Tobruk, 16 Weeks Later

The town, enduring its second siege within a year, is like an old crumbling conch shell in which some new life, some sea anemone, has tenaciously nestled. The Italians lost it after a two-week siege, but for 16 weeks the British had been surrounded in Tobruk; and last week they were more lively than ever.

Over 1,000 tons of bombs had been unloaded on and around this old shell of a town. Very few of its once neat white walls still stood intact. In the harbor the skeletons of Italian and British ships lay half-sunk, scuppers awash. The arid country around town was pocked with bomb holes and tank traps. The place looked dead, but inside the shell was a personality. Here, in a perpetual front line, a division of Imperials lived like happy caricatures of civilized men.

Soldiers walked along "London Street" last week to the post office to mail letters to their sweeties back home. They went to the well-stocked ordnance depot to get what they needed--anything from a new engine for a tank to a new stopper for a canteen. In a half-wrecked house on a square which someone had renamed Piazza Brown others listened to a phonograph grotesquely grinding out their favorite, Waltzing Matilda. A camouflage unit, fresh out of paint, improvised with captured Italian coffee (undrinkable), tomato sauce (condemned) and flour paste (plentiful).

Bakers kneaded flour and shoveled loaves by the hundreds into their ovens. Mechanics--"cannibals" to their officers --performed miracles of condensation, assembling one good vehicle from many wrecked ones. Cobblers made fantastic shoes, stitching old inner tubes for soles to Aussie felt hats for uppers.

These were patrol shoes, real "sneakers" --silent, light, comfortable. They were useful last week.

Every night when the wind was not kicking up a sand, Australian, New Zealand and Indian patrols crept out from the circle of the strong points which the Eyeties had built for their defense of Tobruk. They were armed with tommy guns, grenades and bayonets. Three or four miles out they came on Italian concentrations, inched within lobbing distance, then let fly. The Italians, clumsy at patrolling and clumsier at countering it, suffered mean casualties.

These patrols were not of great military consequence; they were of less importance than most petty skirmishes on the Russian Front. But, devised in the face of appalling living conditions, executed with a certain joy, they--and Tobruk itself--were evidence of a will to survive, testimony that the besieged Australians felt they were still top dog over their besiegers.

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