SOUTHERN THEATRE: Prize Catch

A twin-motored Wellington bomber arrived at Gibraltar from Great Britain one day last week, refueled and took off after dark, heading east. It was a dirty night over the Mediterranean but this plane had to go. It carried the new Deputy Commander of the British Air Forces in the Middle East: square-cut Air Marshal Owen Tudor Boyd, 51, erstwhile of the Balloon Barrage Command at home and years before that a World War I pilot. With him flew his staff, composed of a major and three junior officers, and a plane crew of three.

To reach Malta, where Air Marshal Boyd planned to land about dawn for more fuel, you fly a bit south of east and pass over the north tip of Tunis. For some reason — faulty reckoning due to weather, or engine trouble, or interception by an Italian patrol plane — dawn found Air Marshal Boyd’s pilot flying near the Sicilian coast surrounded by Italian fighter planes who threatened to shoot him down if he didn’t surrender. Air Marshal Boyd called for a landing on Sicily. As his staff & crew skipped clear of their craft (according to some accounts), he whipped out his service pistol and, before Italian captors could stop him, fired three shots into the Wellington’s fuel tanks. Flames spouted, engulfing whatever military secrets the new Middle East Deputy Commander had with him on paper.

Italy chortled over this greatest prize catch of her war with Britain. It made up for the shooting down by the R. A. F of Air Marshal Italo Balbo, Italy’s Governor and Military Commander in Libya (TIME, July 8).* The Boyd capture was doubly triumphal because all hands knew his arrival at Cairo was to presage hotter and harder air blows by the R. A. F. at Italy’s forces in Libya, Albania, the Dodecanese. Such blows had already begun with R. A. F. using its new Greek bases in Crete and elsewhere for fresh attacks last week upon Durazzo, Valona, Brindisi, Bari, and for covering actions with the Greek infantry. Captive Boyd’s superior, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, last week visited the new bases in Greece, conferred with Premier Metaxas, Generalissimo Papagos and King George II. Meantime his men were becoming more active in Africa.

Four Australian fighters saw their first action on the Libyan front, and claimed five Italians downed to one of themselves. Fifteen other British planes took on 60 Italians in the same area, getting ten of them without losing one man or plane (the Italian score for this action was seven British, three Italians). For their part, the Italians replied with intensified bombing of Alexandria, where one night they killed 52 civilians, wounded 79, and of Malta, Ismailia (Suez Canal port) and Cairo, where King Farouk subscribed $2,000 for air-raid victims and the Government added $12,000, the Cabinet $1,000.

Elimination of Air Marshal Boyd probably meant little or no delay in Britain’s follow-up of her great naval coup at Taranto last fortnight, when Fleet Air Arm fliers knocked holes in half of Italy’s battle line, or in new British pressure on Marshal Graziani’s time-marking expeditionary force in the western desert. Knowing that Graziani had completed an advance camp 15 miles east of Sidi Bārrani, had drilled new water wells and about finished a hard-surface supply road along the coast, British naval units last week hove up and shelled the new outpost, road and wells. Motorized units on land engaged Italian advance units with the usual conflicting report of results. On the eastern Sudan front, British pressure by land and air was increased at Gallabat, Kassala and the roads to Italy’s supply base, Gondar, in the Lake Tana region of Ethiopia.

With Italy’s oversea supply line to Africa more vulnerable than ever after Taranto, all these actions suggested the beginning of a British effort to smother Italy before Germany can help her out in Greece or anywhere else.

*Reported missing last week after an Italian bomber raid into Greece, presumably dead or captured, was hard-boiled Ettore Muti, who resigned as Secretary of the Fascist Party to get actively into the fighting. After several days he turned up alive, whereupon Mussolini gave him a silver medal (his ninth) for organizing and leading an October long-range bombing raid on the defenseless Bahrein Archipelago oil fields.