Good Hunting

"The Germans are out of Egypt, but there still are some left in North Africa. There is some good hunting to be had farther to the west in Libya."

That exultant message General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery* sent to his troops last week. Erwin Rommel, crippled if not yet destroyed, continued to flee. The victorious Eighth Army, spurred by its commander, pressed on his heels.

Behind the fleeing Germans and Italians was a littered trail: ledgers, military manuals, permits for furloughs, letters from home; tins of Danish hams, Norwegian herring, Dutch sausages, French wines, Munich beer; trumpets, tubas, drums (to be used in Rommel's triumphal procession into Alexandria) ; women's underwear, silk stockings, cosmetics; brandy and champagne; arms, cannon, machinery, tanks; trucks trapped by sudden rains that had turned the marshlands around Buqbuq into seas of mud. Beside the coast road lay the German dead, grey faces hidden by the peaked caps of the Afrika Korps. Beside them lay their Italian allies, men with stiff beards pointed upward at the stormy African sky.

Farewell to Arms. Bedouin tribesmen, darting out of the desert, pawed over the battlefields, scampered off with bulging sacks. Among the living wreckage were those who, hopelessly cut off from supplies and reinforcements, disheartened, parched with thirst, had chosen to give up. Among these were sullen pilots of the Luftwaffe who had been flying on the Russian front only a few days before, Italians carrying knapsacks and suitcases, glad that the fighting was over. The half dead and the wounded the British loaded into trucks and carted back to the suddenly overwhelmed hospitals of Cairo.

Rommel had been expected to make a stand at Hellfire Pass, on the Libyan border. In a desert dawn, last week, some 30 New Zealanders, whooping and firing, scaled the high escarpment that blocks the route west. An Italian force of several hundred men surrendered after a quarter-hour of token resistance. They were bitter at their German allies. Where was Marshal Rommel? That was what the Italians wanted to know. When they saw him next. . . . They drew their hands across their throats.

Montgomery's pursuing troops swept into Tobruk, where Imperial troops in 1941 held Rommel off for eight months. Montgomery pushed on. A German news agency reported that Rommel in shirt and shorts, minus his coat and his favorite grey-&-white striped scarf, fled from a field headquarters just in time to avoid capture by British tanks. Arriving at a new base, he cracked (according to Nazi propaganda): "Like Napoleon I lost my equipment but there won't be any Waterloo."

The Wicked Fleeth. It was not clear how many men Rommel had been able to pull out of the fire. Winston Churchill said that 75,000 Axis troops had been put out of the fight. Cairo reported that ten Italian generals and some 30,000 other Axis captives had already reached the British Army's rear. Other thousands, not slain or wounded, still wandered in the desert. Rommel might have some 20,000 effectives left, plus a few Italian reserve divisions, a remnant of his original force, but still the nucleus of an army if it was permitted time and opportunity to reform.

The British were determined that he should have neither, even though the pursuit became more difficult with every mile that the Eighth Army, moving westward, extended its line of supplies. As rapidly as he could, Montgomery moved his bases forward across the desert, he had supplies carried up to Tobruk by sea; he put to use abandoned Axis airports. Flying far ahead of British tanks, Allied pilots pounded at Rommel's retreating columns, gave him no peace. When Rommel lifted a futile hand to ward them off, the few planes which he sent up were knocked out of the sky. London reported this week that Rommel was in Munich explaining things to a wrathful Adolf Hitler.

There were signs that Rommel might try to evacuate the coast. If he did, the British would have their revenge for Dunkirk. He might make a stand at el-Agheila, where salt marshes and the sea form a bottleneck. El-Agheila so far has been the farthest point of any British advance. After el-Agheila there was Tripoli. But that refuge might be closed to him long before he got there. Allied forces in Tunisia were rolling east.

Ordered the inexorable Montgomery, who mixes soldiering with religion: "On with the task."

*Elevated to a full general last week and made a Knight Commander of the Bath.

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