BRITISH SEIZE TRIPOLI
Battle remnants of Axis army
Encircled men get out of trap, Nazis report
London, England (UP) –
The British Eighth Army marched into Tripoli and hoisted the Union Jack at 5 a.m. today and then sent striking forces racing west of Benito Mussolini’s last African capital in an attempt to encircle and annihilate Axis forces straggling into Tunisia.
A lively battle was said to be developing between the advanced units of the British and the Afrika Korps, presumably west of Tripoli. The German-controlled Radio Paris admitted that the battle had started and that Axis forces had been encircled in the early stages but said that attempts of the British to throw a firm ring around the Germans and Italians had been “frustrated.”
An Italian High Command communiqué admitted the fall of Tripoli, but attempted to convey the impression that Axis forces had retired from the city voluntarily.
The smashing blow to Mussolini’s dreams of African empire was hailed here by War Minister Sir James Grigg as having been an action that firmly turned the tide of war for the British and Russian armies. He paid tribute to the remarkable offensive conducted by Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, Eighth Army commander, who in three months moved almost 1,400 miles across the desert, fighting most of the way.
Officials try to escape
The Axis offered a brief, sharp rearguard defense of Tripoli, but the British pushed through to the city that has been under heavy Allied air attack for two weeks. They found that Italian and German civilian officials had fled from the city to the port of Zaura, 70 miles to the west, and were attempting to escape in small boats. Allied planes attacked the boats and damaged some of them.
Medium bombers and fighter bombers from the 9th U.S. Air Force in Cairo played an important part in the capture of Tripoli and the subsequent drive on west. A communiqué said the American pilots operating west of Tripoli started numerous fires among retreating Axis vehicles. At one point incendiary bombs caused a large explosion and fire on the road leading to Tunisia. All U.S. planes returned safely, the communiqué said.
French move up
Brig. Gen. Jacques Leclerc’s Fighting French forces from the Lake Chad region were reported to have turned toward Tunisia and the Mareth Line, along the border, where Marshal Erwin Rommel was believed to be hoping to hole up for a while and give his Afrika Korps a breathing spell.
A dispatch from a United Press staff correspondent in southern Tunisia had hinted that U.S. paratroops and infantry, along with French forces, might soon stab to the coast, cutting the Afrika Korps off in a narrow, desolate corridor.
Three months to a day from the start of his smashing offensive at El Alamein, more than 1,300 miles to the east, Lt. Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery’s desert-hardened Empire troops were swinging down the narrow, twisted streets of Tripoli, and under the marble triumphal arch that the Caesars built.
A column that had bypassed Tripoli moved ahead on Zaura, 70 miles west of Tripoli, along a road that was a graveyard of Axis tanks, trucks and troops.
Italian Empire gone
Beyond the border lay the old French Mareth Line of forts, Ben Gardane, 20 miles inside Tunisia; Medenine, 48 miles west of Ben Gardane, and Gabes, 45 miles north of Medenine, the first big enemy base and anchor point of the corridor to the north.
The Italians’ once-pretentious African empire was for practical purposes gone.
Only 300 miles by land separated the forces of Montgomery and the U.S. Fifth Army, the British First Army and strong French forces in Tunisia. Only 200 miles separated them by air, and U.S. and British planes from Africa and Tripolitania overlapped in an eternal pounding of the fleeing Afrika Korps.
Rommel’s ultimate plan was presumably to flee to northern Tunisia and join forces with Col. Gen. Hans Arnim in holding a small bridgehead encompassing Tunis and Bizerte. If he could get there, the two Axis forces might total 150,000 men. The Allies were believed to have two or three times that many.
To fight delaying action
At best, it was believed, the Axis planned to fight only a delaying action in northern Tunisia, to give the Germans time to prepare their European defenses before the Allies swarm on to the continent.
Tripoli, besides being a great symbolic victory, was of great potential benefit to the Allies. It has a magnificent harbor, presently clogged with wrecked ships sunk by U.S. and British bombers. Great Castel Benito Airdrome, 10 miles south of Tripoli, will give the Allies a nearby base for operating against the Axis in Tunisia.
Radio Morocco said the Axis retreat was now a complete rout.