On to Derna

At Sidi Barrani the assault took three days. At Bardia it took two and a half. This time, at Tobruch, the job was done in one. The pattern was familiar by now. First the thin semicircle of defense around Tobruch was surrounded. Day before the attack, by way of feint, heavy concentrations of vehicles and men were massed east of the town, near the sea. In the night they were stolen away to the point of real attack--a place just by the Bardia road where the Italians, in digging their tank traps, had come to solid rock and dug down only two feet.

At 5:40 a.m. the triple blast of land artillery, air bombs and shelling from ships opened. Sappers went out to grade the tank ditch and kill land mines. Tanks poured through, wagging their tails of infantry behind them. Some Aussies crept ahead under cross-curtain of tank and machine-gun fire to cut barbed-wire entanglements. Then the full power of attack brushed past pillboxes, deployed back and crushed them from behind. That accounted for the outer semicircle. For the inner, the process was the same. By noon both had been broken. By sunset the attackers had pushed eight miles to the heights looking down on Tobruch.

They could have gone in that night, but some of the boys might have got shot. In the morning it was just a kind of parade. The defense was no more spirited than usual, for not a single Italian plane or ship showed itself. Lots of the British vehicles just drove into town on the road.

The cocky Aussies entered Tobruch in a burlesque of glory. Along the way some of them sat down and calmly had a snack of bully beef. In town a previously captured Australian airman in blue trousers, a blue sweater and a British Army cap, who had persuaded many Italians to cease firing, greeted the attackers in the principal square: "Welcome, pals! Come right in--the town's yours." An Aussie soldier hauled down the Italian flag and hauled up his broad-brimmed hat in its place. Another changed the name of the main street from Via Mussolini to Via Ned Kelly--after a famous bush bandit from New South Wales who in his raids on towns defied death by dressing in 97 pounds of iron armor.

The pattern of surrender was familiar, too. Italians rushed around looking for captors (see p. 40). The British advance commander and the Italian admiral in command of the town met in a little shack. The admiral: "The town capitulates. All troops are disarming." The British brigadier: "Please delegate officers immediately to show us the position of every mine in the harbor and the town." About 25,000 men were captured, bringing the total since Dec. 9 to 119,000.

The Italians had tried to destroy everything that might be of use to the attackers. They touched off the damaged 33-year-old, 9,232-ton cruiser San Giorgio, which had been beached to be a permanent antiaircraft battery, with a dynamite blast.

They burned most military records and much of the town itself.

Flag Over Derna. On March 12, 1937, Benito Mussolini paused in his tour of Libya at the port of Derna. Set on the edge of a cluster of green hills, rich in water and soil, this little town had come to be called the Pearl of Cyrenaica. A famous local story which Il Duce asked to hear in full was that of William Eaton and Presley O'Bannon. In 1804 the U. S. was very annoyed with the Barbary pirates, who kept nibbling at U. S. trade in the Mediterranean. William Eaton, a Connecticut schoolteacher, and Presley O'Bannon, a lady-loving, fiddle-playing marine, raised an army of eight marines, 38 Greeks, 91 Arabs, a few footmen, cavalry, and camel drivers, and planned a fantastic march from the Nile across 500 miles of desert to subdue the Barbary pirate chief at Derna. They actually made the march and took the town. Presley O'Bannon was the first man to raise the U. S. flag on African soil.

As he heard this tale, Benito Mussolini had no idea that any flag but the Italian would be raised over Derna in his lifetime. He proceeded to subsidize Italian farmers to colonize the place. But last week British advance units swept on from Tobruch, 95 miles to the outskirts of Derna. They found the place practically undefended. The farmers and most of the town's population of 21,500 had been evacuated. The main body of the Italian Army had moved on toward Bengasi. It looked as if the place was British for the asking.

With Derna such a cinch, the British prepared to press for Bengasi, in hope of catching the other half of Graziani's ragged army. Patrols worked along the coast and also cut straight across the hump (see map). With luck, General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell and his merry men might pull off the most surprising total victory in this war of many surprises.

Mussolini Cunctator. New York Times Military Expert Hanson Baldwin said last week that when the British attack on Sidi Barrani began Dec. 9, the troops had strict orders to withdraw if that town had not fallen in three days. By last week this tentative operation and the Eritrean push (see col. 3) had grown into a campaign of conquest covering a quarter of a continent. To the always confident British this was not surprising. But the only reasonable explanation for the Italians' hasty retreat on all fronts was either that the Italians had lost their military minds or that Benito Mussolini had taken a leaf from the book of an ancient compatriot, Quintus Fabius Maximus.

When Fabius came up against Hannibal in 217 B.C., he used tactics of "masterly inactivity," retiring into hills where Hannibal's cavalry was useless, harassing the enemy's patrols, but never really fighting.

For this plan of war Fabius won the nickname Cunctator, the Delayer. It was just possible that Mussolini hoped, by sacrificing men and territory as slowly as possible, that he might postpone a major reckoning in Africa until such time as the Axis was ready to deal Britain a major blow--when Africa would not matter any more.

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