LIBYA’S DESERT

Hokitika Guardian, 13 July 1940, Page 6

LIBYA’S DESERT

A TRIAL OF STRENGTH

UNDER A SCORCHING SUN

(Sydney Paper)

Imagine a fierce motorised battle for a fortified Boulia or Birdsville, in the dry country on tile extreme southwest of Queensland.

This will help you to picture the setting of the fight between British and Italian forces for the, outpost of Gapuzzo, in the. Libyan desert.

Picture, too, aeroplanes bombing coastal places on the edge of the desert country in the extreme liortliwesi of South Australia—places like Yalata, or Eucla, as it existed before the overland telegraph line was shifted northward to the East-West Railway. This will give you some idea of the Italian air raids of the Egyptian border village of Solium. On June 14, four days after Italy had entered the war, British motorised forces from Egypt broke through the barbed wire frontier fence between Egypt and Libya and took Capuzzo. They blew up the fort, and carried off Italian lorries, motor-cycles and other equipment. On June 28, the Italians reoccupied the ruins of the fort with 1,000 European troops, tanks, and fieldguns.

Their aim, apart from prestige, is to restore the system of fortified posts for 200 miles southward from the Mediterranean coast. After that the defensive system dissolves, into the desert.

The British have attacked Capuzzo again. A bitterly contested, fight rages for this symbolic point. The Moslems regard the battle as a test of strength between Britain and Italy, and the result will have an important psychological effect on them. As Lieutenant-General Wilson, commander of the British forces on the Libyan frontier, has pointed out, it is guerrilla warfare in a desert. Heat, thirst, sandstorms, lack of cover, and want of roads are important factors. ' • ’ •

• * O 'ytf Take all Soutli Australia; except the corner .lying east; and ■ south V of’ St. Vincent Gulf,- add Central‘vAusf'. tralia,-'and a good slab of--v, thewilderness of Western. Australia, and you have a region very like Libya. Both areas have a fringe which produces grain, olives, and other products of a rather sketchy agriculture and horticulture; and where they are not plain desert both are mostly dry, hungry pastoral country.

In recent years the latlians have planted Australian eucalypts and acacias in the coastal country of Cyrenaica and Tripoli. -But that is a long way from the desert frontier.

The eastern part of Libya, the country along the Egyptian border, is a much worse desert than anything in Australia. •*

For the first 200 miles from the Mediterranean coast the. Italians built a barbed wire fence, along the frontier, which . the British forces have . now broken. For the other 800 miles, even the Italians reckoned the sandhills, without water or vegitation, was fence enough. The frontier, in fact, is mostly a line drawn, on the map. Much of it has never been surveyed'

Libya lias an area of 682,000 square miles, nearly a quarter of the size of Australia. Its population is under 750,000, of whom about 100,000 are Italians. . Most of the people are concentrated in the two coastal areas of Tripoli and Cyrenaica. The highlands of Fezzan, in the south-west support about 100,000 people. Txcept for the “island” of Cyrenaica, the .eastern half of Libya—the part nearest. Egypt—is straight desert, with a few., spindly oases and nomad Arabs, who wander the wiF dern.ess with their camels, goats, and sheep.

It was the thought of this frightful desert that made atussolini remark bitterly that he was not a collector .of deserts, when British diplomacy sought to appease him with another slab of drought country in SomalilancJ.

The much-vaunted Italian colonisation schemes for Libya are confined to the coastal patches. If the war, had not intervened, the schemes might have put 500,000 Italians into Libya by 1942. This colonisation does not make the settled Arabs, whose, holdings are In danger, love the Italians. A<? for Idesedt dwe%rs r tliey remember the tens of thousands of skeletons that litter the desert on both sides of the frontier.

These are the bones of Arabs who fled from the bombs and bullets of the Graziani “pacification” of 193031. A few starving survivors reached safety in Egypt. * *. * Six years after this terrible affair I took tea with a desert dweller. We had, one word in common, which was sugar (Arabic, zukar). When I mentioned the Italians rtfs feelings were plain enough eyen though lie did not understand my actual words.

In March, 1937, Mussolini .visited

Libya, His stay was . cut short by hews Tf fhe speed' with which ' liis. Italian legions ran from,. the.halfarmed Spaniards at Guadalajara.

Before he left, II Duce, riding,, a white horse like Death in the Book of Revelations, was surprised by a carefully arranged spontaneous demonstration of the Libyan populace.

A leading sheikh,, presented to .him a Milan-made “Sword, of Islam,” Slightly .- embarrassed, when the gift got mixed up with .his reifis, II Duce proclaimed himself; Protector of the Moslems., ,V■ ' C \- T

The comment of the ; Arab . plipp-v herds was: “He "will,protect us as the jackal protects the stray lamb,’’. There’s nothing lamblike about the Libyan Arabs, by the .way, when they have a chance of .cutting up an odd Italian. ,

. Italian works in. Libya . include a l,2Oormile tourist road, right along .the coast from. Tunis to the Egyptian,, border,, . which. Mussolini officially opened, during that visit.

This provides. good motor, road to the, Egyptian, frontier, within a few miles of . Solium.. Egypt has not reciprocated by making as good , a road to the border, from its side. The last stretch is rough g° in g : . ... -. Egypt has a large slice, of /the Libyan desert on, its side of the,,border. A desert belt varying from 350,, to 500 miles in width lies, between the Italian frontier and the cultivated land along the Nile.

This is broken only by a few oases* most of them .much nearer the Nile than the frontier.

The real Egypt is a strip on both sides of the ■ Nile, a thousand miles long, except where it broadens out in the Nile Delta. This runs roughly parallel with the Libyan frontier. * $ * ’ rWhile tty? total, areg of .Egypt is 380,000 square miles, nearly as large as New South., Wales,/, pnd . Victoria together, the cultivable, area, is under 15,000 square miles, about half the size of Tasmania. This supports a population of 16,000,000. The only .cities with over 100,000 people in Egypt. are all in the end close to the Mediterranean. Cairo, at the head of the Nile delta, is the size, of. Sydney, with 1,320,000 people. Alexandria, now . the headquarters of the British Mediterranean Fleet, has 600,000, and Port Said, which lives on and.by the Suez Canal, 105,000. Egypt has an Italian population of over 100,000. Many of the Suez Canal employees of the artisan and clerk type are Italians, though,more are Greeks. The Italians in Egypt show no more enthusiasm for the war than most of the Italians in Italy.