Pause at the Border

Alexandria was busy last week, but not frightened. In the hotels along the placid, sweeping arc of waterfront, civil servants gathered to talk, listen to radio reports, and read the Reuters ticker. In canteens back in the town, soldiers and sailors waited for orders and talked about this chance to crack the Jerries. The fleet was massed in west harbor behind Ras el Tin Point, and in the harbor there was a bustle of ships oiling, coaling, painting, refitting, storing, watering, signaling back & forth. Troops poured into town from East Africa, furious that their winter work was canceled.

This Alexandria was a focus last week. The German drive, which had swept across Libya as fast and as hot as the desert wind called khamsin, was apparently aimed straight for Alexandria. If it reached there, Britain would lose her main operating base and very likely her whole position in the Eastern Mediterranean.

But this did not frighten Alexandrians: they saw thousands of soldiers leave for the desert; they saw a formidable part of the fleet put to sea.

It would take at least several days, perhaps a fortnight, for General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell to organize a counteroffensive with the troops which passed through Alexandria from East Africa to the Egyptian Front. But meanwhile the news from scant forces holding the land front was encouraging. The British garrison at Tobruch was not merely besieged, it was fighting back. The Germans seemed to have forgotten that the British still supplied the garrison from the sea.

Axis troops, mostly Italian, besieged the town. The defenders nipped attack after attack, and claimed 35 tanks and 1,500 Germans and Italians. Farther east, at the border between Libya and Egypt, the British claimed to be holding the Axis force at and around Halfaya ("Hell-fire") Pass.

When the ships left, Alexandrians heard soon enough where they had gone. The Navy announced its greatest success since the Battle of Cape Matapan: in the narrow channel between Sicily and Cape Bon, across which the Axis had run its forces and supplies for the Libyan attack, a cruiser squadron caught a convoy consisting of two ships laden with motor transport, one ammunition ship, and two ships thought to be carrying troops, all protected by three Italian destroyers. The British swept in, slapped aside the flimsy protection, and sank the whole convoy forthwith. The British lost one destroyer, the 1,870-ton Mohawk, in the operation, but saved most of her crew.

The British in Alexandria rested secure in the feeling that this time German logistical arrangements were vulnerable; that though they had come far, it was still lots farther to Alexandria and Suez; that the Germans had not had time to adjust themselves to desert dysentery, sand blindness, and the strange desert infection which keeps even scratches open. But from Vichy they heard that the Germans had spent weeks baking themselves in huge, sand-floored, sunlamp-lit ovens at temperatures well over 100DEG, to fit themselves for desert fighting.

British complacency was perhaps unjustified on other grounds. German Army spokesmen hinted that the pause was not enforced but deliberate. "You may be sure," said one, "that there is a plan; also that the German Army doesn't rush into adventures, a policy which eliminates to the greatest degree humanly possible any chance of failure." The plan was perhaps to wait until British troops were evacuating Greece, then try to greet them in Alexandria. But plan or no plan, the week's developments pointed up the Libyan campaign as definitely more important to Britain now than the outcome in the Balkans.

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