World War, SOUTHERN THEATER: Story of a Siege

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For 101 days the British have be leaguered an almost forgotten inkspot on the map of Africa: French Somaliland.

For a year the colony has felt the pinch of sea blockade, but not until the British under Lieut. General Alan Gordon Cun ningham had mopped up most of Ethiopia last May was the wall around French So maliland complete. Then, after Vichy began to play hard at collaboration, the British and Free French sent an ultimatum to Governor Pierre Nouailhetas at Djibouti: surrender or starve. When the Governor refused to surrender, the British clamped down. By land British troops ringed the colony; at sea patrol boats of the Royal Navy stopped food ships, often in sight of pierhead watchers at Djibouti.

The result has been slow starvation for the 45,000 natives of the colony, its 3,000 soldiers, 150 white women and children. And with starvation, inevitably, has come disease: beriberi and scurvy. Still the officials in Djibouti have refused to yield, to admit the Free French doctors who are waiting just across the Ethiopian border with food, medicine and wine. Last week they again turned down an offer to evacuate civilians from Djibouti.

But French Somaliland was near the end of its tether. Last week Vichy, pleading for U.S. food for Djibouti, tried desperately to enlist U.S. sympathy for the victims of the brutal British. The British had their own tale of brutality. Djibouti's Vichyfrench authorities, they said, were driving natives out of the colony and into the encircling British lines at guns' point, shooting them if they tried to return.