Dust in the Cogs

"The campaign in Libya," wrote the London News Chronicle, "has not met the swift, decisive success which several incautious predictions of the first few days encouraged us to hope for."

"Can nobody," asked the Daily Mirror, "dampen the airy-fairy optimism of the military spokesman at general headquarters in Cairo?"

All the King's tanks and all the King's men ranging across the Libyan Desert had not succeeded, in three weeks of fighting, in achieving a single major aim of British strategy. The one apparent success, the relief of long-besieged Tobruk (TIME, Dec. 8), was last week negated by the Germans, who cut the relieving corridor. The two hoped-for successes, bottling the German tank forces and then destroying them, were at least postponed by the same act of cutting. It was accomplished by a convergence on Sidi Rezegh, southeast of Tobruk, of the three main Axis tank forces--Germany's 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions, Italy's Battering Ram Division.

After this blow, the Axis tank forces could have escaped to the west if they had wanted to. But they did not want to. They chose to stand and fight. For a few days they seemed to be doing a little better than holding their own. But after pausing for repairs and reinforcements, the British resumed the attack, claimed they were forcing the Germans out of the Sidi Rezegh area deeper into the desert.

Pause for Tanks. If the British had not yet won, they were learning how to win; and the two most important lessons were about tanks.

> The first lesson concerned fire power. After having scoffed at the U.S. Army for the way it "overgunned" its tanks (a 75-mm. cannon, a 37-mm. cannon and four .30-caliber machine guns in the Chrysler M3, for instance), the British found that fire power is the first requirement of a tank-eating tank. Their own tanks, whose primary armament consists of the two-pounder gun (approximately the same as the 37-mm. cannon), were no match for German tanks carrying thirteen-pounders (roughly 75-mm.).

Even the airy-fairy Cairo censor permitted this dispatch on the fire-power question: "Although the Germans' losses have been heavy, many of their surviving machines are the huge but highly mobile Mark III and Mark IV tanks. The British have tanks that will halt these giants, but it is not always possible to have them in the right place at the right time. Despite the fine showing of light American-built tanks against the German heavyweights, it is obvious that when huge machines face only light ones or infantry the advantage must lie with the heavy machines."

> The second lesson concerned recovery. The decisive factor in last week's fighting was the rapidity and efficiency of German field supply, and particularly repair. It was this which had made it possible for General Erwin Rommel to recover so quickly from the first pounding his forces took, then to seize the initiative before the British had caught their second wind.

Cause for Thanks. The British situation was not all black. Although the Germans turned out to have stores vastly greater than the British had counted on, it still appeared that the Axis powers had great problems in logistics. They could not supply their forward forces by sea. The British Navy last week said it had stopped 60% of all enemy supplies destined for all ports in Africa. Between the extreme rear (Tripoli) and the immediate rear (Bengasi) a British raiding force presumably still straddled the Axis supply roads. The only steady flow of Axis supplies came by plane and night. In the sector of supply the British had the advantage, and time might increase that advantage.

The main reason for British confidence was that the men had been spared the nightmare of swastikas screaming down the sky. This time the R.A.F. was dominant.

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