Crumbling Empire

Out of the white, garden-edged streets of Bardia, belying with their neatness the destructive bombardment of a fortnight ago, swept a train of British armored cars, tanks and infantry trucks one day last week. It wriggled onto the coast road, penetrating still farther into the African empire of Benito Mussolini. From the desert to the south another spearhead, fresh Anzac and Moslem Indian troops, poked north and west. Before mop-up units in Bardia had finished prying the last pockets of Italian Terribili from their wadi hideouts, the two points were encircling Tobruch.

Tobruch looked to be an easier place to capture. Like Bardia, it was protected by a semicircle of forts, 16 clusters of six sunken casemates each, with another chain three to five miles outside the town within the outer ring. But Tobruch was thought to be undermanned and underequipped. Half the Italian artillery, ammunition and transports, one-third of the Italian Army was already in British hands. Moreover, Tobruch was known to be dependent on tankers from Derna for its water supply. And Italian captives in Bardia were sure Tobruch could not hold out. Said one colonel: "No force in the world could have stood up to the R. A. F. bombing. They came as regularly as chimes of a clock. Bombs and shells were exploding among our defenses night and day."

Siege of Tobruch. With this added tip the British went methodically to work on a repeat performance of the Bardia show. While heavy artillery went up, the R. A. F. started off with an attack on Tobruch, roared westward as far as Tripoli, hunting out Italian troop concentrations and airdromes. Off the harbor the British Fleet stood by. Advance land forces pushed on past Tobruch to cut off the Italian retreat, some of them reaching Bomba, 60 miles to the west.

At Tobruch's own air base of El Adem, constructed at enormous expense for a permanent airdrome, one British mechanized patrol counted the charred fuselages of 40 planes, burned and twisted by R. A. F. bombs. The runways were pitted with a lacework of craters. The hangars and machine shops were battered to rubble. The plush officers' quarters, completed down to tile bathrooms, were sagging ruins. At El Gubbi the story was the same. At El Gazala they found 35 more wrecked planes. The Italians had abandoned their air bases as far west as Derna, acknowledging British dominance in the air over the immediate battle front.

At Benina, near the big base of Bengasi, British fliers swooped low to machine-gun hangar attendants, unloaded their bombs over a fleet of 100 planes drawn up on the field. At Bengasi itself, five Italian ships in the harbor were blasted with incendiaries and explosives. At every Italian air base around the Cyrenaican bulge to Martuba the British kept pounding.

Next Step? Having already decisively defeated the Italians, General Sir Archibald Wavell had accomplished his first objective. All that remained was to see how completely he could destroy Marshal Graziani's Army.

Though a 625-mile march to Tripoli still looked like a large order for the British, Marshal Graziani was in a predicament. If he attempted to make a stand at Derna, where the Gebelel Achdar mountains make a land attack difficult, he risked being cut off by British columns slicing across the base of Cyrenaica by the 250-mile inland road to Bengasi. If he dug in at Bengasi he would have time to prepare strong defenses but might have a bad time if forced to retreat 500 miles along the coast to Tripoli. Said one commentator: "If Graziani defends Tobruch, he won't get back to Bengasi, and if he retreats to Bengasi, he won't get back to Tripoli--at any rate as a fighting force."

On top of this there were reports, not at all unlikely, that the Libyan tribes were beginning to rise against the harried Marshal. And every Italian retreat shortened the coast line the British Fleet had to blockade.

Unhappily, the Rome radio admitted: "Our real defense will be put up farther away [from Bardia] where the bulk of the Italian Army is. ... There is a possibility of our having to yield some further points."

More bad news arrived for the Italians every day. At the oasis of Giarabub, 150 miles southwest of Bardia, Australian land patrols and R. A. F. bombers harried the last eastern outpost of the Italians in Libya. In Ethiopia, with the rainy season about to end, it looked as though the British might soon strike at the isolated Italian garrisons. And from the Sudan, Emperor Haile Selassie rallied his tribesmen to settle their score with the Italians.

Only at week's end did Italy have anything resembling a victory to report. Then, in answer to British claims of disastrous raids on Messina, Palermo and Naples, the Italian High Command announced some successes of its own: two British merchantmen shot out of a convoy in the Mediterranean, the Free French submarine Narval sunk by a torpedo boat, a Greek freighter and the British flotilla leader Shakespeare* torpedoed in the Atlantic, a British battleship on convoy duty struck by dive bombers in the eastern Mediterranean.

Later, Rome triumphantly claimed that Italian fliers, with their new Nazi assistants, had picked up the convoy again, as it was passing through the Sicilian Straits. This time, said the Italians, torpedo carriers struck first, diving down through anti-aircraft fire and swarms of British fighters to score a direct hit on one British aircraft carrier. Next came a squadron of Picchiatelli (Pixilated) dive bombers, planting two bombs aboard a British cruiser in the second section of the convoy. Same time Nazi dive bombers hit another cruiser and a destroyer.

"Saint of Bardia." Meantime the Italian press still gave its public a diet of fine words. Example:

"At this moment, the newspapers of all the world and all the radio commentators are repeating this name: Annibale Bergonzoli. ... I remember Bergonzoli during the Midnight Mass before the advance on Neghelli, with his head uncovered, his arms folded. He seemed a saint, and so he must have seemed to his soldiers to the very end--the Saint of Bardia." The British discovered that the bearded Saint was not among their captives. He had run away.

* Jane's Fighting Ships lists the Shakespeare as having been scrapped in 1939.

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