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Rommel, who had made his reputation in the 1940 French campaign, arrived in Africa on 12 February 1941. His soldiers, flushed with victory in Europe, were in exuberant mood, perceiving their deployment as a romantic adventure. ‘We are all twenty-one years old and crazy,’ wrote panzergrenadier lieutenant Ralph Ringer. ‘Crazy, because we have volunteered of our own free will to go to Africa and have talked about nothing else for weeks … tropical nights, palm trees, sea breezes, natives, oases and tropical helmets. Also a little war, but how can we be anything but victorious? … Like madmen we jumped around and hugged each other, we really were going to Africa!’ Lt. Pietro Ostellino, one of the small minority of dedicated fascists in the Italian army, wrote exultantly to his wife on 3 March: ‘Here things are going very well and our reoccupation of Cyrenaica, which has been held by the enemy, is a matter of days or even hours away. We hasten to the front line for the honour of the Patria. You must be proud and offer your sufferings to the cause for which your husband is fighting with enthusiasm and passion.’ He added three days later: ‘Morale is very high, and in cooperation with our valiant allies we are getting ready to do great things … Ours is a holy cause and God is with us.’

Rommel launched his first offensive against the British in Libya on 24 March, easily capturing El Agheila at the base of the Gulf of Sirte. British tanks checked the Afrika Korps at Mersa Brega, but the weak forces now commanded by Lt. Gen. Philip Neame were obliged to withdraw. On 4 April, Rommel attacked again, forcing a new retreat by threatening Neame’s supply line. Many British tanks were disabled by mechanical failure, and the Germans had little difficulty in pushing on to Tobruk. The port was left to be defended by an Australian garrison, while the main imperial forces fell back across the Egyptian frontier, almost to the start line of their December offensive.

Wavell had impressed on Neame that it was more important to keep his army intact than to hold ground, but soldiers ignorant of this higher purpose were simply bewildered by their own headlong flight. Gunner Len Tutt described an action in which his 25-pounder battery held off panzers for some hours, then as darkness fell was suddenly ordered to withdraw: ‘The rot seemed to set in. We dropped into action a little way down the road but had hardly surveyed the position before we were ordered to withdraw again. There seemed no overall direction. Too many units were on the move at the same time, a mistake which contributed to a growing panic. We soon saw the danger signs: men abandoning a stalled truck and running to get on another vehicle, when possibly a few seconds under the bonnet would have kept it going. Others were abandoned because they had run out of petrol, and yet there were three-tonners loaded down with the stuff passing on either side.’ There was further seesaw fighting in which the Halfaya Pass and Fort Capuzzo changed hands several times, but at the end of May the Germans and Italians occupied the disputed ground.

Pietro Ostellino wrote on 13 May near Tobruk: ‘We are well advanced now and it is only a question of time. It is quite hot, but bearable, and I am in good health – brown as a salami, partly from the sun and also because we are covered in sand which sticks to our skin and with sweat forms a layer of mud. We have enough water, but fifteen minutes after washing we are back to what we were before.’ Soon afterwards, hearing news of the Axis advance into Greece, he wrote: ‘Yesterday I received a letter from Uncle Ottavio from Albania in which he talks of the great victory they have achieved there. We will soon be emulating them and will throw the English out of everywhere.’ Though the Australians held out in Tobruk even after the Afrika Korps raced past towards Egypt, strategic advantage lay firmly with Rommel. And meanwhile across the Mediterranean, as Ostellino noted, the British