Ships on the Desert?

Last August, before the Italians made their initial, short-lived drive into Egypt, Britain's defense-minded military expert, Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart, wrote some extremely interesting words about defending the Western Desert of Egypt. The narrow coastal route, he said, was badly exposed to naval bombardment and concentrated air attack, and badly confined by its escarpment parallel to the shore. That later proved true. But:

"South of it, in the interior, lies the vast desert expanse. It is a perfect barrier against the normal kind of force. But more danger might arise if an invader applied a new mechanized technique, adapted from that which the Germans employed in France, and had really up-to-date means of carrying it out. We must reckon with the possibility. A wide-fronted advance by well-dispersed mechanized units, acting on infiltration methods, would be much harder to check than any old-style column.

The most effective answer would be the counter-manoeuvre of our own armoured forces. In such a mobile operation between modern 'ships of the desert much might depend on which side could bring into action the more powerful battle tanks."

Last week Britons had to reckon with Captain Liddell Hart's now very possible possibility. The German Libyan offense went into its third week of apparent doldrum. The British, worrying about morale at home, made much of their successes--a naval assault on Tripoli in which the town was given a thorough shellacking, a few raids out of Tobruch against Axis supply lines, a seaborne raid near Bardia in which a bridge was said to have been blown up, a few tank patrols near Salum. And they minimized the decision of the Duke of Aosta, commanding Italian forces in East Africa, not to capitulate--which would mean further delay in moving forces to threatened Egypt. But the pause was poisoned for many Britons by the thought that the Germans might not stick to the coastal route, where they might be stopped relatively easily.

Vichy sources made the flat assertion that the Germans were concentrating a force at the Cufra Oases, 500 miles south of the Libyan coast. The force was said to have been flown in, complete with air-carried baby tanks. Only British air reconnaissance could tell whether this was fact or fable. A Rome report, answering the British protest that no. soldier could operate in the desert's summer heat (as high as 130DEG), was that the German tanks were equipped with refrigeration pipes.

But whether reports like these were true, as they might be, or just part of the war of nerves, the British had still to consider seriously the possibility that the Germans, in developing the giant southern claw of the Suez pincer (see map, p. 29), might attack Egypt not along the coastal road but on a front deep enough to get away from naval bombardment and wide enough to flow right around islands of British resistance.

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