Wings Over the Desert

(See Cover)

An empty Chianti bottle lay in the desert where an Italian had dropped it in his retreat. Near by, the moonlight made a complicated and shadowy apparition out of a wrecked Mark III tank, glinted on a German chocolate tin and a bloodied German helmet.

East of this no man's land, headed in the general direction of the Chianti bottle, a squad of British sappers dragged themselves across the sand, pulling the string of German land mines. Behind them the 51st Highlanders squatted in slit trenches, awaiting the signal to advance another 50 yards. To the rear, British 25-pounders roared, spewing their shells across the line into the darker, hostile horizon.

In the moonlit, light-lanced sky, Allied planes ranged back & forth, their routes marked by bursting bombs behind the Axis front line. West of the Chianti bottle the Axis armies ponderously gave ground.

Somewhere behind the German lines, Erwin Rommel listened with grim interest to the uproar of British guns and high-domed Albert Kesselring, who designed the bombing of Coventry, brooded over his less than adequate African Luftwaffe. Somewhere behind the Allied lines, tall, affable "Mars" Coningham, R.A.F. chief in the field, guided the performance of his planes. Near by, in a desert caravan, the tough, ubiquitous Bernard Montgomery kept his finger on every unit of the strongest Eighth Army any British general has yet commanded in the long desert campaign.

The Web. In Cairo, 140 miles east of the Chianti bottle, General Sir Harold Alexander, Commander of the Middle East, pored over reports telling the story of the battle. He sat in close communion with a thin, jug-eared man, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder. Upon these two depended the fate of Allied power in the Mediterranean. In their strategical structure, Egypt is the keystone.

From afar the communication lines of both sides ran like threads of a web into the desert battlefield of Egypt. From Italy and Crete, Axis transports on the sea and in the air, plagued by Allied planes, tried to rush reinforcements and supplies. Across French Equatorial Africa tortuous lines fed aid to Montgomery; men of De Gaulle hacked new routes through the jungle. U.S. and British freighters rounded the Cape, climbed the side of East Africa and plowed into the Red Sea. The web covered half the world.

Vichyfrenchmen in Dakar looked over their shoulders at Liberia, where U.S. troops, according to Reuters last week, had built two airports. Dakar might find itself suddenly caught between two camps. Berlin studied the corners of a chessboard; either airpower had to be shifted from Russia or Rommel would continue to lose the battle of supply. Rome had reason to be afraid. If Rommel's army was destroyed, the Allied fist would be pointed from North Africa at Italy's soft underside.

The Chianti bottle in No Man's Land was in the middle of vast and incalculable affairs.

The Battle. Along the 40-mile front there had been no spectacular advance. Unlike previous desert campaigns when wide pendulum swings were measured in hundreds of miles, last week's gains were measured in yards. This was a different kind of desert warfare.

This time minefields, artillery and geography hemmed in the space-devouring tanks. Until infantry clawed a path through the deep and complicated defenses of Rommel's line, there would be no sweeping around flanks. Both sides husbanded their armored strength. Tanks were in operation, but only in quick exploratory sorties. More likely to develop in the early stages was a flanking movement by sea. Axis communiques reported that the British had already made three fruitless attempts to land along the coast behind Axis lines. The reports were not confirmed.

The fighting resembled the trench warfare of World War I. Under a thunderous barrage of cannon fire British troops went forward in short, heavy waves.

British ordnance was the week's surprise. Buildings in Alexandria's suburbs, 70 miles behind the line, shook with the reverberations. Axis artillery was only a faint obbligato to the symphony of British guns, which never before in the desert had been able to match the power of Rommel's superb artillery. As the battle wore on, the volume and tempo increased. During one attack shells hurtled into the Axis lines at the rate of more than 1,500 a minute. German and Italian soldiers left alive were too dazed to fight. Axis guns and tanks were flattened out. The horizon was ringed with fire, the earth rocked.

But the most noteworthy Allied performance of the week was in the air. The score, after six days of fighting, was 101 Axis planes downed to 48 Allied (none of them bombers). U.S. fighter squadrons of Major General Lewis H. Brereton's Army Air Forces lost two planes, shot down 22 of the enemy's in five days. So complete was Allied superiority that aircraft observers were able to hover undisturbed over Rommel's fixed gun positions, directing British fire.

The Axis air force was never able to get off the defense. The best it could do was to patrol its own airdromes, and even at this it was not too successful. One Stuka raid fizzled out. A second, more serious Stuka raid was scattered by ack-ack guns and an R.A.F. tornado.

The lesson the British had learned, and now were applying, was one of unified strategy and tactics. The R.A.F., instead of conducting a free-wheeling sky offensive, had become an integrated part of Montgomery's whole plan of attack. The R.A.F. softened enemy fixed positions with nightlong bombing, strafed Axis troops as Imperial troops advanced, dispersed Axis concentrations before they could get set for counterattack. Its light bombers and long-range fighters pounded at fuel and ammunition dumps, at Axis motor vehicles bringing food, ammunition, gas and oil to Rommel's forward troops. Its light and heavy bombers and torpedo planes hunted out Axis shipping on the Mediterranean.

To save overland hauls along the coast, Axis ships tried to sail directly into the much-bombed port of Matruh, instead of landing farther west. Within four days the R.A.F. sank two tankers and three cargo-carriers. U.S. bombers drummed over Crete, started fires at Malemi airdrome, which is the depot for troop-carrying Junkers-52s on their way from Europe. Rommel's supply problem was becoming increasingly acute. Rommel needed men, but more he needed oil.

The Sage. The man who scrutinized the R.A.F.'s performance with the deepest satisfaction was General Alexander's companion in Cairo, the quizzical Tedder, who in England is accounted one of the wise men of aviation.

In June 1941, when Arthur Tedder succeeded Sir Arthur Longmore as air boss for the Middle East, he became chief of an air domain that stretches now from Malta to the Persian Gulf and extends south to Madagascar.

His task was to build a bomber and fighter force in a theater that was considered secondary to Britain, yet covered far more territory and required a greater complexity of operations. Tedder's men had to support the light vessels of Admiral Harwood, attack Axis warships in the Mediterranean, hunt submarines in the Persian Gulf. Tedder's men had to bomb cities and airdromes. Tedder's men had to fight over desert, where airdromes were mobile and maintenance was a special and involved problem. More than that, Tedder's men had to learn to subordinate their spectacular activities to the larger ideas of integrated strategy. This, the sagacious Tedder knew, had to be taught them or the battle was lost in its beginning.

For long months of the war internecine strife between the R.A.F. on the one hand and the Army & Navy on the other had confused the British war effort, much as the conflict between the military and naval arms has confused the U.S. effort (see P. 67). The R.A.F., a separate and autonomous command, preferred to direct its own operations.

In the fall of 1941 Winston Churchill had to rule that the R.A.F commander must give the Middle East army commander in chief all aid, "irrespective of other targets," when a battle was in progress. The army commander in chief, said Boss Churchill, would specify targets and tasks. A year later he announced hopefully that cooperation had ben realized--"is now renewed"--between Tedder and Alexander, Coningham and Montgomery. Large credit was due to Arthur Tedder.

Headquarters Bloke. For 26 of his 52 years shrewd Sir Arthur Tedder has been in aviation. Before he joined the infant Royal Flying Corps in 1916, he had just been an English gentleman, a graduate of Cambridge's Magdalene College (where he became an avid reader of Shakespeare), a rugby player, a colonial servant of the Empire stationed at Fiji, and a soldier in the Dorsetshire Regiment. But military aviation seized his intense mind and has occupied it ever since.

He has occupied many jobs, chiefly teaching: in the Royal Naval Staff College, the Imperial Defense College, in the R.A.F. Staff College, as Director of Air Training, then Director-General of Research and Development for the Air Ministry.

It was from that job that he went to Egypt. To his superiors and his men, to whom he is known as "The Chief," Arthur Tedder presents the same half-amused, scrutinizing, birdlike face. When Churchill arrived, Tedder slouched in an easy chair, exasperated his boss at first with his frankness and biting wit.

He lets his deputy, quiet, able Roy Maxwell Drummond, handle most of the administrative problems. He likes to pop into the desert headquarters of the debonair Antipodean, Arthur Coningham (whose nickname "Mary" is corrupted from "Maoris," the name of the fierce New Zealand aborigines). He frequently pops into squadron posts and tells maintenance men to ask him questions. They take the Chief at his word: "When are we getting rid of this bloody antiquated lathe?" Air force men of one unit, not recognizing the coatless man who stopped by one morning, started kidding him about the regulation black tie he was wearing. Said Tedder: "Oh, I'm a headquarters bloke. You know how stuffy the Chief is."

Arthur. In his private life, English-born Tedder kids his wife about her Australian ancestry, a long-standing ribbing which small, blonde Lady Tedder, after 26 years, bears resignedly. Tedder's one hobby is sketching. Sitting outside a tent in the Western Desert, flying from station to station, Tedder sketches.

When his oldest son, Arthur, was killed in flying combat over England, Tedder took his sketchbook, wandered away for a few days, returned and wordlessly dug himself into his work. The only sign of his deep grief, in days to come, was a sharpening of his cutting humor. He has two other children, a daughter in the W.A.A.F. in England, a younger son still in school.

Tough and wiry, he never looks quite well. In the blazer which he puts on to avoid the saluting problem when he drifts around to a cricket match at Cairo's Gezira Club, he looks something like a pale, thin gremlin. His appearance worries his friends. Lord Trenchard, Marshal of the whole R.A.F., on a visit to Middle East headquarters kept asking him: "Are you all right, Arthur?"

Arthur was all right. This week, as Montgomery surged against Rommel's line and the supporting air offensive rose to a crescendo, Arthur was very much all right. In the overall strategy which he helped plan and which now he saw in action, planes and pilots were functioning magnificently. Beneath Tedder's wings was a design for victory.

In the minds of Alexander, Tedder, Montgomery and Coningham was the determination that this time Rommel must be smashed. Within the speculations of Tedder was a day when the British would occupy airdromes along the whole coast of North Africa, when the R.A.F. would take up its devastating role in the next phase of the Mediterranean war: an attack on southern Europe.

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