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In mid-September Mussolini, fancying himself a second Caesar, sent Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s Tenth Army to invade Egypt with five divisions along the coast, taking Sidi Barrani. He stopped 75 miles short of the British, in Mersa Matruh, while both sides were reinforced. It was a nerve-wracking time for the British in Egypt. ‘We actually made dummy tanks, dummy guns, and from the air when reconnaissance planes came across it looked as though we had a really good, strong army,’ recalled Private Bob Mash, an engineer with the Nile Army. ‘We’ve blown up rubber tanks, put them in position, taken them down in the evening, taken them three or four miles further away, blown them up again and laid them there, and from the air it looks as if we had plenty of tanks. Just the same as on the Canal Zone… every other anti-aircraft gun was a wooden one.’3

On 8 December 1940, Wavell’s friend, Lieutenant-General Richard O’Connor, commander of the Western Desert Force (numbering only 31,000 men, 120 guns and 275 tanks), counter-attacked fiercely against a force four times his size, concentrating on each fortified area in turn.4 Operation Compass had close support from the Navy and RAF, and, aided by a collapse in Italian morale, by mid-December O’Connor had cleared Egypt of Italians and 38,000 prisoners were taken. Bardia fell on 5 January and on the 22nd the 7th Armoured Division (the ‘Desert Rats’) captured the key port of Tobruk, which was to loom large in the fortunes of both sides over the next two years. As so often, air superiority was vital, especially as there was less possibility of concealment in the desert than in other terrains. The RAF quickly established dominance over the Italian Air Force, the Regia Aeronautica.5 British naval control of the North African littoral also helped O’Connor, because much of the coastal road was within the range of the large-calibre guns of the Royal Navy.

Encouraged by his success in the north, Wavell then moved to cover his southern flank. When Italy had declared war the Duke of Aosta, Viceroy of Ethiopia (Abyssinia), had crossed into the Sudan with 110,000 troops and taken Kassala, then into Kenya to capture Moyale, and also into British Somaliland, seizing Berbera. Wavell had bided his time before responding, but in late January 1941 he sent two British Commonwealth forces totalling 70,000 men – mainly South Africans – to exercise a massive pincer movement utterly to rout Aosta. Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Cunningham occupied Addis Ababa on 4 April, having averaged 35 miles a day for over a thousand miles, taking 50,000 prisoners and gaining 360,000 square miles of territory at the cost of 135 men killed and four captured.6 The Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia returned to his capital on 5 May, five years to the day since it had fallen to the Italians. Aosta and his enormous but demoralized army surrendered on 17 May, leaving the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden open to Allied shipping once more.

Meanwhile, in the north, very great victories greeted O’Connor, who saved the Suez Canal and drove the Italians back along the coast road to Benghazi. As the 6th Division forced Graziani into headlong retreat, O’Connor sent the 7th Division through the desert via Mechili to slice through the Cyrenaican bulge and cut off the Italians. At the battle of Beda Fomm on the Gulf of Sirte between 5 and 7 February 1941 the British Empire and Commonwealth won its first really significant land victory of the Second World War. In two months from 7 December 1940, the Western Desert Force had achieved successes that utterly belied Churchill’s statement quoted above; they had destroyed nine Italian divisions and part of a tenth, advanced 500 miles and captured 130,000 prisoners, 380 tanks and 1,290 guns, all at the cost of only 500 killed and 1,373 wounded. In the whole course of the campaign, Wavell never enjoyed a force larger than two divisions, only one of them armoured. It was the Austerlitz of Africa, and