TUNISIA AND LIBYA

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23800, 20 November 1942, Page 5

TUNISIA AND LIBYA

RELATIONSHIP OP CAMPAIGNS IMPORTANCE OF TIME FACTOR LONDON, Nov. 18. The Allies’ southern Tunisian drive is a crucial factor in the campaign against Marshal Rommel, states a correspondent of the “Dally Telegraph,” who has just returned from North Africa. This drive is directed at the control of the narrow corridor between the southern mountains and the sea. Axis control of this corridor would delay the application of the western claw of the Allied pincers which is intended to meet the eastern claw formed by the Bth Army advancing through Libya. The southern Tunisian corridor is the only practicable land route between Libya and Tunisia. Observers in London believe that the Axis land forces intend to fight a holding action. Probably between 8000 and 10,000 Axis troops have been landed by air, and they are still coming in at the rate of between 2000 and 3000 a day, evidently to keep open the line for the retreating forces from Libya, Every day the Axis can gain in Tunisia helps them in the transportation problem involved in the redistribution of their forces in Europe. Hitler plainly hopes not only to create a pocket of resistance, but to interpose a wedge between the Bth Army in Libya and the Allied forces advancing from Algeria, and he will try to make that wedge include Tripolitania as well as Tunisia. That wedge has Sardinia. Sicily, and Tunisia as its angles, and the Axis will endeavour to dominate the Mediterranean by closing the Sicilian Strait. Sicily is a tremendous aircraft base which, if the Axis seeks a decision by air, may be more important for the enemy than Malta for months has been for the Allies. An all-out effort by the Luftwaffe has been foreseen by the Allied leaders, who will command tremendously adequate air combat forces when the issue is joined.