The Other Way in Libya

Under a brilliant moon the desert looked like a plain of salt. Across it three British staff cars sped. At a fork in the road a sentry stopped them and signaled the drivers to turn off onto a small side road. The drivers told the sentry who were in the cars--two generals and their staffs. The sentry said he was sorry, but the main road ahead was being prepared for demolition in connection with withdrawal operations.

The cars turned off. Soon they overtook a lorry convoy, which had halted to remove some anti-tank blocks. The staff cars made their way to the convoy head to investigate.

At this point a lone Nazi on a motorcycle appeared at the convoy's rear. An armed guard stuck his head out from the rear lorry's tarpaulin and said: "What in hell do you want?" The Nazi tommy-gunned him. Another guard shot the Nazi.

A few more Germans came up on motorcycles, proceeded to the convoy head, covered the staff cars with half a dozen tommy-guns before the officers realized anything was happening.

Thus were captured last week Lieut.

General Sir Richard Nugent O'Connor, who was knighted only last month for his brilliance as field commander of the Imperial Army of the Nile in its winter campaign against the Italians; and Lieut.

General Philip Neame, an engineering expert famous for a day at Neuve Chapelle in 1914 when he stood bolt upright on a parapet for 20 minutes, lighting the fuses of improvised jam-tin bombs with a cigaret and lobbing the bombs at the Germans. Also captured last week after a tank fight at the outpost of el-Mechili were Major General Michael Denham Gambier-Parry, tank strategist, and 2,000 men. Also captured in Libya, apparently while flying out to Egypt from Britain via Gibraltar and Malta, was Major General Adrian Carton de Wiart, who unhappily commanded British troops in central Norway last year.

Serious Business. The loss of four top-flight generals was almost as bad news as the misfortune in which they were lost --a six-day Nazi advance from Bengasi right into Egypt. Their loss underlined an interesting feature of General Sir Archibald Wavell's technique of generalship.

Unlike the Ludendorff-Haig-Pershing-Joffre practice of letting brass hats with the aid of technicians work things out at desks far behind the lines and then turn execution over to subordinates, the Wavell usage is to train civil-servant-like underlings to do the paper work, while the generals, viewing the field in person, make decisions on the spot and virtually in action.

General Wavell did not invent this technique. Field Marshal The Viscount Allenby, his preceptor, used it. The fiery Confederate cavalry general, James Ewell Brown ("Jeb") Stuart, lost his life using it in the skirmish at Yellow Tavern on May 11, 1864. The Germans use it in Blitzkrieg.

But so far as the British are concerned, General Wavell has infused new life into the practice. He captured Cheren after a seven-week siege by flying to the spot, seeing for himself a valley which threatened the Italian rear, and ordering it occupied. Last week's grave losses suggested that the practice is more fortunate in advance than in withdrawal.

The capture of these generals--rknown to be the top men in the field--made the Germans even bolder than they had already been. With complete recklessness as to lines of communication, they charged past the British forces left in Tobruch, straight on to Bardia, only eight miles from the Egyptian border, and took it forthwith. This had been the most important British supply port in Libya.

Without stopping, the Germans pushed on, claiming early this week to have captured Salum, Egypt. In ten days the Germans recovered ground which the British had taken eight weeks to cover. They did not and could not recover the great Army Italy had lost to the British, but once again the Suez Canal--keystone of all British operations in the eastern Mediterranean -- was in grave danger.

The withdrawal had at first been minimized by the British (TIME, April 14).

But last week, as the Nazi drive took on such dazzling speed, the British began to get panicky. Troops were rushed to northern Egypt from East Africa. Prime Minister Churchill publicly admitted that the loss of Cyrenaican airfields, within easy range of Crete and Alexandria, would be felt. The British could not spare the full force of their Mediterranean Fleet now to cooperate in a Libyan action; they might have a quasi-Dunkirk to pull up north.

And North Africa's worst hot weather was still five or six weeks away.

But the big reason the affair had now become serious was that it threatened, along with the loss of Salonika, to shake the British from their firm control of the eastern Mediterranean. They had not made the middle Mediterranean secure, for parts of three divisions of heavily mechanized Nazis in Libya had been shipped across the narrow Sicilian channel where the Luftwaffe based on Sicily discouraged British patrols.

Now there was a threat in the eastern Mediterranean. Ships need bases, and the Germans have shown how bases can be bombed. Without naval freedom of ac tion, the British position in the whole area would be dangerously weak.

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