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By Root 1448 0

1940 Wavell unleashed Lt. Gen. Sir Richard O’Connor’s Operation Compass against Graziani. This began tentatively, with modest objectives, then expanded dramatically amid stunning success. Imperial forces swept into Libya, capturing Italians in tens of thousands. A British gunner described one of O’Connor’s racing columns, “loaded with the paraphernalia for making war in the wilderness—rations, ammunition, petrol and that most precious of all requirements, 4-gallon flimsy aluminium containers of water, all carried in three-ton canvas-covered Bedfords. [There were] 5-cwt Morris Scout trucks with the section officer or battery captain standing up in the passenger seat, divisional pennants fluttering in the wind-stream; a couple of RHA 25-pounder guns, cylindrical water bowsers skittering on two wheels behind a 15-cwt. Sometimes a troop of Hussars’ light tanks, their tracks screeching and rattling and bouncing over the boulders, their long, slender wireless aerials bobbing and waving. The rolling convoy moved in unison, fanned out in open order, fifty yards separating each vehicle, sand streaming from the wheels like spray in heavy rain.”

The Italian defences crumbled with extraordinary speed. “They can’t take it,” an Australian soldier wrote home contemptuously. “They can’t take pain (I saw hundreds of their wounded … all in tears), they can’t take shells (they flinch when one drops a hundred yards away), the sound of British tanks terrorised them and the sight of our bayonets was enough to make them throw up their hands. Fascism … pooh!” Likewise an officer: “All Australians now know that one Aussie is still equal to … 50 Italians—almost, anyway.” Lt. Tom Bird employed a cricketing metaphor: “One can’t help feeling that it is a great bit of luck to have been able to have a practice over or two, so to speak, with the Italians. What more delightful people to fight could there be?” Nothing went right for the Italian war effort. Mussolini’s propaganda department in Rome made a film designed to demonstrate the superiority of fascist manhood. To this end, a fight was staged between former world heavyweight champion Primo Carnera and Kay Masaki, a black South African taken prisoner in the desert. Masaki had never entered a boxing ring in his life, and was knocked down when the cameras began to roll. He picked himself up, however, and struck Carnera a blow that rendered him unconscious.

To the outside world, the relative insignificance of Britain’s desert triumphs was plain. The Romanian Mihail Sebastian wrote on 7 February 1941: “It goes without saying that the whole of the war in Africa (however interesting and dramatic) is only a sideshow. The struggle is between the British and the Germans; that is where everything will be decided.” He was right, of course, but in blitzed London there was rejoicing. By 9 February, O’Connor’s force had advanced 500 miles and taken El Agheila; the road west towards Tripoli lay open. Thereafter, to the bewilderment of ordinary soldiers, the advance ended; deep in the sands of Mussolini’s colony they halted, and languished. “Every day was the same as the day before,” gunner Doug Arthur wrote wearily. “Saturday could have been Monday, Friday could have been Tuesday, even Pancake Tuesday, for all we knew … We didn’t know what was really going on, where we were going or what faced us when we got there.”

They were going no farther in Libya. Four of Wavell’s divisions, including the New Zealand division and much of the Australian contingent, were transferred to Greece to meet the anticipated German assault there. It was afterwards claimed that the Greek diversion cost the British a unique opportunity to clear the North African coast and regain control of the southern Mediterranean. This seems doubtful: Lt. Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps was already landing at Tripoli, to succour the faltering Italians and thereafter dominate the campaign; the British supply line was stretched to the limits; O’Connor’s tanks and vehicles were almost worn out. Fighting the Italians flattered the capabilities of the