry blow for blow. The first U.S. tanks ever to taste war* were here--some American Car and Foundry lights and a few medium Chrysler M-3's. Men were here from many lands-- England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, even the U.S. (a few observers and maintenance men). More than half of the entire Middle Eastern force of 750,000 men was here--apparently opposed by two German mechanized divisions, by perhaps two more German infantry divisions, one Italian mechanized division and an unknown number of Italian infantry divisions.

The Scheme. By the third and fourth days, it was clear how the first British move (see map inset) had developed.

First there had been a feint against the main Axis defense line, from Halfaya ("Hellfire") Pass to Sidi Omar, hard against the Libyan-Egyptian border. Then the main British attack had snipped through the Italian barbed wire just south of Sidi Omar and cut speedily northwest toward Tobruk, isolating the bulk of the German armored force. Secondary British attacks had run up behind the Hellfire-Sidi Omar line, to try to neutralize it, and beyond Tobruk, to try to surround Italy's Ariete Battering Ram Division stationed south of the besieged town. Far down in the desert, auxiliary columns were driving by compass straight across to cut off the enemy's rear below Bengasi.

By the fifth day, great things seemed to have been achieved. It appeared that a good chunk of the trapped German force had been knocked out; and, while British losses were heavy, they were said to be only one-third as great as the Germans'. The Tobruk garrison, with the help of tanks secretly landed by night, had smashed its way out of the ring which had gripped it for seven months. The Hellfire-Sidi Omar line was cracked by New Zealanders and they took Fort Capuzzo, nine miles to the west of Halfaya Pass. Then they went on to take Bardia and Gambut, the latter an Axis supply base.

On the sixth and seventh days came the first bad news. The main tank battle between Salum and Tobruk was gradually moving west. Evidently the Germans were making a supreme effort to break out toward Bengasi through a narrow bottleneck south of Tobruk--and evidently they were having at least partial success. If they escaped, the hardest British task would still be ahead. British losses were mounting hourly; the Germans claimed a ridiculously specific 662 British tanks. The Luftwaffe was appearing in greater strength. Things were getting tough. London spokesmen began to say ominously and vaguely that the fighting was "very hard and very confused."

Cunningham, Cunningham, Coningham & Co. If the plan eventually succeeded, it would be thanks to three field commanders whose names were, symbolically enough in a campaign demanding the utmost in teamwork, all pronounced the same. Every ranker knew a little about the mononymic three:

> Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham, 54, hates big cities. He likes gardening. He also likes dogs. But what he likes best is to fight battles on land. This time, as commander of the newly designated Eighth Imperial Army, he had a whopper on his hands. Lieut. General Cunningham's fame is young: last spring he drove 1,500 miles from Kenya, through Italian Somaliland and the Ethiopian desert right to Addis Ababa, reaching the capital faster than other British columns with far shorter distances to go. His name is almost always bracketed with his succinct Order of the Day before that march: "Hit them. Hit them hard and hit them again."

> Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, 58, hates big cities. He likes gardening. He also likes dogs. But what he likes best is to fight battles at sea. Sir Andrew is Sir Alan's brother, and this time his job was to make his brother's job easier. His main efforts were concerned with bombarding the enemy wherever he dawdled within 30 miles of the Libyan coast, and with breaking his supply lines. Sir Alan's forces torpedoed a cruiser (the R.A.F. got another), a destroyer and two supply ships. Admiral Cunningham has on his escutcheon the fair marks of Taranto, Matapan and last year's Libyan show. He has kept Tobruk alive with a steady stream of supplies. His most famous signal at sea, which he flashed as he steamed toward Taranto: "I intend to behave offensively in the Ionian Sea."

> Air Vice Marshal Arthur Coningham (no relative) is a dark, strong-faced, deep-voiced, wisecracking, non-smoking six-footer from New Zealand. He has a reputation for talent in cooperation--not a notable talent of previous R.A.F. commanders in the Middle East. Air Vice Marshal Coningham speaks French, German and Italian. He is widely traveled and knows Italy well; he refers to his bombings of Naples as his "slum-clearance project." Of the Germans, whose country he used to visit annually, he says: "They know war from A to about Y. They don't know Z."

The Auk. Behind these three field commanders was the real boss, General Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, Commander in Chief of the whole Middle East.

General Auchinleck may be said to have in his blood a long-standing feel for desert terrain, since the name Auchinleck derives from the Gaelic achadh na cloiche, which means field of stone. He is nicknamed for a bird many of whose characteristics he has. The auk, sometimes known as the tufted puffin, walks with dignity in a penguin-like human gait; is a bird of modest plumage; is austere, plodding, gregarious. The bird, however, does something the man hopes he will not do in Libya: lays a big, splotched egg.

The Auk was born with a drumbeat in his ear at Aldershot, the great British Army post. Though the Auchinlecks were originally Scottish, the Auk is by recent blood a fighting Ulsterman (so are ex-Chief of Imperial General Staff Dill and Chief of Staff Brooke). He was taught strategy at the Army's "geography class," the Imperial Defence College (where he had ex-Chief of Staff Dill as instructor and Chief of Staff Brooke as classmate).

On the book his record looks dull; in British service talk, it sounds pretty good. As a young man he served in India, at Aden, in Mesopotamia (D.S.O., O.B.E.). After 1933 he fought several brilliant punitive campaigns in India, but his greatest exploit (1940) was getting the Indian Army's slow feet out of stirrups and onto clutches. The Germans laugh at him for his alleged failure at Narvik, but there were extenuating facts.

The Auk hit Cairo like a breath of cold air from the Himalayas. He carried no fly-swish, the badge of respectability for Middle East officers. He indulged in no siesta and, by roaring that his staff of 700 officers was too large by about 600, got many others to skip theirs. Somewhere along the way he got a reputation for being just a little stuffy, both as man and soldier.

For nearly six months he preached his text and lived by it: "A general should choose his battlefield and oblige his enemy to fight on that battlefield and no other. He must choose his objectives and then prepare. He must prepare thoroughly and engage the enemy, knowing down to the last bullet what he's got and how he's going to use it." General Auchinleck's objective as he began the Battle of the Desert was to knock the Axis clean out of North Africa, even if it meant going to Tobruk, Tripoli, Tunisia and points west.

This week he had reached Tobruk. Tripoli was a long way away. Tunisia, with its important port of Bizerte, was still in the realm of diplomatic uncertainty (see p. 24). The points west were far out in the vague area of another year's strategy.

But close by, immediate, was the responsibility the Auk had on his shoulders: the job of showing that the British could decisively lick a German Panzer Army.

*Ten U.S. tank battalions were organized and fought in World War I, but no U.S. tanks got overseas. The men used British and French tanks.

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