Second Round: Rommel's

The released British prisoner climbed in the desert heat with a note in his hand. The hot place he had reached was Bir Hacheim, a four-mile-square, mine-necklaced plateau in the Libyan desert. The note was addressed to General Pierre Koenig, the Free French commander of this southern anchor of the Allied line. It was from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and it said: Surrender, or suffer the consequences.

Pierre Koenig, tall, blue-eyed, blond, German of name and physique but French as only a Foreign Legionnaire can be, read the note. The smile he habitually wears faded, and his officers saw one of his brief furies mount. He scrawled on the note a single French word: Merde (obscenity). Then he called for a German prisoner, gave him the note and sent him out to find Rommel.

Pierre Koenig and his 3,000 Parisians, Bretons, Moroccans and Hitler-hating Germans settled down to wait for the inevitable. It was inevitable that Field Marshal Rommel, having bypassed Bir Hacheim in the expectation that it would be a pushover, only to find it a stubborn thorn, would devote his full fury to the place. Every day for ten days there had been attacks by Italian troops, stiffened by a few Germans. Every day Koenig's band had thrown the attacks back with the old French favorite, the 75-mm. cannon.

But now, sure enough, the shifty Rommel came to clip his thorn. He came with tanks, with a bee-swarm of dive-bombers.

Near Tobruk, all this while, the R.A.F. was feverishly busy. Gaily, pilots flew out from a field which they called Tramride. Grimly, they flew back again and renamed it Tramraid. Their job was to cut Axis supply columns, and it was urgent. They had to try to stave off the fall of Bir Hachein for, if that hot spot fell, Rommel would have clear lines of communications for an advance on Tobruk.

' 'Twas hellish good fun," said one pilot returning to Tramraid.

"'Maybe fun isn't the right word for it," said another. "But it was a lovely target and I'd say we got a devil of a kick out of it."

But though these pilots burned a black belt of gutted hulks across the desert, they noticed that the main German force was getting nearer, swinging north and east, splitting, opening like a jaw. Things seemed to be getting worse. A huge tank battle was developing, and Rommel seemed to be forcing his way north to the coast. The German High Command announced that the desert fighting was finally taking "a favorable course" for the Axis.

There was reason. After 13 days, Bir Hacheim, the hot place, Pierre Koenig's key post, had fallen.

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