What War Looks Like

Desert warfare is like naval warfare, as Winston Churchill has said. In some ways it is more like the warfare of wooden sailing ships than that of dreadnoughts. Desert war is a visual spectacle that calls for a Turner in the mood of The Burning of the Ships--with just a dash of Dali's eye for desert plains strewn with unreasonable wreckage. Herewith a composite picture of a day on last week's field, as described by various British correspondents on the spot:

The escarpment is empty. It is a plateau covered with scattered scrub and occasional boulders, and here & there it is cut by dry streambeds called wadies. The sun has just come up, and each stone and bush throws a long shadow.

On the horizon a low-lying cloud appears, and grows. It is a column of dust, signaling a column of vehicles. They approach. There are tanks, command cars, supply vehicles. They clank to a stop and lie scattered. Men crawl out, stretch, make repairs, talk, crawl back in.

Another column of dust peels from the skyline. The command cars and supply trucks of the first column withdraw. The tanks fall into formation, face the approaching column.

The first cannon flashes. Then the two formations gambit and answer with feints, approaches, withdrawals which seem as tentative and formal as a minuet. Then they begin to mix it up.

Suddenly the whole field is a melee. Low-lying, dust-colored British tanks, flying their proud little regimental pennants, crisscross and interweave with the darker Nazi vehicles, each marked with great white crosses. Some get so close that cannons are fired over open sights. Tanks suddenly buckle into twisted masses and leap clear off the ground under the impact of point-blank hits. Shells crash in all directions; friend sometimes hits friend.

The battle pitches a tent of smoke and dust over itself. Into the murk new forms rush. Supply vehicles, naked of protection, dart squarely into the mixup, make contact with tanks which have run out of fuel or ammunition, and, if they are not crumpled, bounce out again. Command cars dash in & out. Ambulances go in undaunted, and their crews run about hunting wounded men.

Some tanks throw or break their tracks, and lie still like wounded animals. New weapons appear--ugly little German 20-mm. ultra high-velocity anti-tank guns, motorized 75s, an occasional Hurricane blazing away with four cannon, Stukas in their grim game of selective diving.

Suddenly (showing that the crazy helter-skelter of tanks was as tightly controlled by radio as a well-commanded platoon of infantry) all the tanks of one adversary wheel out of the fight. The other tanks also go off to a rendezvous.

Now the escarpment is strewn with broken, burning vehicles, overturned tanks, the guts of trucks, smashed guns, upended smoldering airplanes. Wounded and lost men sort themselves out, groping for water or food, staggering, like drunks, in search of ambulances.

Single vehicles rush past. A lost truck stops and asks a wounded man where a certain regiment's headquarters have gone. :'Can't say," comes a Tommy's reply, "I'm a stranger 'ere myself."

As evening settles with the dust of battle, a huge supply convoy comes up, like a great merchant fleet. It forms in close laager--the unprotected vehicles at the core, a ring of armored cars and tanks on the watch outside.

Night falls. Here & there in the distance Very lights go up, trucks still burn, flaming oil dumps set up a glow. The escarpment gradually goes silent.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.