A Hand in the Mud

The Germans showed their hand in Tunisia last week--and their hand was strong. After British Guardsmen and Commandos seized two hills commanding a highway to the naval port of Bizerte, the Germans counterattacked with artillery, planes and infantry, and they rewon the hills. The German plan was evidently to hold their outer defenses at any cost, while behind the lines they prepared for battles to come when the rains cease and the African sun dries the boggy Tunisian mud.

Berlin disclosed that General Walther Nehring, the Axis commander in Tunisia, had been succeeded by a 52-year-old Panzer officer, Colonel General Juergen von Arnim, who recently led one of Field Marshal Rommel's tank divisions.

Spaatz over Doolittle. The Allies also prepared. Lieut. General Mark Wayne Clark was already shaping the various U.S. units in North Africa into the Fifth Army (TiME, Jan. 11). Last week British, U.S. and French air forces in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia were placed under the joint command of U.S. Major General Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz, who had organized the Eighth Air Force in Britain. Under him in Africa will be the R.A.F.'s Air Marshal Sir William Welsh, Major General Jimmy Doolittle, and General Jean Mendigal with his poorly equipped but zestful French airmen. General Spaatz presented 13 U.S. P-4Os to the French Lafayette Escadrille, successor to the famed U.S. squadron of World War I, and promised that the French will get more U.S. planes.

Leclerc Over the Desert. Driving northward from interior Africa (the Chad) to threaten Rommel's inner flank was a Fighting French column under one of the heroes of the De Gaullist forces. He was a young Frenchman who was wounded in 1940, twice escaped from the Germans, finally made his way to Fighting French territory in Africa and fought under the nom de guerre of Brigadier General "Jacques Leclerc," apparently to protect relatives in France. Last week his motorized forces, already well over 1,000 miles from their base at Fort Lamy in Chad, seized two Italian posts south of Tripoli. They still had 350 miles to go before they could reach the battered but unshattered Afrika Korps.

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