Word: libyans
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Last week Britons had to reckon with Captain Liddell Hart's now very possible possibility. The German Libyan offense went into its third week of apparent doldrum. The British, worrying about morale at home, made much of their successes-a naval assault on Tripoli in which the town was given a thorough shellacking, a few raids out of Tobruch against Axis supply lines, a seaborne raid near Bardia in which a bridge was said to have been blown up, a few tank patrols near Salum. And they minimized the decision of the Duke of Aosta, commanding Italian forces...
Vichy sources made the flat assertion that the Germans were concentrating a force at the Cufra Oases, 500 miles south of the Libyan coast. The force was said to have been flown in, complete with air-carried baby tanks. Only British air reconnaissance could tell whether this was fact or fable. A Rome report, answering the British protest that no. soldier could operate in the desert's summer heat (as high as 130°), was that the German tanks were equipped with refrigeration pipes...
...hope would be realized. The Germans had already counterattacked across Libya and developed a threat to the Suez Canal (see p. 23). They accomplished this, in spite of the British Fleet, by flying some troops to Tripoli. The British suspected that the French had helped the Germans supply their Libyan Army...
When the ships left, Alexandrians heard soon enough where they had gone. The Navy announced its greatest success since the Battle of Cape Matapan: in the narrow channel between Sicily and Cape Bon, across which the Axis had run its forces and supplies for the Libyan attack, a cruiser squadron caught a convoy consisting of two ships laden with motor transport, one ammunition ship, and two ships thought to be carrying troops, all protected by three Italian destroyers. The British swept in, slapped aside the flimsy protection, and sank the whole convoy forthwith. The British lost one destroyer...
...rush into adventures, a policy which eliminates to the greatest degree humanly possible any chance of failure." The plan was perhaps to wait until British troops were evacuating Greece, then try to greet them in Alexandria. But plan or no plan, the week's developments pointed up the Libyan campaign as definitely more important to Britain now than the outcome in the Balkans...