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BENGHAZI is in British hands. Its fall marks the end of Italy's dominion over Cyrenaica and completes, at any rat, the first stage of General Wavell's historic campaign. It opened with the surprise attack on Sidi Barrani in the early hours of December 9: it closes only two months later. In those 60 days Graziani's initially formidable army has retreated 440 miles, an average of more than seven miles every day. At least sixsevenths of the retreat has been across Italian territory on whose complicated fortification the Fascist Government had poured out treasure wrung from the Italian peasant. Two more Mediterranean ports (Tobruk and Benghazi) are now at the service of the Royal Navy, as well as the smaller port of Bardia: the menace to Egypt has been utterly destroyed: the Italian army in Libya has been reduced to impotence. It is still too early for any complete estimate of General Wavell's happy and glorious achievement; but from what we already know two factors stand out and demand the most generous praise: the perfect co-ordination of land, sea and air forces and the superb Staff work that preceded the attack and made that co-ordination possible. From the beginning of what then seemed a hazardous enterprise but is now shown to have been a masterly campaign almost without precedent in military history the three branches of the Fighting Services have operated with clockwork precision as one unit. They synchronised their individual forms of attack; and thus immeasurably increased the total effect of the offensive. The melancholy lessons of Gallipoli have been truly learned. To allot praise may seem invidious. If it goes in high measure to the men from Britain and the Dominions who carried the 60 days so gallantly, it must go in equally high measure to those who enabled their gallantry to be turned to good account: to the Staff who prepared their plans down to the last and smallest detail and arranged for those plans to be implemented at precisely the correct moment. What General Wavell's next move will be we shall not attempt to guess. The implications of his victories here and in East Africa are easier to read. They are blows not only at an already-reeling Italy but at Germany as well, who, it would appear, is hurrying south to patch the yawning fissures in the Fascist bastion. History may yet prove that the hurrying began too late. The capture of Benghazi increases also our power to police the Straits of Sicily across which any German force would be compelled to pass into North Africa; and it reduces the considerable hazards to which the Navy is now exposed in those narrow waters. It is a reserve line behind Malta, and its possibilities are boundless. If an advance on Tripoli should be the next move that General Wavell contemplates, the importance of Benghazi becomes all the greater: it will prove a supply base of inestimable value. Rapidly the Axis is becoming a meaningless phrase: an axis requires two ends, and , if it is to function, each end must perform an equal task. Otherwise the whole thing crumbles away. One day that will happen, and General Wavell, by his care and genius, has brought that day nearer than two months ago we dared hope.
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