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Flag Over Dérna. On March 12, 1937, Benito Mussolini paused in his tour of Libya at the port of Derna. Set on the edge of a cluster of green hills, rich in water and soil, this little town had come to be called the Pearl of Cyrenaica. A famous local story which Il Duce asked to hear in full was that of William Eaton and Presley O'Bannon. In 1804 the U. S. was very annoyed with the Barbary pirates, who kept nibbling at U. S. trade in the Mediterranean. William Eaton, a Connecticut schoolteacher, and Presley O'Bannon, a lady-loving, fiddle-playing marine, raised an army of eight marines, 38 Greeks, 91 Arabs, a few footmen, cavalry, and camel drivers, and planned a fantastic march from the Nile across 500 miles of desert to subdue the Barbary pirate chief at Dérna. They actually made the march and took the town. Presley O'Bannon was the first man to raise the U. S. flag on African soil.
As he heard this tale, Benito Mussolini had no idea that any flag but the Italian would be raised over Derna in his lifetime. He proceeded to subsidize Italian farmers to colonize the place. But last week British advance units swept on from Tobruch, 95 miles to the outskirts of Derna. They found the place practically undefended. The farmers and most of the town's population of 21,500 had been evacuated. The main body of the Italian Army had moved on toward Bengasi. It looked as if the place was British for the asking.
With Dérna such a cinch, the British prepared to press for Bengasi, in hope of catching the other half of Graziani's ragged army. Patrols worked along the coast and also cut straight across the hump (see map). With luck, General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell and his merry men might pull off the most surprising total victory in this war of many surprises.
Mussolini Cunctator. New York Times Military Expert Hanson Baldwin said last week that when the British attack on Sidi Barrani began Dec. 9, the troops had strict orders to withdraw if that town had not fallen in three days. By last week this tentative operation and the Eritrean push (see col. 3) had grown into a campaign of conquest covering a quarter of a continent. To the always confident British this was not surprising. But the only reasonable explanation for the Italians' hasty retreat on all fronts was either that the Italians had lost their military minds or that Benito Mussolini had taken a leaf from the book of an ancient compatriot, Quintus Fabius Maximus.
When Fabius came up against Hannibal in 217 B.C., he used tactics of "masterly inactivity," retiring into hills where Hannibal's cavalry was useless, harassing the enemy's patrols, but never really fighting.
For this plan of war Fabius won the nickname Cunctator, the Delayer. It was just possible that Mussolini hoped, by sacrificing men and territory as slowly as possible, that he might postpone a major reckoning in Africa until such time as the Axis was ready to deal Britain a major blow—when Africa would not matter any more.