Between Two Walls

(See Cover)

Britain's soldiers stood in their classic and indomitable position: with their backs against the wall. West of Suez there was no other place to make a stand. Behind them was Cairo, capital of Egypt; the delta of the Nile, a great plain as large as Vermont, crisscrossed with irrigation canals; Alexandria, last major British naval base in the eastern Mediterranean. All that stood between Rommel and Suez was General Sir Harold (Rupert Leofric George) Alexander's Eighth Army. If it failed, then, in the words of one U.S. Army official last week, "God help us all."

God Help Cairo. All through the summer, 140 miles behind the lines, Cairo had sweltered and fidgeted, stirring uneasily under an occasional sprinkle of Axis aerial bombs. In & out of gaudy, mosquelike Shepheard's Hotel had streamed the city's potpourri: cotton kings, gamblers, Imperial soldiers, newsmen and Cecil Beaton, wincing at the din of "hurdy-gurdies, bicycle bells, news vendors, trams, bagpipes, loudspeakers and the braying of donkeys."

Wrote Photographer Beaton in Vogue: "The dust blows past the jalousies into the 'Art Moderne 1900' interiors, on to the pinnacles of bric-a-brac. . . . The heat becomes oppressive; only the darkened room is bearable." Before his eyes swam Beatonesque visions: "Prince Mohammed Ali, heir to the throne and cousin of King Farouk I ... in his tarboosh, morning coat and sponge-bag trousers, with an enormous emerald on one finger." . . . Madam Fouad El Manasterly at soirees in her garden overlooking the Nile. "The glitter of the Turkish standard candelabra and the white-draped musicians in the boats below the window create a romantic effect. They say that Moses was hidden in the bulrushes here. . . ."

In Cairo's narrow streets natives in flapping galabeyahs jostled Scots in kilts, Egyptian officers in red fezzes elbowed turbaned Sikhs. British officers relaxed at the Turf Club. Last week Wendell Willkie arrived (see p. 19).

In his palace sulked Farouk I, the boy king with the girl wife. No great friend of the English was Farouk. Despite years of English domination, Egypt was more Latin than Anglo-Saxon. In political control was the Wafd Party, under Prime Minister Mustafa El Nahas Pasha. The best that could be said of the Wafdists was that, with the Axis armies at the gates, they were neutral, their hands upraised. The Egyptian Army, little more than a police force, could not be expected to resist. Egypt, old and lush, indolent and naked, waited--ready to be taken.

This was the crisis faced by the little Irishman upon whom England and the United Nations depended last week. As General Alexander well knew, to lose the battle was to risk the war.

The Relativities. When Rommel made his first tentative attack, the rains in Ethiopia had washed the red-brown silt down from the hills, swelling the sluggish Nile. The hottest desert days were over.

It was unlikely, though, that the climate had much to do with Rommel's timing. All through the hot, stinking summer, while the unburied dead burst like ripe melons in the sun, while soldiers got dysentery (which the English call "Gippy Tummy"), while the flies swarmed over his desert camps, he had waited for reinforcements. It was likely that he wanted to attack before Alexander's reinforcements exceeded his.

All summer Allied planes had ranged up & down the Mediterranean, bombing Rommel's communication lines, but they had never succeeded in shutting off his streams of supply. London calculated that there were some 140,000 Germans and Italians --shock troops, armor, motorized divisions and paratroops--disposed along the 35-mile front and piled up in reserve behind the lines.

As for the British, before the holocaust last June they had some 100,000 actives to oppose 90,000 Axis troops. They had lost 25,000 in one disastrous day at Tobruk, 230 out of 300 tanks in one disastrous afternoon (TIME, July 13). It was doubtful that enough armor had reached the British in two months' time to put them on a par with the Germans. But they were probably still superior in the air.

These were matters of relative strength. Another matter of relativity was the untested ability of General Alexander to cope with the rowdy Rommel. If the two men's abilities were as well balanced as their forces, Rommel would not take Suez.

If Alexander succeeded where Wavell, Cunningham, Ritchie and Auchinleck had their tails twisted, Britons would put him in a special niche of fame. Britons, watching Alexander and Rommel square off, had a deep, personal feeling about this battle, for Rommel was the one enemy for whom they felt a deep, personal hatred--and respect. Around him had gathered the myths which decorate the great.* To destroy Rommel would be to win more than a battle.

General Alexander understood Rommel's war of wile, ambush and sudden attack. He got an early training in something like it. The third son of the fourth Earl of Caledon, he was left fatherless at a tender age and given over more or less to the care of his brothers. Their home was a large and straggling mansion in Northern Ireland. Most of the time Harold and his brothers ran wild in the woods and fields, spent their nights with poachers.

When he was not ranging the countryside Harold applied himself to cabinetmaking and metalworking. But at the age of ten, when he was finally sent off to school, he could not write his own name.

He plunged into solitary and laborious study. Small, tough as nails, he also became an accomplished athlete (he later set an Army record for the mile). Harrow and Sandhurst polished him off.

He fought in France in World War I. A lieutenant colonel at 26, he commanded a battalion; at 36 commanded a regiment; at 42, a brigade. Today, at 50, he is a brown, hard-faced, fit-looking general. He speaks French, Italian, German, Russian, and Urdu. Before the war he painted watercolors, studied science and archeology. After his retreat from Burma he. spent a month's leave in England rebuilding a blitzed greenhouse so that his wife could grow tomatoes.

Though Alexander had the misfortune to command two retreats (Dunkirk was the other), in both cases he got the job after other generals had been recalled, possibly too late. His own motto is: "Attack, attack and reattack, even when you are on the defensive." His politeness is unfailing, but staff officers confronting him for the first time remark his pale blue eyes with unwavering, pinpoint pupils, his clipped mustache and his clipped, machine-gun orders; they regard him as a somewhat dashing but thoroughly competent commander. His chief aide in the field as the battle joined was Lieut. General Bernard Law Montgomery, 54-year-old Ulsterman, who is merciless, almost brutal. In the two of them Rommel might indeed have met his equals.

"Sturm, Schwung, Wucht." And so it looked this week. Rommel began his action with feints towards the north, then a jab at the southern front. With his entire Afrika Korps of four divisions--tank columns and light infantry--he swept along the edge of the Qattara Depression, struck at the British lines, penetrated some distance into British mine fields, swung toward the seacoast. This was Rommel's Sturm, Schwung, Wucht.* The operation was reminiscent of the wide sweep he had made around Bir Hacheim in May. But Alexander and Montgomery were ready for him. They had learned some lessons about desert warfare:

> They were not caught by surprise. Reconnoitering by land and in the air had appraised them of Rommel's intentions.

> They lay low. Alexander's own philosophy of attack also recognized the possibility of entrapment. They waited to see which way Rommel's Sturm swung.

> They conserved their power. They sent medium tanks, among which were U.S. crews getting their first lesson in actual combat, to harass, work on the flanks, blunt the Sturm without meeting it in head-on collision. General Grants operated by U.S. crews waylaid one column of Mark Ills and Mark IVs and routed them. (Said Private Barney Rossi, of Brooklyn: "If we'd had our newest tanks we'd have moidered dem bums.")

> They used their artillery, turned strategically placed 25-pounders on Rommel, knocked out his tanks, even blew up some of his deadly 88-mm. cannon.

> They used their air power in teamwork with ground forces. At Rommel's advancing columns they unleashed the fiercest air attack the desert has yet seen. Along with the British planes were U.S. bombers of Colonel C. G. Goodrich's command and U.S. fighters under the command of Brigadier General Auby Strickland. They routed the Luftwaffe by the very weight of numbers, until they were able to blast Rommel at will, morning, noon and night.

They pounded his supply lines, even sent planes over the Mediterranean toward Crete and Sicily to attack ships moving in slow convoys with new supplies for Rommel's reserves. Sunk within four days were three Axis tankers, two freighters laden with motor vehicles, one destroyer.

Licked, Not Liquidated. This time the British broke Rommel's Schwung before it got fully under way. For the British had before them a real wall of steel and men and mines, stretching from Qattara to the sea. They stopped Rommel against that wall, in the valley between the ridges of El Hemeimat and El Ruweisat. There they kept pressing him back on his heels until he grudgingly gave way, edged back from a battlefield littered with his demolished tanks and motor vehicles.

Rommel's first failure was not merely a failure to find and exploit a weak place in the Eighth Army's line. A specific, carefully planned mode of attack, by which he had expected to break the British line, had failed. It was a method which he had used before, in more open battlefields, and it had usually worked. It was to drive an alley through or around a flank of the British defenses, then line the side toward the enemy's main forces with an impenetrable wall of artillery and aircraft. This time he tried to drive such an alley through the British mine fields, between the Eighth Army's southern flank and the Qattara Depression. Had he succeeded, he could then have moved his forces through the alley and used them as he liked in the British rear. Failing, he was stopped.

But Rommel was not yet defeated. If he can find another way, or enough armor, artillery and aircraft to make the first way work at El Alamein, he will be pounding toward the Nile once more. If he fails, the star of Rommel will be eclipsed by the star of Alexander, and the valley of the Nile will be secure.

In the Valley of the Nile, skinny, red-brown fellahin labored from sunup to sundown, pushed their ancient wooden farm tools behind their water buffaloes, patiently raised the river water by their shadoofs (well sweeps) and dumped it on to their fields, bucket by bucket, as their ancestors had before them. Their patches of maize were green. From their mud-brick huts they lifted their eyes, squinted at the Allied planes. Allied or Axis, it made little difference. The Nile was rising again to enrich their land, for which God be thanked.

* Latest Rommel "true story" : Brigade headquarters of an advanced unit got this message from a trooper sent out to bring in water: "Rommel captured, returning on foot." Out rushed a whole tank squadron to meet him. There was the trooper, plodding across the desert, leading a camel by its headrope. "Where is he?" barked the Senior Officer. "Where's 'oo" inquired the trooper. "Rommel," yelped the S.O., waving the message under his nose. " 'Rommel Captured,' " read the trooper interestedly. "Wot I said was 'Camel ruptured.' "

* Attack, impetus, weight.

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