Toward the Last Shore

At El Alamein, at Bengasi, at Tripoli, at the Mareth Line and finally at Bizerte and Tunis, the battle for the southern shore of the Mediterranean had been won by the Allies. Now it was time to fight for the islands of that sea and for its northern shores.

Ready In the West. Said a German military commentator, Captain Ludwig Sertorius: "The huge British and American army reserves massed in Algeria and Morocco are enough to form not one but several armies. . . . The Allied high command . . . is planning a. landing maneuver on a large scale."

Part of the Allied reserve is the U.S. Fifth Army, trained first in the U.S., then behind the lines in North Africa, under the command of Lieut. General Mark Clark. The Fifth was stationed during the winter and spring near the border of Spanish Morocco. On at least one occasion General Clark crossed the border, conferred in secrecy and amity with Franco's High Commissioner Luis Orgaz Yoldi.

In any case, General Eisenhower visited the Fifth Army last week and spoke to them as if their hour of action was imminent: "I know that in the days ahead you will make a grateful nation proud of you."

For weeks the Spanish peepers by Gibraltar had reported sea traffic pouring through the Pillars of Hercules in volume great enough to carry Mark Clark's Army and then some. One day Berlin reported 23 transports and tankers escorted by carriers, battleships and smaller ships going eastward, two days later reported 150 landing barges, escorted by destroyers and a carrier.

The Germans gave tangible evidence that they expected an attack soon: according to London reports, a German force of between 80 and 100 heavy torpedo bombers had been shifted from Norway to Sicily. These bombers, commanded by Luftwaffe General Hans Juergen Stumpff, caused great losses on the Allies' northern convoy route to Murmansk last year, and they could be dangerous to any invasion fleet in the western Mediterranean.

Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, who for a year has been commander of German defenses in western Europe, appeared last week in Sicily. Just before leaving Berlin he said (according to BBC): "I share Marshal Rommel's opinion that the Eighth Army has been chosen to invade the European Continent."

Ready in the East. The British have two armies--the Ninth and Tenth--in Syria, Palestine, Persia and Iraq. Fortnight ago troops on Cyprus,which has been built up into a formidable base, completed maneuvers, and the men were declared "ready to take the offensive." The Allies have had time to refurbish airfields in Cyrenaica, only 200 miles from Crete, a logical objective of Allied activity in the eastern Mediterranean and a. barrier to any invasion of the Balkans. For their part, the nervous Germans moved last-week into Italian Rhodes, on Crete's flank and only 100 miles away. Marshal Rommel was reported to have completed a tour of Salonika and the Greek islands.

Some of the reports of activity in the Mediterranean may have been mere puffs of smoke. But there was much kindling on the islands--on Sardinia, Crete, Corsica, Lampedusa, Pantelleria, Sicily--and there was fire near the kindling.

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