Battle of Cyrenaica

Rome and Naples bubbled joyously one day last week. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani's "Terribili" legions in Libya had turned terribly on their British attackers and terribly smashed them to bits. They had taken 50,000--100,000--150,000 prisoners. They were marching triumphantly eastward again along their Via Vittoria (Victory Road) to Sidi Barrani in Egypt. Roman history had been made!

Bitterly the Italian High Command had to correct these reports. The "Terribili" were not marching eastward. The High Command did not stress the fact that they were running westward, farther and farther into Libya. The prisoners were not British, they were Italian--31,546 of them (so far counted), including 1,626 officers. It was not a Roman victory, it was another shocking Roman rout, a fierce continuation of last fortnight's Battle of the Marmarica in which, after slicing through Capuzzo (in the line of forts guarding Libya's eastern border), savage little squadrons of fast British tanks and Bren gun-carriers whipped around the port of Bardia, outflanking it as they had outflanked Sidi Barrani and Salum.

Bardia lies in a deep, winding wadi (river gorge) whose walls are honeycombed with stone caves. But for those caves, many more of the 20,000-30,000 Italian soldiers trapped there last week would have died. Enough died as it was under a ceaseless inferno of bombs from the R. A. F. and shells from the Royal Navy. For five days many units of the latter lay to offshore, grimly pouring broadside after broadside into the flaming town. In an extraordinarily daring exploit, one British "light vessel" (possibly a destroyer) penetrated Bardia's inner harbor, and in a hail of Italian machine-gun fire from shore, sank three Italian supply vessels. The Italians tried, with torpedo planes, to drive off the iron-clad fortresses which their shore batteries could not hit or harm, but the R. N. stood its water in a historic demonstration of naval fire power supporting a land attack. The R. N. also supplied water, food and munitions to the land forces, which were 130 miles from their railhead at Matruh; and relieved them of inconvenient prisoners.

In Bardia were two Italian divisions, remnants of a third, and escapists from the Battle of the Marmarica.* They lay in their wadi, behind a semicircle of concrete pillboxes, land mines and artillery emplacements, 15 miles in perimeter. After the British mechanized units, commanded by Major General Michael O'Moore Creagh had pinned them in, the encircled men tried to run for it, thousands at a time. As they fled on the coast road around the rim of Cyrenaica toward Marshal Graziani's main fortified base at Tobruch, 70 miles west, the R. A. F. and the mechanized British attacked them and occasionally fleet units shelled the road. At length the Bardia troops resigned themselves to being bottled up, praying for rescue.

This was not forthcoming last week. Having lost from one-fifth to one-quarter of all his troops--and probably having nearly half his Army so disorganized as to be out of action--Marshal Graziani was in turn praying for help from home. The disorganization of his armies was the more complete in that most of their attack equipment, massed in the east for a drive on Alexandria and Cairo, had been lost. (The British were astonished at how heavily the Italians had planned to travel, and also at curious shortages in the equipment, especially steel helmets, barbed wire.) Graziani, in explaining himself to Mussolini, put the blame of his defeat on a shortage of tanks. While Graziani worked desperately to reform his Army, the British surrounded Bardia with artillery and infantry. The R. A. F., ranging even more widely, rained bombs on Tobruch. Derna, even on the main Italian air bases across Libya at Benina, Benghazi, Castel Benito. Graziani had some 200,000 men left and possibly--just possibly--he was lying back to let the British extend themselves into Libya.

The British were out, not to capture territory, but to smash Graziani once & for all. Their chance of doing so with some 40,000 men, of whom by last week they had lost relatively few, was enormously enhanced by the crushing power of their fleet's big guns, so easy to move from place to place, so easy (apparently) to defend against Italian planes.

Prime Minister Hussein Sirry Pasha of Egypt went out last week, escorted by Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore and Lieut. General Sir Henry Maitland ("Jumbo") Wilson to see how cleanly, how terribly the British & Imperial Army of the Nile, plus the R. N. and the R. A. F., had swept his country's desert fringe clear of Italians. But a man who awaited Graziani's further defeat with even keener relish was Seyyid Idris el Senussi, swart chieftain of the Libyan desert tribes whom Graziani "pacified" in 1930, executing their leaders, reputedly dropping their bodies into their camps from airplanes, then burning the camps and villages, impressing survivors into labor gangs and conscript regiments. Seyyid Idris was one of Commander in Chief General Sir Archibald Wavell's chief advisers in planning the war against Graziani, and last week, as that war went so amazingly well, his followers were reported rising through the desert back country, sabotaging Italian rear areas, slitting Italian throats.

Another desert revolt was forming in the eastern wing of the southern war theatre. Somewhere below Khartoum was wizened little Emperor Haile Selassie, sending word to tribesmen in the fastnesses of captive Ethiopia that the day of liberation, castration and feasting was at hand. The British had no major force to spare for a strong thrust at the 100,000 Italians cut off from home in Ethiopia, but at Gallabat, Kassala and down in Italian Somaliland they delivered jabs and jolts. In a swift raid they seized El Wak, across Kenya's east border, took 120 prisoners, seized or burned important Italian supplies.

Through all these actions, most conspicuous by its absence was the renowned Italian Air Force. A captured Blackshirt pilot shed some light. "Of what use are our two-gun planes," he asked, "against the British eight-guns?"

* Passengers of the U. S. liner President Garfield which docked last week in Manhattan told of seeing "6,000 or more" Italian prisoners (probably an exaggeration, for these Italian prisoners must have been taken before the Battle of the Marmarica) aboard the Cunarder Queen Mary in Bombay, en route to prison in Australia, whence the Queen will soon fetch 16,000 more Anzacs for the Middle East. In Bombay also they saw the He de France, idle; at Cape Town, the Queen Elizabeth, at anchor.

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