Gambit at Gambut

The General Officer Commanding the British forces in Egypt thought he saw something coming from the direction of Libya last week--something pretty big. He decided to strike the big thing before it struck him.

The General Officer Commanding had been busy preparing for this something for several weeks, but his name was announced to the world only last week just before he went into action: Lieut. General Sir James Handyside Marshall-Cornwall. Sir James is one of the most versatile men in the British Army. He started as an artilleryman. He was largely responsible for training the British Intelligence Corps in the last war. He speaks French, German, Italian, Turkish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Greek and a smattering of other tongues. He has been on enough military missions to know how a score of potential allies would operate. He is a particular expert on Turkey and on Thrace. But last, as first, he is an artilleryman.

General Marshall-Cornwall had his artillery all set last week, clean of sand, trained westward, and mounted for mobility. To make some of his guns mobile, he had loaded them on to ordinary trucks. He would have been glad to have a few more shielded guns on wheels--Bren carriers and tanks; but with the Axis threat from Libya growing every day, General Marshall-Cornwall knew it was now or never; attack or be attacked.

The Germans were very visibly moving a force to the Egyptian border. The R.A.F. caught a huge convoy of trucks, mostly large "tankers," as it crept up from the Axis base at Bengasi, and claimed to have destroyed 30. Three days later Army patrols attacked a land convoy between Tobruch and Salum, and destroyed twelve more. British reconnaissance noted ex tensive digging on the escarpment around Halfaya Pass, only convenient gate from Libya to Egypt; extensive aerial preparations at the airports of Derna and Gambut.

As usual the Italians could not suppress their excitement. Rome radio vaunted: "Three million tons of goods and one million men have been carried by Italian ships across the Mediterranean in the last two months."

If such power as this was really being assembled in Egypt, it would be inexcusable to let it complete preparations for attack and get rolling. The only answer could be an anticipatory attack--not just a patrol, not just a raid, but a real whang. If it failed, the German preparations for attack would at least have been hampered. If it succeeded, Winston Churchill and all his people would have much to be thankful for.

This week General Marshall-Cornwall whanged away. The opening gambit was addressed somewhat south of Salum, on the coast hard by the Libyan border. On the second day, British advance forces reached Gambut, 40 miles inside Libya, there claimed to have put to rout an Italian column, and to have destroyed a dozen more vehicles. Both German and Italian communiques claimed that the attack was broken, and the Germans said their dive-bombers had crushed 60 British vehicles. But both the German and Italian communiques admitted on the second day that the battle was continuing.

When the British swept the Italians out of Egypt and Bengasi last winter, they achieved immediate and complete air superiority. This would be the prerequisite to a repeated success. In the first hours of fighting the rivals' claims suggested that the British had achieved the narrow edge which attackers would naturally have--but as yet nothing like decisive superiority. The British claimed one Italian and five German fighters shot down, eleven destroyed on the ground. The Axis claimed eleven British planes shot down.

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