BATTLE OF AFRICA: The Scythe and the Ring

In Tunisia, Axis and Allied troops approached the climactic battle for North Africa.

The news last week was fragmentary. Virtually all that General Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters revealed was that Allied forces were moving steadily eastward from Algeria. The advance was four-pronged —one prong aimed at the Gulf of Gabes in order to cut any communication with Rommel’s troops in Libya, the other prongs designed to make a scythelike sweep against Bizerte and Tunis. In a ring around Bizerte and Tunis the Axis forces dug in.

Nearing Nehring. Bizerte can hold all the fleets of Europe. Jetties protect its outer harbor, from which a narrow canal leads into Sebra Bay. Farther inland is the great 30-mile expanse of Bizerte Lake. The surrounding hills bristle with fortifications. In the area are seaplane bases, airdromes.

Only 160 miles away are Axis air bases on Sicily. Vice Admiral Emile Muselier, onetime commander of the French fleet at Bizerte, now with the Fighting French in London, declared that the Allies would find it “virtually impossible to dislodge the Germans from Bizerte except by siege with an overwhelming force,” if the Axis became well established.

Running the Axis show, according to Rome radio, was Major General Walther Nehring, one of Germany’s smartest tacticians. Under Nehring was an army estimated at 10,000 men, strengthened daily by airborne reinforcements and supplies. Hitler planned a grim last-ditch fight.

Axis planes pecked at Allied supply lines, pounded at their bases at Bougie and Bone. Axis submarines attacked sup porting warships and transports in the Mediterranean Sea. Armored columns—indicative of the strength which the Axis has succeeded in rushing into Tunisia—jabbed at the Allies’ advancing columns. But step by step, through the valleys and over the rugged ridges of the Atlas Mountains, the Allied troops moved ahead.

Britain’s First Army carried the attack. First the U.S. forces had moved into Algeria and French Morocco with the help of the R.A.F. and Royal Navy. During the initial landings the First Army remained offshore in a vast convoy, landed near the Tunisian border only when U.S. forces had secured the rear in Algeria and had solved the first, delicate problems of relations with the French.

It was no blitz. After the lightninglike operations of the week before,* many wondered at the deliberate pace last week. One explanation was that the element of surprise was gone. The First Army was moving perforce from bases set up on an alien shore, lugging equipment to fight an enemy in positions which the Germans had time to prepare.

Actually the advance was ahead of schedule. Behind the First Army Western Africa appeared to be secure to the Allies all the way down to Cape Town. Admiral Darlan broadcast the announcement that French West Africa and Dakar had come “freely under my orders.” Dakar had been won at last and after a bloodless battle. Despite official fears that press comments less brutal than President Roosevelt’s forthright reference to the renegade admiral might upset the apple cart, Darlan apparently was still acting in accord with General Eisenhower’s plans.

With the First were mobile U.S. units, Fighting French. Ahead of them, some 30,000 Giraud-Frenchmen, ill equipped as they were, carried on savage, widespread guerrilla warfare against Axis outposts and Nehring’s reconnoitering troops, hampering their movement, forcing them back into the circle around Bizerte.

Overhead soared R.A.F. fighters and the heavy bombers of Jimmy Doolittle’s 12th Air Force, sprinkling paratroops into strategic spots, raining destruction on Axis-held airfields. Major General* Doolittle’s job was just beginning. London reported that Hitler had massed 1,000 planes in Sicily, Sardinia, south Italy and Crete. If he launched them into North Africa, Doolittle and his U.S. and R.A.F. flyers would have their hands full.

Anderson and God. Commander of the First Army was a tall, quiet, greying man who in 1911 was a second lieutenant in the Seaforth Highlanders—Lieut. General Kenneth Arthur Noel Anderson. Like General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, who was squeezing the Axis from the other end of the North African coast, Anderson has been a soldier most of his life; like Sir Bernard, is a pious man on whom the mark of a religious background is deep. Said he to his soldiers: “Let us unashamedly and humbly ask God’s help in our endeavors and strive to deserve it.” Like many of his devoted, knobby-kneed Scotsmen and war-hardened Englishmen, he is a veteran of Dunkirk.

At week’s end one column was ploughing into Gabes. Axis reserves, probably from Tripolitania, had either infiltrated through the Allied southern prong or dashed ahead of it and were streaking northward to the aid of Tunis. Fighting all along the contracting front grew heavier. Inexorably, to the north, the scythe swung against Nehring’s iron ring.

*In which the U.S. lost 860 men “killed or missing” and 1,050 “wounded,” according to the War Department. Most of the losses were incurred in seizing Oran and Casablanca from the French.

*Elevated to that rank from Brigadier General last week—up from rank of Lieut. Colonel in seven months since his attack on Tokyo last April.