Intestinal Divination

Tension rose in Cairo. Men told each other: Something has got to break. It was like thunder from the desert, an intangible but ever-growing certainty that a blow was about to fall somewhere around the Mediterranean.

Who would strike first? And where? Ordinary men--junior officers, correspondents, British Tommies, U.S. privates--did not have the answer. They simply knew that Churchill had been in Cairo, that reinforcements had been pouring into Egypt, that the British forces had a new aggressive commander (see col. 3).

Men felt in their bones that the indecisive sparring on the Egyptian front had gone on long enough. They sensed, too, the fact that the war in North Africa had reached a curious and explosive stage, where each side had everything to lose, and nothing to gain, by waiting for the other to strike. It was this feeling, a kind of intestinal divination, that made men everywhere listen for the guns.

On the El Alamein Front, where Field Marshal Rommel still hovered over Egypt, no real battles had been fought since late June. But each side had learned a great deal about the other, and what the British learned about Rommel was not pleasant:

> Despite continual bombing by British and U.S. planes, Tobruk and Bengasi were still open ports, through which a stream of men and supplies flowed from Greece and Crete. Motor-driven lighters, laden with supplies, hugged the coast in Rommel's immediate rear, supplementing the truck convoys on land. Bombings had impeded, but by no means broken up, this front-line supply system. Nor had Allied air attack smashed the Luftwaffe's airtransport line from Crete to the African battlefront.

> Rommel's air force was probably stronger than it was just after he halted at El Alamein. Allied flyers recently spotted big Luftwaffe concentrations at Rommel's advanced airdromes; they made no claim that bombing had destroyed or even seriously dented them.

> A regiment of the famed Fliegerkorps parachutists from Crete was in Rommel's front line, getting acclimated for desert warfare. More thousands of parachutists and airborne infantrymen waited in Greece and Crete, whence they could directly attack the British rear along the coast, or be shifted to Africa for use from Rommel's airdromes.

> British patrols said that Rommel had withdrawn the bulk of his German troops to the rear for rest and refitting, had left Italians to hold most of the front. He evidently had a poor opinion of Britain's Eighth Army, and of the chances of a British offensive.

The British in Egypt have been reinforced. Whether they have received enough from Britain and the U.S. for an effective offensive, no one outside the high command knows. The R.A.F. had clear superiority in the air when the front was stabilized at El Alamein; it now has considerable help from the U.S. Army Air Forces: U.S. medium bombers last week joined the heavy bombers and fighters already in action in Egypt. Correspondents, summing up the total of U.S. aid, were allowed to say only that it was not yet a flood, but that it was more than the trickle of a few months ago.

At least one official British source suggested that Rommel may be allowed to strike first. A military commentator for the British Information Services in New York observed: "Rommel is a daring and successful commander, and a master stroke on the Middle East might upset severely the strategy of the United Nations. There are many reasons why he should strike now rather than later."

Stab in the Back. It was at El Alamein that the Germans and the British actually faced each other; it was beyond El Alamein that the richest and most immediate rewards of conquest--Cairo, Suez--beckoned to Rommel. But the tense situation on that front invited action elsewhere

> Temptingly before the British was the long African coast in Rommel's rear: Spanish Morocco, France's North Africa and Tunis, all of which would raise major diplomatic problems. Italy's Tripoli and Rommel's own Cyrenaica (Bengasi) could be the target of a sudden blow to cut the rear communications of the Afrika Korps.

> Sardinia, Sicily or Italy itself might be chosen as a target. Geographical and military realities were huge and frightening obstacles, but they did not in themselves bar an effort which might also save Egypt and Suez and make it possible to supply Malta without the present appalling cost in ships.

> Crete might also be the Allied target. Else it will almost certainly be the base for a German stab.

> Or it might be farther east--a new Anglo-American front in the Caucasus to keep the Baku oilfields out of German hands.

Second Frontling? Into the reports of fresh German concentrations in Greece, Crete and the nearby Axis islands Ankara correspondents read: 1) a Nazi threat to Turkey and the whole Near East between Suez and the Caucasus; 2) the need for an immediate Allied move in the Near East to counteract the threat. The British, choosing big, 60-year-old General Sir Henry Maitland ("Jumbo'') Wilson to command a new independent army in Iraq and Persia, were perhaps preparing such a move.

If a new Allied attack should be made at any new point, it would be, not the Second Front, but only another front. Yet it might save Egypt from Rommel and prevent an eventual junction between Rommel and the German armies now in Russia.

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