World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF EGYPT: Rommel Rolls

Around fallen Tobruk the man-made sandstorms, kicked up by tanks scouring the desert, died down in little dunes beside the gridded tracks. Torn barbed wire marked the silent graves of Knightsbridge, El Adem, Acroma. Germany's Erwin Rommel was 200 miles to the east, rolling into Matrûh.

Tobruk was full of grinning, jabbering Italians. Rommel was cleverly using Italians to occupy captured ports, for salvage work, to count prisoners and booty—thus saving valuable German manpower for his thrust at the stepping-stones to Suez.

Terrible tales were told by the handful of British who escaped by sea from Tobruk: how swarming Stukas silenced the port's gun positions one by one, how Rommel's truck-borne infantry poured through and caught the defenders in murderous cross fire. A British truck driver named Downes, who escaped from both Dunkirk and Tobruk, said Tobruk was worse. Reaching the docks just as an artillery shell blew up a building behind him, he boarded a tug, which soon took two or three direct shell hits amidships. He jumped overboard, swam around patches of blazing oil, cried out to a passing mine sweeper, was hauled aboard. Next day the mine sweeper was attacked and burned by Italian torpedo boats whose fire killed all the mine sweeper's gunners. Again Downes went overside, swam to a raft, from which he was rescued by a British torpedo plane and taken to Matrûh.

No Pause, No Rest. With Bardia already in his hands, Rommel did not stop for a rest—or give the British any.

While correspondents wondered how he would attack the British strongholds near the border—Fort Capuzzo, Salûm, Halfâya—a British communiqué dryly remarked that "much enemy movement" had been observed to the south. Shells from heavy field guns in Bardia, crashing over the British positions, protected this movement. The British saw that again they were in danger of being outflanked.

There was only one thing to do: pull back to a defensible position, in time to organize it. They hoped that the rougher country to the south would give Rommel pause. It did not.

With captured British and U.S. tanks, freshly swastika-daubed, sprinkled among his two German and one Italian armored divisions, Rommel crossed the border south of Sidi Omar, sent one prong northeast through Sidi Barràni, one prong east and one southeast, jabbing at the British covering forces ahead of him.

For the defense of Matrûh, the British drew up their line from that port south to the edge of the Qattara Depression—a great under-sea-level wallow bordered by steep limestone scarps and bedded with salt marshes. Even Rommel, they thought, would not try to outflank them by venturing into that. He did not.

He feinted first on the coast, hoping to pull the British out of position. When they did not tumble, he probed for the weakest spots in the long, weak British line. At week's end, handling his tanks, artillery, planes and infantry like one four-stringed instrument, he struck with all his might.

The crafty German launched the blow in the late afternoon, with the sun at his back and glaring in the eyes of the British.

Outnumbered in tanks since their losses before Tobruk, the British gave way.