World War: Lawrences of Libya

One day last summer General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell called three of his officers into the Cairo headquarters of the Imperial Army of the Nile. He was worried about rumored Italian plans to slice in through the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan from southeastern Libya. But to get firsthand accounts of Italian troop and supply dispositions meant a hazardous trek of over 1,000 miles across rocky, dune-ribbed desert. The three men before him jumped at the job. For ten years they had made a sport of just such traveling, spending their vacations exploring the Sahara. Within six weeks they had trained a small, tough column of British and New Zealand desert fighters, set out for the oases of Cufra.

Their report, documented with an Italian mail pouch they had seized, gave such complete information that Sir Archibald decided to keep up a series of longdistance scouting sorties. All fall and winter three columns ranged across Libya, as far as Free French-held Chad, harrying isolated Italian garrisons, keeping tabs on Italian movements.

By last month they had covered thousands of miles, so silently that no word of their activities leaked out until last week. Then, with the Italian Libyan Armies no longer in condition to strike a flanking blow at Egypt, Cairo uncovered the story of their campaign, added new details to the Free French raid on Murzuch (TIME, Feb. 10).

At a secret rendezvous in the 10,000-foot volcanic mountains of southern Libya the British units had joined Free French forces pushing up from Chad, headed north to the outpost and airport of Murzuch. They dressed in the flowing coverings of the desert, and scattered Italian patrols they passed on the way took them for relief troops, unsuspectingly waved them the Fascist salute. When they reached the fort the Italian garrison was even less wary. Coming smartly to attention at the command of a British officer, they were all set to parade in review when ordered to surrender.

When the raiders struck again last week, the British were working with General Charles de Gaulle’s forces once more. As before, a Free French column pressed up the ancient Faya-Tekro caravan route from Chad, swung out into the Libyan desert, where they were joined by the British. This time they even had planes to help them. They raced in over the Cufra oases, an important refueling centre for Italian transport planes supplying Italy’s East African Armies, smashed the airfield and opened the way for a successful attack by mechanized ground troops.

At the same time Vichy released reports that another raiding party, continuing on from Murzuch, had moved northward along the Algerian frontier, captured the fort of Gadames. If this were true, it would put them astride a well-built north-south motor road, 300 miles southwest of Tripoli, just across the border from General Weygand’s garrison at Fort Saint in the Tunisia-Algeria-Libya corner.

Jubilantly Colonel Diego Brosset, onetime officer in the French Mehariste Camel Corps, took to the radio in London, in soldierly language exhorted the Free French to push on, urged the troops in Weygand’s command to pitch in with them. “It is Brosset, a Saharan of Algiers, of Morocco, of Mauritania and the Sudan, who is asking you if you remember that ardor and devotion whose tradition once existed in the oases, in rocks, in mountains and in the desert. . . . Are you still worthy . . . Meharistes, who were my own young men? . . . Remember that Lawrence was at Damascus before the regular troops; Tripoli is waiting for you. Saddle up your camels and ride like the devil on these Italians who were such marvelous soldiers in the films, but who in reality are very poor fighters. We are waiting for you at Tripoli for the Grand Parade.”