Run, Fox

Once again the fox was in flight. For three weeks, while General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery cautiously poked at him, Erwin Rommel had crouched in the bottleneck of El Agheila, holed up. Montgomery had been in no hurry to attack. He had had to bring up supplies across the 700 miles of desert which Rommel had already covered in his retreat from El Alamein. Until he was ready, he had kept Rommel in a state of nervousness with jabs of armored cars and tanks. First clue to his readiness came last week. Heavy artillery began to bellow from behind the British lines. Over the Axis position rolled a cloud of some 300 Allied planes. Infantry advanced. British tanks struck at the inland end of the Axis lines. British forces surged against the northern end. Rommel made scarcely a pretense of holding. He was up and off in retreat.

It seemed clear that he had never hoped to hold. Apparently his shattered Afrika Korps, filled out with odds & ends of Italians, had been a secondary concern of the German High Command, whose primary objective was to hang on to Tunis and Bizerte and strike back in northwestern Africa. The fox had been left to find another temporary refuge, possibly at Misurata, 300 miles farther along the North African coast. After Misurata was Tripoli, itself a dubious refuge, target of methodical Allied bombing.

It was too early to tell what relation Montgomery's advance bore to Lieut. General Dwight David Eisenhower's campaign in the west. It might have been designed to relieve Eisenhower by forcing the Germans to divide their strength between Tunisia and Tripolitania.

Stuck. All week Lieut. General Kenneth A. N. Anderson's First Army had been stuck in the mud. The cold and fog of a North African December hung over Tunisia and torrential rains made quagmires of the few roads that threaded the mountains. The Allies were still trying to move supplies up, still trying to equip advanced airdromes as fighter bases.

Anderson's advance columns, fingering in toward the Axis strongholds of Tunis and Bizerte on the seacoast, were mauled and forced back. German tanks harried them. German paratroops leap-frogged behind their extended positions trying to disrupt their communication lines. The Luftwaffe dominated the grey, dripping skies. There were disquieting reports that the Axis, pouring in airborne reinforcements from Italy, had gained numerical superiority along the fighting front. On the heights overlooking Mateur and Madjez-el Bab, Anderson's lightly armed advanced troops grimly hung on and waited for heavier troops to crawl up.

News was fragmentary. Allied headquarters in North Africa had little to say beyond a laconic: "There is nothing to report. Bad weather has stopped all operations."

Unstuck? Then at week's end came brighter reports. Heavy and medium U.S. bombers unleashed two days of concentrated raiding on the docks of Tunis. The waterfront of that seaport was left in flames over a distance of ten blocks. Allied fighter operations were suddenly on the increase. P-38s (see p. 83) made a sweep across Tunisia's waist to attack Axis concentrations near Sfax. One dispatch told of Allied paratroops occupying an airdrome from which British Spitfires took off 30 minutes later to challenge the Luftwaffe.

At sea, Royal Navy submarines sank five cargo ships that were trying to run the gantlet from Sicily. The submarines surfaced along the Italian coast and shelled trains and factories. Bad news for Italians was the report that Senegalese soldiers of the French colonial armies were joining Eisenhower's command. In French West Africa were more than 50,000 of the ferocious, black warriors, whom the Italians dread.

If these were signs that the Allies had gained the initiative in the west, then Montgomery's advance might be the signal that Eisenhower and Anderson were able at last to get up off their knees and launch an all-out fight for Tunis and Bizerte.

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