"Stick It"

The Germans were ready. Their Italian stooges were ready. So were the British and their Free French allies. Over the grey Libyan Desert the air quivered in the peak heat of the early hot season. The heat made men and machines thirstier, and the desert was stingy with water. Metal in the sun was too hot to touch. But for the moment no khamsin was blowing, no dreadful sandstorm to grind up men and machines. And it was not too hot to fight.

Thrice before, the Axis had struck eastward across North Africa, twice before the British had counter-driven to the west. Now for the fourth time the Axis attacked. From tank parks south of Derna, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Nazis' smartest desert general, sent his divisions toward the Allied post at Bir Hacheim south of Tobruk. While Italian tanks made a holding attack on the post and were beaten off by Free French defenders with a loss of 35 Axis machines, 250 German tanks made an end run clear around Bir Hacheim, veered north toward the coast and Tobruk. The British met the German columns, blunted them and beat them back to the west. Around Knightsbridge the battle swirled for days.

Spitfires Over Stukas. Some Stukas and other planes helped the Germans, but the R.A.F. was clearly dominant in the air. Spitfires, Hurricanes and U.S. fighters and bombers (British-manned) made scores of deadly sweeps against the attackers, shooting up enemy supply trains and tearing some of them to shreds. The British were delighted beyond measure when they shot down a German reconnaissance plane and found in the wreck, alive and spattered with the blood of. his dead pilot, a Wehrmacht bigwig: General Ludwig Cruewell, Rommel's second in command and head of the forces attacking Tobruk.

To fill their offensive pool of men and arms in Africa, the Germans had had to get their convoys past the tiny, bristling island of Malta. Their constant raiding had kept Malta busy protecting itself while the convoys got by, but they had lost hundreds & hundreds of planes. Their weakness in the air now made it look as if they had paid almost too much.

Evidently Rommel counted on lancing through to Tobruk before British air power beat him back. One captured German said he had expected to be in Tobruk that night.

Chapter Six. Erwin Rommel was wielding the most massive ground forces the Axis had ever had in Africa, in five campaigns over the same ground. The British also had never been stronger. Their arsenal included new U.S. medium tanks as well as U.S. planes, and their manpower included U.S. mechanics--the most essential of personnel in tank warfare, where 50% to 90% of the machines in action are often disabled in a single battle.

The German tanks, still packed more firepower than the British, but this advantage was being cut down fast. The British had learned that they could match heavier firepower with tactical skill, smoke screening, ganging up--exactly as three British cruisers had harried the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee to her doom off Montevideo. Tank warfare in the desert resembles sea war in more ways than one: the taking of ground means nothing; the location and destruction of the hostile land fleets everything.

Rommel's push might be the southern prong of an Axis drive for the Middle East, with the north prong aimed at the Caucasus and perhaps a central prong from Greece and the Aegean Islands through Turkey. If so, the capture of Tobruk would be just an opening puncture for Rommel, as the capture of Kerch had been an opening puncture for Field Marshal Dieter Wilhelm von Mannstein. Or it might be merely an attack to test the British strength and prevent the diversion of British units to Syria.

At week's end Rommel's battered columns were backing & filling short of Tobruk. General Sir Claude Auchinleck the British Middle East Commander in Chief, wired congratulations to Lieut. General Neil Methuen Ritchie's defending Eighth Army: "Well done indeed, Eighth Army. Stick it. Hang on to him. Never leave him. Don't let him get away. Give him no rest. Good luck to you all."

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