Closing Trap

Rommel's African days were growing shorter. The strung-out columns of his army unraveled, steadily shredded away as he frantically dragged westward along the Libyan coast. Ahead lay the El Agheila bottleneck, the most logical place for Rommel to try to make a stand (TIME, Nov. 23). Beyond that lay the long (600 mi.) and weary route to Tripoli which, by the time Rommel gets there, may be only the other end of a slowly closing trap.

Last week Rommel abandoned Bengasi on the Cyrenaican hump. Short of Tripoli itself, Bengasi was the last port left to him and the last chance he had to evacuate by sea. But it was not much of a chance at that. The British were hot after him'. Evacuating from Bengasi would have been a Dunkirk in reverse, a disaster which Rommel elected to put off.

Britain's Montgomery almost caught him south of Bengasi. While Montgomery's main force followed Rommel's wreck-strewn trail around the coast, a second column cut across the Cyrenaican hump. The intercepting column was just too late. By the time it had battered down a holding force which Rommel left along a 50-mile escarpment, Rommel's main army had slipped past, desperately wriggling on along the seacoast.

Weather held the British up. Torrential rains lashed the rolling hills of Cyrenaica, a far different terrain from the hot, flat desert floor where the battle had begun 31 days before. Inland roads that climb and twist around precipitous cliffs were seas of mud. Motorized forces were delayed. Allied planes were grounded. And every day of advance beyond the El Alamein bases, now 500 miles back, made Montgomery's supply problems more acute.

Rommel played for time. The Eighth Army in Libya, the British, French and Americans in Tunisia strove to rob him of time, to deny him his one avenue of escape at Tripoli. Allied bombers, ranging far ahead of Allied troops, pounded the port. Until Tripoli was the Allies', until Rommel had neither time nor the vestiges of an army, he could not be counted out.

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