Fall of Bardia

At dusk the British bombers began to thunder in from the east. Out in the desert the Australians lay hidden with their tanks. Offshore the main body of the Mediterranean Fleet was steaming into position.

The besieged Italians had never seen anything like it. After the first few minutes flares became an extravagance. Incendiaries and explosives touched off leaping fires that lit the whole town. Along the arc of defenses which guarded the landward side a rain of bombs gouged out pillboxes and machine guns. Tanks and armored cars were battered, gutted. Heaps of materiel were fired and blown up. All night the British kept at it, crisscrossing the sky in steady waves.

Then, at dawn on Jan. 3, backed by the R. A. F. and a barrage of heavy artillery, the Australians struck. Big, husky, uncontrollable men. they, like their Anzac fathers before them, had for months made their officers' lives hell. They had taken the war as a vast, rowdy picnic. On the way to their battle stations they had made themselves more feared than the enemy wherever they stopped, made a shambles of Army discipline. When they were refused permission to land in Ceylon they swam ashore in their shorts, frolicked about half-naked in the streets for two days before they could be rounded up.

Those who turned up in Capetown promptly raided the town's big breweries, kissed all the kissable women, commandeered the town's dray horses and staged a Melbourne Gold Cup race down the main street. But now they wanted to fight.

Their big tanks raced forward through clouds of sand, to the southwest of the city. Sappers had blown earth into the tank traps, cut the thinly strung wire, exploded the land mines with flung stones.

Behind the big tanks came lighter tanks and armored cars, followed by waves of soldiers, shouting out the chorus from The Wizard of Oz. By noon they had driven a gaping wedge into the Italian defenses 12,000 yards wide, 3,000 yards deep.

While the tanks sliced through to harry the Italians from the rear, the infantry went to work mopping up with bayonets and hand grenades.

To the east, where the Italians had expected the first attack, another Australian force cracked the outer line again, cutting off a string of pillboxes. The Australians swept two miles into the defenses through both breaks. At nightfall 5,000 Italians had been taken prisoner.

Enter R. N. As the British land forces, stung by bitter winds and flying sand, burrowed into the wadi for the night, the Royal Navy began its part. In towards the shore slipped the monitor Terror, with her the river gunboats Ladybird* and Aphis. At extreme range the Terror's big 15-inchers opened up, started chewing at the cliffs where Italian batteries were dug in. Steadily the little flotilla moved closer, bringing smaller guns into action. Within two hours the main line of the battle fleet had moved into position and started pumping shells in a whistling stream into the shore batteries. For hours they kept it up. Bucking from the recoil of their guns, the advance units moved into the harbor.

By dawn on Jan. 4 the Italians could reply only with intermittent fire. The British land-sea-air attack had silenced most of their guns. Huge clouds of smoke hung over the battered town. Then a whole section of the cliff gave way. Roaring down to the sea in an avalanche of sand and rock it wiped out many of the Italian gun positions in a single stroke.

While the fleet moved off to help the R. A. F, block the Italian line of retreat to Tobruch, the Australians started pushing again, this time from the north. That afternoon 15,000 of the Italians were in British hands, the rest "confined to a restricted area." The Rome radio warned the Italian people that Bardia was about to fall. The Italians no longer stood by their positions. Three thousand were taken out of one cave. Neither side's casualties were heavy.

At sunset the Italian flag was hauled down from the Bardia Government House; at 1130 the next afternoon Bardia officially surrendered. The British raised their estimate of prisoners taken to over 25,000, including General Annibale Bergonzoli, leader of Fascist volunteers in Spain, and four other generals.* Forty-five light tanks and five medium tanks were captured or destroyed. Australians were already carrying supplies in Italian trucks, dispatches on Italian motorcycles. They were ensconced in Italian quarters, eating Italian food.

That night the estimate of prisoners taken was boosted to 30,000 by the Australian commander, slim, soft-voiced Major General Iven Giffard Mackay, who earned the title "Iven the Terrible" in World War I, spent his time between wars as headmaster of a school in Sydney.

What Next? Although Bardia fell it had given the British their first real check in their four-week campaign. After the storming by surprise of the positions around Sidi Barrani, the British had romped ahead to Libya over the road which the Italian invaders had conveniently built. When Bardia proved too tough a problem for motorized troops with air and naval aid to solve, the British had to spend a fortnight strengthening their land forces and hauling up heavy artillery, while Graziani gained precious time for reorganization at Tobruch.

But though the siege slowed the British, their advance guard had pushed on. The High Command claimed an armored car detachment had spent Christmas Day in an abandoned airdrome near Tobruch, 70 miles farther to the west. Free French troops were reported in control of sections of the Bardia-Tobruch road. Day & night the R. A. F. had slugged bases in both Italy and Libya, striking at Gazala, Derna, Tobruch, Tripoli, the ports of Taranto, Palermo and Naples.

At sea the fleet had kept chopping at Italian supply lines all week. A submarine (British or Greek) sank three Italian merchantmen in the Adriatic. Next day another Italian ship was torpedoed off the Yugoslav coast. An armed merchantman was sunk after a running fight in the same waters. The submarine Thetis which foundered off Liverpool in 1939, now raised and renamed the Thunderbolt, torpedoed an Italian submarine cruising on the surface.

Enter Germans? Against the parade of catastrophes Italy could talk only of the help it was going to get from its Axis partner. With a flourish General Francesco Pricolo, Chief of Staff of the Italian Air Force, announced the withdrawal of Italian airmen from Channel bases and the imminent arrival of Nazi airmen in the Mediterranean area: ''The common work will bind ever more those spirits already tempered by the conflict that has taken place and will cement them in a more intimate brotherhood of arms."

With their invasions in reverse on two fronts, their supply lines badly snarled, their Navy and Air Forces no more effective than their Armies, Italians this week took what comfort they could from the words of the Rome radio:

"A few hard knocks have been given to the Italians. . . . But their main Army remains intact. . . . The British to all intents and purposes are as far off from a decision as ever. And the internal front of Italy not only has not collapsed but it has been strengthened. Consequently, we can without any hesitation conclude that the great British offensive has proved a fiasco."

* She carried survivors from the Panay down the Yangtze River to Shanghai in 1937. * An Australian destroyer last week captured a 100-ton Italian schooner in the Mediterranean.

Aboard it were nine British prisoners of war who overpowered their guards, locked 100 soldiers below decks when the warship appeared.

"The only British troops the Italians ever captured," said the Australian skipper, they were on their way to Tobruch "for show pieces."

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