Rommel Marches On

For the British it was utter, humiliating defeat. Tobruk, the same battle-scarred port that last year held out for eight months against Axis besiegers, succumbed to one day's attack. Tobruk fell quickly, squashily, to the planes, tanks and guns of Germany's Erwin Rommel. The Axis announced that it took 28,000 Allied prisoners in the garrison, including "several generals." This was indirectly confirmed by a British report which said that Axis shelling prevented any substantial rescue by sea.

Rommel was well known to be a demoniac master of desert war, but neither the British nor the U.S. public was prepared for Tobruk's fall. For it followed weeks of such cheery headlines as these: Planes pound Axis units in Libya. . . . British in Libya mopping up. . . . Heroic stand at Bir Hacheim foils Rommel. . . . Axis road to Egypt barred. . . . Even two days after Tobruk fell, the New York World-Telegram still bleated: R.A.F. Blasts Nazis in Libya.

When Rommel started his offensive last month, he seemed weak in the air; correspondents cabled exultantly about R.A.F. superiority. It turned out that Rommel had plenty of planes. The British were also confident that their ground forces matched the enemy. One thing Rommel did, apparently, was to let the British exhaust themselves winning their "victories," then throw in his reserves to take the real victory. Moreover, he changed the pattern of desert warfare by stepping up the role of artillery. Before Tobruk's fall, when the British, confident of equal armor and equal or greater air strength, attacked Rommel's line south of the port, the German surprised them with a massive assembly of 88-mm. anti-tank guns and the British tanks took a dismal mauling--suffering losses which were at least partially responsible for the British defeat.

The London Evening Standard's correspondent cabled from Cairo: "This is the story of Britain's regression in the Western Desert. . . . It is a story partly of faulty leadership, partly of our war machines, partly of our men who guide those machines to battle."

The Briton-in-the-street was as mad as a blitzed Briton, and Winston Churchill was in for more trouble the moment he got back from the U.S. The British remembered General Sir Claude Auchinleck's order of the day issued in the battle's first week: "Well done indeed, Eighth Army. Stick it. Hang on to him. Never leave him. . . . Give him no rest. . .."

While Londoners raged at a distance, the people of Alexandria flew into a state of British calm. Said an A.P. dispatch from there: "Britons in Alexandria . . . are watching the enemy moves without alarm. Alexandrians dance on and are well supplied with food and drink."

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