SOUTHERN THEATRE: Winter in the Wilderness

(See Cover)

Through the squadron, like an exciting rumor through a bored crowd, ran the warning: enemy planes sighted. The carrier broke course and nosed into the breeze; the destroyers hung by her flanks watchfully. Three long-nosed fighters roared along the carrier's broad flight deck and up into the sky. For ten minutes hundreds of eyes strained.

Suddenly one of the cruisers shuddered. About 200 yards astern of her a huge plume of foam scarred the blue of the Mediterranean and the blue of the southern sky. Other plumes from the same salvo walked out across the water. Every one a miss.

Spotters caught the enemy in focus. Archies opened up. The first roar had not died when a roar of British throats took its place. Down the sky like an aimless maple-seed pod fluttered a crippled Fiat. Two parachutes opened and floated down. They were seen to land on the sea, but the gear dragged the pilots down before a destroyer could gaff them.

To U. S. Correspondent Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune, who watched this brief action last week, this was stirring stuff. This was Great Britain, ruling the waves even in a sea which Romans called "ours." Engagements like this had by last week confirmed Britons in their confidence—that peculiarly British sense of superiority which classifies all foreigners as "natives," which makes Britons refuse to learn any language but their own, which in peacetime is simple bigotry, but in war becomes a kind of national virtue. The British were last week more sure than ever that the favorite vessel of the Axis, the airplane, was not necessarily superior to the proud conveyance of Drake, Nelson, Jellicoe. They were sure that Britain could not be brought to her knees until her Fleet was put out of action. And they were also sure that Adolf Hitler, who was mighty sick the first time he ever went to sea, and Benito Mussolini, who looks his most imposing pitching hay, were not the men to turn that trick on any body of water.

This attitude came into the open in Britain for the first time last week. Its emergence was due to three things: the amazing tenacity of the R. A. F. (see col. 1) the gales of autumn whisking the skirts of the Channel, and the reluctance of the Italian Fleet to do anything but play peekaboo. For over a year Britons had seen one victory after another go the enemy's way. Last week for the first time they thought they saw a chance of carrying the war to the enemy.

Gap. They reasoned that this was still a war of blockade. Britain, with Canada and the U. S. behind her, was still blockading Hitler's Europe, and, by the grip on Gibraltar and Suez, Mussolini's Italy. The deadlock in the Battle of Britain, apparently, was about to bring a new Axis strategy into play against this blockade. Hitler undoubtedly visited Mussolini at Brenner Pass last week to talk strategy (see p. 39). German papers began to argue, not without a certain petulance, that Britain could be beaten without a costly invasion. Could it be possible that the war would move south for the winter? Britons hoped so—for this would give Britain's Navy her first chance in the war for a real fight. In the Mediterranean, they were sure, Britain could and would assert her naval supremacy.