Inferno - Max Hastings [70]
Ashore, the war in the North African desert engaged only a handful of British and imperial divisions, while most of Churchill’s army stayed at home. This was partly to provide security against invasion, partly for lack of weapons and equipment, partly owing to shortage of shipping to move and supply troops overseas. The clashes between desert armies were little more significant in determining the outcome of the global conflict than the tournaments between bands of French and English knights which provided entr’actes during the Hundred Years’ War. But the North African contest caught the imagination of the Western world, and achieved immense symbolic significance in the minds of the British people.
Hostilities were conducted upon a narrow strip of sand along the Mediterranean littoral, seldom more than forty miles wide, which was navigable by tanks. For thirty-two months between September 1940 and May 1943, the rival armies struggled for mastery in a series of seesaw campaigns which eventually traversed more than 2,000 miles of coastal territory. Shifts of advantage were heavily influenced by the distances each side was obliged to move fuel, ammunition, food and water to its fighting units: the British fared best in 1941–42 when closest to their bases in the Nile Delta; Axis forces when nearer to Tripoli. It is foolish to romanticise any aspect of the war, given the universal reality that almost every participant would have preferred to be in his own home; that to die trapped in a blazing tank was no less terrible at Sollum or Benghazi than at Stalingrad. But the emptiness of desert battlefields, where there was neither much slaughter of innocents nor destruction of civilian property, alleviated some of the horrors imposed by collateral damage in populated regions.
While campaigning in the desert was never comfortable, in the protracted intervals between battles it was preferable to winter Russia or monsoon Asia. It is sometimes suggested that in North Africa there was “war without hate.” This is an exaggeration, because there was certainly fear, which bred spasms of animosity; most men in the heat of action feel ill-will towards those seeking to kill them. But extremes of brutality, especially the murder of prisoners, were generally avoided by both sides. Italians and Germans, British, Indians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans subsisted and fought in a wild and alien environment where none had any emotional stake. They engaged in a common struggle against sand, flies, heat and thirst, even before the enemy entered the reckoning.
In the autumn of 1940, Mussolini was impatient to the point of obsession to achieve some conspicuous Italian success to justify seizing a share of the booty from anticipated Axis victory. Though ignorant of both military and naval affairs, he craved foreign conquests to ennoble fascism and stiffen the frail spirit of his people at home. “The army has need of glory,” he said. Libya, an Italian colony, adjoined British-controlled Egypt, where Wavell had a small imperial force of one British division, the 7th Armoured, together with an Indian and a New Zealand formation, soon reinforced by two Australian divisions. Britain’s presence was anomalous to the verge of absurdity: Egypt was an independent sovereign state ruled by King Farouk, where the British supposedly exercised rights only to defend the Suez Canal. The Cairo government did not formally enter hostilities until February 1945. The sympathies of most Egyptians lay with the