Three Kings

Chapter 7

General Archibald Wavell was a singularly important man in the hierarchy of British war plans late in 1940. After a wave of bitter reversals, it was his theater that would have the honor of launching the first counteroffensive against the Axis forces, and much was riding on its outcome. The British had been looking for some way to get back on their feet after the hard knockdowns they had suffered in the early rounds with Germany. The most recent setback at Gibraltar was a hard right cross to the chin that had been delivered by Operation Felix, a blow that evicted the Royal Navy from one of its oldest and most important bases. The whole of the Western Mediterranean was now lost, with enemies on every shore until the tempestuous waves washed ashore over a thousand miles to the east on the tiny island of Malta.

Wavell, the nominal Commander of all British Operations in the Middle East, was soon to be thrust into the fire of war, with threats on every side. On his immediate western front The Italian 10th Army under General Rodolfo Graziani had crept across the wire into Egypt, setting up a series of armed camps as they came, and pushing all the way to Sidi Barani on the coast. Behind him, across the searing deserts of Jordan and Arabia, the coup de tat staged by the Golden Square and Rashid Ali in Iraq was now threatening R.A.F. Habbiniyah and the British Petroleum oil concerns near Basra. North on the borders of Palestine, a hostile Vichy French presence in Syria threatened to become a danger to his right flank if reinforced by Germany, and the wolves were coming, slowly devouring the Balkans as columns of tanks and infantry pressed a relentless attack that had swept all the way to Greece as the bitter year of 1940 began to wither and die.

With threats on every side, and a supply line that stretched over 12,000 miles, all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, Wavell was now at the center of a gathering storm, and with impossible orders issued from Whitehall — attack!

Churchill had promised him more armor, sent the 6th Australian Division, and troops from India had been rushed to fill the ranks, yet with no more than five divisions, he was opposed by two times that number in General Graziani’s force, and also faced with an active war front to his south in the Horn of Africa. It was a typical case of finding oneself surrounded by threats on every compass heading, and something had to be done.

The solution would be to take on the most imminent threat, and turn his own compass needle due West against the encroaching Italians. He knew Whitehall was correct in prodding him to action. To sit there and wait for his enemies to slowly invest Egypt in a stranglehold of steel would invite disaster. And so, on this day he met with his Western Desert Force commander, Lieutenant General Richard O’Connor, to see what they could do about the situation.

“We’re to take the matter in hand,” he said to O’Connor, a quiet, self-effacing man who had recently been promoted from command of the backwater 7th Division in Palestine, the same division where he had served as Brigade Signals Officer in the First Battle of Ypres during WWI. Wavell had been there, losing sight in his left eye in that battle. There was no scar, no eye patch. The rugged handsome face still seemed unblemished, but the liability bothered him at times, particularly when the desert sand would blow on the fitful wind.

Wavell was no stranger to the desert. He had braved its tempestuous whirlwinds in his youth, standing with the fabled Lawrence of Arabia when he made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem at the end of that campaign in WWI.

Now Wavell looked to General O’Connor to be his foil in the battle that was looming like a threatening sandstorm in the Western Desert. Mentioned in Dispatches nine times during that war, O’Connor rose steadily in the ranks, achieving his Brigadier post quite early. No stranger to the suffering of war himself, O’Connor’s experience in WWI, where grueling hardship and attrition style battles were the order of the day, led him to believe strongly in a new concept of maneuver in battle. So it was that he soon found service in a new unit pioneering theories of armored warfare between the wars, 5 Brigade under the command of J.F.C. Fuller, an early tank warfare expert.

Theory and practice of combined arms was only then emerging, a craft the Germans seemed to have mastered instinctively. Another General who had literally read Fuller’s book was a man named Heintz Guderian, who had just ably demonstrated his mastery of the craft in the lightning Blitzkrieg across France.

For the British, however, tanks were still thought of as a kind of cavalry unit on the battlefield. Indeed, many existing tank regiments had been born from former cavalry units with long, storied histories in the British Army. As such, the roles they thought to assign to armor were scouting and reconnaissance, infantry support, and the occasional mad charge through any hole in the line the foot soldiers managed to create. It was a fundamental misapprehension of the real virtues of tank warfare — mobility and shock, and O’Connor seemed to be one of the first British fighting Generals to appreciate that point.

“My force is already in position,” said O’Connor. “The Italians have waltzed in thinking we were all asleep, but all they’ve done since is sit about in their lodgments and bake in the sun. It’s high time we hit them — and with thunderclap surprise.”

“Without adequate infantry support?” Wavell was also a veteran of the First Great War, where it was infantry that formed the edge and crest of the battle line. When tanks came on the scene they were simply a means of breaking through wire and fortified positions to allow the advance of the real fighting man on the field, the doughty rifleman. Wavell would write after the war: ‘Let us be clear about three facts. First, all battles and all wars are won in the end by the infantryman. Secondly, the infantryman always bears the brunt. His casualties are heavier, he suffers greater extremes of discomfort and fatigue than the other arms. Thirdly, the art of the infantryman is less stereotyped and far harder to acquire in modern war than that of any other arm.’

“I should think you would want to wait for the Australian Division,” Wavell suggested.

O’Connor had seen the misery and struggle of the infantryman all too well in the first war, where the only tactic seemed to be the direct assault on prepared positions into mined wire, and under the intense fire of machineguns, artillery and sometimes gas. It was no way to fight a war in his mind, and he had no intention whatsoever of fighting this one in that manner. At present he had two divisions in hand, the 7th Armored and the 4th Indian Infantry. The thought of waiting for the 6th Australian Division to come up might cost him days of valuable time, and there was one element he seemed to have a firm grasp on — the importance of time in any battle of maneuver.

“The 6th Australian Division? Well where are they? I’d venture to say they’re still within five miles of the docks at Alexandria — simply too far away. It will take them days to get up here and sorted out, and in so doing they’ll accomplish only one certain thing in revealing our intentions to the enemy.”

Wavell raised an eyebrow, listening, his riding crop tucked under one broad shoulder. “Then what do you propose?”

“A raid. Right now, with whatever I have in hand. We hit them in their encampments, lightning swift. We punch hard, and then move to punch again, like a good boxer with fancy footwork. I’ve 32,000 men — including the two divisions you mention. I’ll be up against ten divisions, but they are not massed on any cohesive front. Our reconnaissance has them strung out from Sidi Barani all the way back to Benghazi. If we move quickly, hit hard, run, and then jog right using the desert, we can give the Italians fits.”

“And the infantry?”

“They can advance along the coast and take advantage of the mayhem I have in mind.” The General was almost up on his toes as he spoke, a restless energy animating his sharp intelligence. He was always an active man, quick on his feet, though never one to seek laurels in anything he undertook. It was enough to do a well reasoned job in the most efficient manner, and that done, it really didn’t matter who took the credit. This was character as hard as the steel in his tanks, and it would soon be put to its first real test in this new war.

“Run off half cocked and you’ll have your tanks scattered all over the desert, and with no infantry support.” Wavell did not yet share the vision in O’Connor’s mind. His was a more carefully prepared chess game, with the pawns advancing and the heavy pieces marshalling in support. But O’Connor saw his mission now as that of a bold knight, leaping past his forward pawns to strike deep into the enemy camp and wreak as much havoc as he could. For this he needed one thing — the element of surprise — and he would lose it if he waited for the Australians.

“Let me go now, and I’ll break up all their forward encampments and send them packing. The Australians can come along and round up whatever remains. I’ve been out with several forward patrols. I know the ground, the enemy’s dispositions, and precisely where I want to hit them — right on the flank.”

“On the flank?” Wavell squinted at the map he held. “Why, they’re digging in around Sidi Barani even as we speak, and that flank is well guarded by these three encampments at Tummar and Nibeiwa.”

“It looks that way,” said O’Connor with a glint in his eye, “but we’ve found a chink in their armor — right here, near Bir Enba.” He pointed out the location for Wavell.

Reconnaissance was an art that O’Connor strongly believed in, and he cultivated the craft through every level of his Corps. His primary recon unit was the 11th Hussars, and they had been roving the no man’s land between British and Italian positions to ferret out information on the enemy’s dispositions. A light armor force with machine gun tankettes, they were given much needed support with an ingenious solution put forward by Brigadier W.E. “Strafer” Gott. He assembled ad-hoc groups of lorried infantry, engineers, a few AT guns and 25 pounders for heavy support, and he ran them about on the heels of the 7th Hussars recon groups scouting out the Italian positions. They came to be known as “Jock Columns,” after Lt. Col Jock Campbell of the Royal Horse Artillery, who contributed the 25 pounders. They soon discovered a weakness in the Italian line.

“One of my Brigadiers, Dorman-Smith happened on it,” said O’Connor, “and I’ve gone forward to see the area personally. We can move along an open wadi through an escarpment masking the position. I’ll run two brigades of the 4th Indian right through, and they’ll be behind those encampments you mentioned a moment ago, and taking them from a most unexpected direction.”

“But surely they have forces along the coast road at Azzizya and Bug Bug. You’ll run those Brigades right into the hornet’s nest, and once they get in how in the world will you get them out?”

“Yes!” O’Connor said exuberantly. “Right into the nest, but we are the hornets, and we’ll take them like a bolt from the blue!”

Surprise was essential to the success of his plan, which is why a cloak of secrecy had been thrown over the whole operation as he worked it all out. He would issue no written orders, confine planning to key staff members only, and not even the troops knew of the impending battle until that very night, just three days prior to commencement of the operation.

Yet it was more than mere secrecy as to timing that would create the element of surprise. O’Connor was taking an otherwise ponderous force in the 4th Indian Division, and giving it a dynamic new axis of attack. Instead of fighting up the coast road to come upon the Italian encampments from the most expected direction, he would send his infantry through an inland gap in an escarpment, and have them drive north, then east to appear suddenly behind the enemy position. His armor would be on the left, driving north towards Bug Bug to cut the main coast road. He explained his thinking to Wavell.

“I’ll have 4th and 7th Armored Brigades right beside them on their left. We’ll punch through, and I’ll send 4th Brigade to Azzizya, and 7th to Bug Bug. Meanwhile the Indian Division takes those encampments from the rear and storms on to invest Sidi Barani.”

It was a bold plan, even daring considering how badly outnumbered the British were at that moment. Wavell looked at the map for some time, thinking. Though he had grave reservations, and did not yet grasp how an armored force should be fought in these circumstances, he gave his grudging approval for the plan they would come to call “O’Connor’s Raid,” Operation Compass.

“If you can give them a good beating it will mean the world to us now,” said Wavell. “We’ve got to get back on our feet. I’ll send the order up through Jumbo just to follow protocol.” He was referring to General Maitland ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, the nominal commander of British troops in Egypt at the time. In spite of his caution, he caught the glint of brilliance in O’Connor’s plan. It seemed rash, even foolhardy, yet if it worked… He turned to O’Connor, taking a long breath. “You may have your battle, General, and god go with you.”

O’Connor was elated. He had planned everything he would need for this operation, right down to the open desert supply depots he would create, the night marches the troops would make, and every other detail of the attack. He had even put his men through a training exercise where towns were mocked up to mimic the Italian positions as photographed from above. The only question now was whether the men and material he had in hand would be enough to do the job. The equipment O’Connor had at his disposal was not entirely suited to the action he had in mind.

The 7th Armored Division had only recently taken that new name, having been simply called “The Armored Division” before it arrived in Egypt. The divisional commander’s wife took a stroll through the Cairo Zoo one day, and when she returned home she drew a sketch of a Jerboa which soon was adopted as the divisional flash. Even as the Armored Division took its first number, lucky 7, so it also came to be called the “Desert Rats.” It had only 65 tanks when Italy declared war, but Churchill had labored to send considerably more, and now General Creagh had 275 tanks, a mix of A-9 and A-13 cruiser tanks, and an equal number of Matildas, which were well armored tanks for their time, but not given to the lightning quickness O’Connor was now advocating. Where O’Connor saw his armor as a quick foil to slash and jab at his foe, the Matilda was more of a lumbering battle axe.

The A12 Matilda II could reach a speed of 16MPH. It was a tank designed for the role the British still had in mind for armor — an infantry support tank — a tank Wavell would understand implicitly. Most were gathered in the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, and realizing their limitations for the maneuver he had in mind, O’Connor would have them operate with the infantry as Wavell might expect. They were his heavy cavalry, to be thrown in at the appropriate time when the infantry had forced a key position to break the enemy line.

With a small 2lb main gun and a single 7.92 Besa machinegun, the Matilda might pose a threat to enemy infantry if properly employed, and its 78mm armor was impervious to any anti-tank weapon then fielded by the Italians. It was not the dashing armored chariot O’Connor had in mind, but the tank would prove a shock to the Italians when they found they could do very little to harm the Matilda’s waltzing through their positions. The tank would soon be christened “The Desert Queen,” and the Matildas were not alone.

O’Connor also had about 135 cruiser tanks in the 7th and 8th Hussars. The A-9 and A-10 cruiser had the same 2 pounder gun as the Matilda but, with half the armor at 30mm, it was twice as fast. The A-13 cruiser could make 30mph, and this was the lightning fast jab that O’Connor would put to good use. The rest of O’Connor’s “armor” were older Mark VI light tanks, which were really nothing more than fast machine gun carriers with thin 14mm armor. Yet speed was the order of the day in the general’s mind just then, and so he would gallop ahead with his cruiser tanks and an ad hoc brigade of armored cars, lorried riflemen, and anti-tank guns. O’Connor would put his Western Desert Force to good use, and prove his methods on the field, even with equipment ill-suited for the role he envisioned.

The plan called for speed, surprise, bold flanking maneuvers and night movement so as to assure he would not be spotted by the Italian Air Force, and it was going produce something much more than even O’Connor had expected.

Chapter 8

The attack started when the Blenheims came in at 7:00 scattering loads of bombs along the Italian positions, a rude awakening that was made worse when the monitor HMS Terror opened fire on the coastal encampment with her two big 15-inch guns. The ship was basically a small 7200 ton floating gun turret, a spare that had been built for the battlecruiser HMS Furious before it was converted to an aircraft carrier.

It had been at Malta earlier, helping to fend off the Italian air attacks there with her anti-aircraft guns. Now it was cruising off the coast in the pre-dawn light, blasting away at the Italian positions and living up to its name in every respect. The shock of 15-inch shells tearing up the stony ground was tremendous, and a rude awakening that day for the Italians. Terror was joined by a few other smaller gunboats that were peppering known artillery and AT gun positions with smaller caliber fire, concentrating on the coastal towns of Maktila and Sidi Barani.

Further inland at Nibeiwa camp, the Italians heard the skirl and drum of Scottish bagpipes, and the growl of tanks. The surprise was that the attack was not coming from the east as expected, but from the west, behind them! The British had come in through the Enba gap as planned, infiltrating at night behind the Italian encampments, and they were taking them from the rear. Stunned by the sudden attack, the Italians burst out of their field tents and leapt for the cover of nearby slit trenches just as the Matilda’s of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment came rumbling into their camp, along with infantry of the 11th Indian Brigade.

The Italians had a battalion of light tanks in their Maletti Group, consisting of thirty-five M11/39 medium tanks and an equal number of L3/35 light tankettes. Their crews were just settling in to morning breakfast when the attack came in. Twenty-three of the better tanks had been deployed to guard the entrance to the camp, where no mines had been sewn, and this was where the 43 Matildas of the 7th RTR were heading. They caught the Italian armor completely by surprise, their 2 pounder guns brewing up one tank after another in the opening salvoes, some before the shocked tank crews even had time to reach their vehicles.

General Maletti ran from his dugout field bunker and was cut down before he could utter a single order, so he did not see the systematic destruction of his unit, wiped out in just ten minutes by the heavier British tanks.

As the alarm was raised, frightened Italian soldiers grabbed any weapon they could find. Some fought, others ran for cover. Frantic artillery crews tried to turn their field pieces on the British tanks, firing at near point blank range, yet they were astonished to see their rounds simply could not penetrate the heavy armor on the Matildas. Faced with an enemy they could not kill, the camps fell one by one, the first easily, the second more stubbornly, but the outcome was the same. The Matildas would breach the enemy perimeter, and the Indian infantry would follow them in, rooting out one fox hole and machine gun nest after another.

Along the coast, a mixed force of 1800 troops under Brigadier General Selby was coming up from Mersa Matruh. They had been busy earlier building dummy wooden tanks inland in the desert as a good target for the Italian planes if they showed up, all a part of the deception O’Connor had planned.

By mid day the inland encampments had fallen and the British were mounting up the infantry in lorries to move on the coastal town of Sidi Barani. The thirsty Matildas had refueled and taken on fresh ammunition, and the bulk of all the 7th Armored Division’s artillery was setting up to support this renewed attack. By nightfall the town had fallen and the British column had reached the sea, bagging several Italian divisions that were now cut off from any escape.

The Italians began to surrender en masse, causing a snarl as groups of 2000 men might be herded off by no more than a platoon of British soldiers to watch them. The fight had simply gone out of them. They were conscripts, sent by Mussolini to conquer Egypt, but had little real stomach for combat once cut off and with no sign of relief anywhere apparent.

“O’Connor’s Raid” had been a resounding success, yet it was not over in spite of an unexpected setback when General Wavell radioed to inform O’Connor that the 4th Indian Division must now be withdrawn for duty in the Sudan.

O’Connor was surprised by the news, as he had not been told about this in advance, and it was most disconcerting. He would get the 6th Australian Division as a replacement, but not for some days, which meant he would have no infantry support. Any other commander would have stopped his offensive there and then, but O’Connor was determined to exploit his initial successes, and decided to press forward with 7th Armored Division alone. He would soon turn the Italian retreat into a rout of historic proportions, a debacle in the desert not replicated again until the 1st Gulf War when half a million Coalition troops routed the armies of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait.

But O’Connor did not have half a million men. He had begun his offensive with no more than 30,000 against a force of 150,000 Italians. He had destroyed 73 Italian tanks, 237 artillery pieces and bagged over 38,000 prisoners in the first round of fighting. In doing so he had taken only 70 casualties. Now his numbers were cut in half, but rather than consolidating his gains, he did the unexpected and attacked.

The Italians had retreated up the road toward their bastion at the small port of Bardia. A rocky escarpment angled in towards the town from the desert, stretching some thirty kilometers to the southeast, creating a kind of stone funnel that any force advancing up the coast had to enter. As they moved forward to the west, the attacker would be compressed by this escarpment, which had only one natural opening at a place called Halfaya Pass.

To cork this bottleneck, Graziani had rallied a small armored force to defend the pass. The British 3rd Hussars were now in the lead, but they were mainly equipped with the light Mark VI machine gun tankettes, and ran into heavy Italian artillery fire when they reached the town of Bug Bug about half way to the pass.

“We’ll meet fire with fire,” said O’Connor as he sized up the situation. “Bring up the division artillery. And get word to the sea bombardment force that they are to keep as much fire as possible on that road.”

Terror was still raining down heavy rounds on the retreating columns of Italian infantry and trucks, raising havoc as they hastened to the safety of their fortified ports at Bardia and Tobruk further west up the coast. Using the superior firepower of his 25 pounder artillery, O’Connor was able to blast his way forward, eventually taking Halfaya Pass and pushing on through Sollum, Now, confronted by an anti-tank ditch and miles of wire and bunkers outside Bardia, he was forced to wait for the Australian infantry. If he took Bardia, he knew the psychological shock of that loss would likely send his enemy on a headlong retreat to Benghazi far to the west.

Lieutenant General Annibale Bergonzoli's XXIII Corps was digging in, occupying the strong defenses of Bardia with all the troops he could gather as they retreated up the coast, still harassed by British naval gunfire. Mussolini knew the man personally, calling him Barba Elettrica, “Old Electric Beard,” because his whiskers and handlebar mustache jutted so wildly from his face. He sent him a message urging him to hold Bardia at all costs. Bergonzoli’s reply was brave and confident: “We are here in Bardia, and here we will stay.” He would soon command a force of 40,000 men there, making ready behind a double line of fortified concrete positions.

The task of taking the place with such a small force at his disposal seemed impossible, but O’Connor had no hesitation. He knew that it would need a combined assault by infantry, tanks and artillery to do the job, and he gathered all his remaining Matildas in the 7th RTR and planned to use them as an armored battering ram against the enemy line.

The engineer sappers of the Australian 16th Brigade finally came up in their trucks, inexperienced, but determined, tough men of the Australian bush who were accustomed to harsh desert conditions. They began unloading equipment, only to find that cases of much needed wire cutters were nowhere to be found. Orders were sent back to find them, and the infantry began to dig in to set up positions for their 3-inch mortar teams when it was discovered that none of the mortars had sites!

“How are we supposed to fire the damn things if we can’t sight and register on the targets?” A gritty Sergeant put a plain enough point on the dilemma, and a young Lieutenant scratched his head, then found the nearest jeep he could get his hands on and started back down the road to look for the missing mortar sights. He would have to go all the way to Cairo to find them, where the crates sat in a warehouse, overlooked in the hasty forward movement of the brigades.

O’Connor took advantage of the time to finalize his attack plan and call for both air and naval support. That night Bardia would be visited by Wellington bombers of the R.A.F., which put in a strong attack to soften the enemy defenses, dumping all of 20,000 pounds of bombs. As the night wore on, the Royal Navy put in the second act, with the monitor Terror returning to pound the port defenses in the dark hours before the assault. At one point an old British river gunboat, the Aphis, had slipped into the bay off Bardia, right into the harbor itself, and it was firing away at anything that moved on the shore, with an impertinent and daring display of bravery.

“Look there,” O’Connor pointed. “If the Navy can get inside the enemy’s camp like that, then we’ll scratch our way in too!”

General Iven Mackay of the Australian 6th Division was already looking over the ground. Selecting points that seemed suitable for an assault. As dawn came the looming shapes of the big engineers moved like grey shadows over the lunar landscape. These were big, muscular men, and their appearance intimidated the defenders when they saw how doggedly they came forward, moving up to prepare the way for the assault even under sporadic machine gun fire from the bunkers. O’Connor countered this by ordering a heavy covering artillery barrage to suppress the enemy guns. Then the shovels and wire cutters went to work, the aim being to fill in a section of the anti-tank ditch for the Matildas. Bangalore torpedoes were pushed under the wire to blow gaps and detonate hidden mines, difficult and grueling work under enemy fire, but the Aussies persisted.

It was not long before O’Connor could order up his battering ram, the tanks of the 7th RTR that had led his assault many days ago against the Italian encampments. The men were tired, some near exhaustion as they pushed along the narrow road, nerves jangled by the grating clatter of the tank treads. The Australian infantry had punched through the outer defenses, like ghoulish specters, their rifles and bayonets a frightening shock to the inexperienced Blackshirt militias on the front line. The Italians wanted nothing to do with these brawny, hard looking men, and began to surrender in droves.

Yet it was not all so one sided. In places the Italians fought hard, a stubborn sergeant holding his men together in a concrete bunker and refusing to give in until the Australian infantry had to work their way up and hurl in grenades. As the first prisoners were led to the rear, O’Connor was surprised to learn what he was up against. The Italians quickly told the interrogators that the port was defended by all of 40,000 men with a brigade of tanks in reserve. It was twice the size O’Connor had estimated, and now his 23 Matildas seemed a small force to consider challenging such a weighty garrison.

“40,000 men sir! Do you think the buggers are giving us a load of crap?” A staff officer had come in with the report, and O’Connor took the information in, thinking.

“We shall soon see.” O’Connor smiled, his short white hair catching the morning sunlight at the edge of his officer’s cap.

“You mean to continue the attack?”

“What else? The enemy line stretches out for twenty kilometers to the east. They may have 40,000 men, but they can’t all be in one place at the same time, can they? We’ll hit them, just as we planned. See to the orders, Lieutenant.”

“Sir!” The man clicked his heels and was off, and soon the Matildas were pushing forward towards the gap that had been forced by the Australian infantry. When the tanks pushed through, they made short work of the pill boxes, blasting at them with their 2 pounder guns. When one post fell, the next bunker adjacent to it decided the wiser thing was to surrender, and the infection soon rippled back from the point of the assault.

The big Australian infantry rushed forward with the Matildas, Bren gun teams having to fire no more than a few hostile bursts before whole trench lines of Italian infantry would emerge, hands in the air, white flags waving. One Bren team came upon a line of L3 machine gun tanks, twelve in all, their motors revving up as though they were making ready to charge into the battle. More on instinct than anything else, the gunner fired at the closest tankettes, and was astonished when the whole line of twelve gave up and surrendered after a single burst.

Once the British tanks were ‘inside the wire,’ it had the effect of piercing a balloon. The entire defensive position began to collapse. It was not that the British and Australians were that much better at the art of war, but only that they were that much more determined to prevail. They had the will to win forward, and the Italians did not, preferring a quick surrender and a safe walk to the rear areas, and out of this damnable desert war.

Bardia fell that very same day, and the shock of its sudden capture by a force a third the size of the garrison rippled across Cyrenaica, sending columns of Italian Colonial infantry streaming west towards Benghazi. Old Electric Beard had been given a close shave, and now it was on to Tobruk, the first real prize O’Connor had in mind. It would offer a great natural harbor to supply his forward move from that point, but by the time he got there the 7th RTR was down to only eighteen Matildas.

Several tanks had broken down, others had simply run out of fuel and ammunition, still others had run over a mine or slipped a metal tread and were stuck in the sand, no more than metal bunkers now. Yet O’Connor would not stop. He was out among the men, urging them on, commandeering any truck that seemed idle and stuffing it full of riflemen before he rapped his riding crop on the hood and pointed out the direction he wanted it to go. His energy seemed boundless, and he moved so quickly that he seemed to be everywhere at once.

The tired Aussies took heart to see this, and they shouldered their rifles and slogged on. They would use the same formula to take Tobruk: engineers, artillery, and those eighteen Matildas. A good bayonet with some guts behind it often resulted in surprising results. They would take another 25,000 Italian prisoners in the valuable port, including Admiral Massmiliano Vietina, the commander of the garrison. 208 guns, numerous enemy tanks and trucks were also taken, and many were used to flesh out the thinning ranks of the British 7th Armored division. In all, the British force had ended up capturing 130,000 Italians, losing only 500 men in the process, with 1373 wounded and 55 missing.

It was a triumph of will, determination, and the skill of all who fought that action. But it would not end with Tobruk. O’Connor radioed back to Wavell that he had both ports, and was given a hearty congratulations.

“Best to stand on that ground now and consolidate,” said Wavell. “Your men will be tired, and it will take days to get food and petrol up to the front.”

Everything he said was true, but O’Connor felt that if he could find a way to press on now, he might drive the Italians from Cyrenaica while he had them on the run. Yet his division was in no shape to move. It was scattered all over the desert, with seventy percent of its tanks and vehicles stalled, broken down, or out of fuel. Yet there was still that thirty percent, and he set out now to find it.

Chapter 9

The Italians were beaten. Graziani made one last call on his gilded, monogrammed telephone, sending a frantic message to Mussolini saying that all of Cyrenaica would soon be lost. Electric Beard Bergonzoli was howling about the need for Germany to attack with its entire air force. He was hastily evacuating the last of his Colonial troops from Derna on the north coast, even as the Australians pushed on up that road. As the Italians left, the Arabs drifted into town in their long desert robes, like phantoms emerging from the desert, and they began to loot the place, dragging away anything of value the Italians left behind.

Cyrenaica was a vast peninsula extending from Bardia in the east, then curving up through Derna, and west to Benghazi before it dipped down again to Agadabia on the Gulf of Sirte. The best road was along that curving edge of the coast, for inland the ground rose in the imposing terrain of the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountains.

O’Connor could see that he had one last chance to turn a solid victory into something truly decisive. If he allowed the remaining Italian troops to escape, he would only end up having to fight them another day. So he stared at the map looking for another way west, but found no roads fingering their way into the deserts beyond Bardia and Tobruk. There were goat trails, thin tracks tracing their way through the wadis, remnants of secondary roads that were really nothing more than the tracks of a vehicle that had wandered there, and they were all shifting with the wind on the sand.

So he decided. He would make his own road. He would simply get a column together and point it west, cutting right straight across the wide base of the peninsula, through the open desert. He Found General Michael O’Moore Creagh, commanding 7th Armored, and urged him to move via the thin trail network through Mechili, Msus and Antelat.

“Get west,” he said. “Any way you can. I don’t care if you have to cannibalize every unit you have, but gather any vehicle that has petrol and get them moving!”

Creagh made the decision to give this job to the intrepid commander of his division reconnaissance unit, Lieutenant Colonel John Combe of the 7th Hussars.

“Look Johnny,” he said. “I’m going to cobble together anything that still has petrol and give you a flying column, about 2000 troops in all. You do the flying. Head southwest and position yourself defensively to block the Italian retreat to Tripoli.”

Combe looked at the map, seeing nothing but blank space along the route Creagh was pointing out. “Along what road?” he asked the obvious question.

“There isn’t one,” said Creagh. “At least not anything we would call a road. You’ll just have to make your own. We’ll follow as best we can with the rest of the division.”

“Very well.” Combe smiled. It was a classic cavalry action for his Hussars. He would dash on ahead through the night, braving the unknown, scouting out the way, and when he got there he would be facing off the remnant of the entire Italian 10th Army, perhaps 30,000 men, and he would hold until relieved.

“Got it,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation, and “Combe Force” was born. He had a squadron of his own 11th Hussars in old Morris and Marmon Herington armored cars, supported by B Squadron of 1st King's Dragoon Guards, with a few Mark VI Light tankettes and another handful of armored cars. C Battery, Royal Horse Artillery, had a few 25 pounders, and he had some truck mounted 37mm anti-tank guns from 106th Regiment RHA. The infantry element was the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, motorized infantry.

And off they went into the night, with the armored cars leading and Combe squinting at his map and compass. Just follow a compass heading southwest, he thought, and it was a fitting end to the operation he had led with his Hussars from the very first. They navigated around wadis, over cold stony ground, the vehicles jolting over the rugged terrain, through occasional thickets of desert scrub. Fuel was always an issue, but he reckoned he had enough to get his force to the west coast. Getting back was another matter, but that never entered his mind.

The sun rose on his force half way through that ordeal, and he pushed on, warily watching the sky for any sign of enemy aircraft. None came. The last Italian air strike had managed to zero in on a cluster of 8000 prisoners well behind British lines, where the Italians suffered the ignominious humiliation of being bombed by their own air force.

By noon the column had come up on a low ridge overlooking the road to Benghazi to the north, a place called Beda Fomm. Combe was elated to see that he had beaten the Italians to this place, and he busily set about arranging his small contingent into a blocking force. His few Bren carriers were out of petrol, so he left them behind and brought up his infantry.

“Get the lads dug in along this line,” he said. “We’ll position the artillery and AA guns behind.” He sent one small group up with a few crates of landmines and had them lay down a makeshift mine field, but that was the defense. He had a few mines, a single battalion of British infantry, and the handful of guns and armored cars against anything the Italians had left.

As it happened, he had beaten the Italians to this place by a bare two hours, for his troops soon saw the dust rising from an approaching column. It was led by the 10th Bersaglieri, which blundered into the shallow minefield and stopped with some shock and surprise. They quickly pulled themselves together, however, and organized a strong attack, determined to open the road again for the long column behind them.

Combe opened up on them with his 25 pounders to break up the attack, his gunners putting down disciplined fire on the enemy as they advanced. The Italians fell back, and Combe looked at his watch. He had received word that O’Connor had put together a supporting force of anything else that could move in Creagh’s 7th Armored division. They had been following the tracks his own column had made to navigate their way west, and by 4pm the lead elements arrived from 4th Armored Brigade, just as the Italians were putting in yet another strong attack.

Nearly out of fuel, the few cruiser tanks and Bren carriers that could still move charged boldly forward against what appeared to be an endless column of Italians. Combe began to open up with his 37mm flak guns, and a 40mm Bofors, setting several Italian trucks on fire and causing a panic on the jammed coastal road. Trucks veered away, plowing into heavy sand and bogging down as they came under fire. There were some 20,000 Italians clogging up the road, with fighting troops mixed in with support services, airfield crews, and civilians from Benghazi.

One British squadron of three cruiser tanks, a Bren carrier and one truck mounted 37mm AA gun took off north, running parallel to the coastal road and blasting away at the Italian column for all of ten miles. They stopped to fetch ammo from the supply truck and found out just how far afield they were, a handful of men stinging the long python that might turn on them at any moment. So they simply turned around, firing at the enemy all the way south again, until they had returned to Combe’s main lines to report the column seemed endless.

If the Italians had massed their fighting troops and made an all or nothing attempt to break through, they would certainly have prevailed. Had these been German troops, or Japanese, they would have brushed the scanty blocking force aside with no trouble. As it was, the British were determined to stop them, and the Italians were not as determined to break out, even though they tried gallantly in several attacks, the last a formation of nearly 100 light and medium tanks.

On they came, the tracks rattling, guns barking at the thin lines of the 2nd King’s Rifle Battalion blocking the way. The British troopers opened up with their Vickers MGs, but it was the 25 pounder artillery that would have to do the job if they were to hold. The artillery crews leveled the barrels of their field pieces and began to pour well disciplined fire on the advancing tanks. Blasting away at them as they charged bravely forward.

“Where’s our bloody tanks?” an artilleryman shouted over the din of the firing?”

“Back there,” the Gunnery Sergeant thumbed over his shoulder. “Out of bloody gas. Now load and fire, boyo, because that barrel is all that’s between you and those enemy tanks!”

The British had nipped at a part of the flank of the Italian column, capturing about 800 prisoners there, mostly service troops. But, as fate would have it, there were three fuel trucks in the column, and several Tommy’s got them back to Creagh’s 4th Armored where the tanks were hastily filling up with the much needed fuel. That was a fortunate find, for the supply column on its way from Bardia with more fuel had run into a sand storm and was now completely lost.

“Nice of the Italians to make the delivery just when we needed it most,” said a tanker. It was just another barb in the Italian 10th Army’s side, a force that was now in the last desperate throes of the most ignominious defeat in the history of Italian arms.

Twenty Italian tanks had managed to break into the lines of the Kings Rifles, but they soon realized that they had no supporting infantry and that the rest of their brigade had been stopped by the artillery fire, well behind them. One British Sergeant took out his pistol and leapt atop an enemy M11/39 tank, rapping on the turret hatch, which, to his surprise, was immediately opened by an ornery Italian Lieutenant.

“Hello mate,” he said calmly. “You and your lads might want to give it up now before those 25 pounders get you bore sighted.”

There was the Lieutenant, sitting behind 30mm armor, with a 37mm main gun and two 8mm Breda machine guns bristling from his upper turret, and he was facing a single British Sergeant with a revolver. He could have slammed his hatch shut, which he should never have opened in the first place, and gunned his engine to continue his attack, but instead he just climbed out of his tank and surrendered. The Sergeant single handedly captured three of the twenty tanks in the lines with nothing more than his sidearm. Seven others were knocked out by the artillery, and the rest turned and fled.

The incident was symbolic of the entire battle, where this vastly superior Italian force seemed not to have the slightest idea of how it should fight the enemy tormenting them in the desert. When this attack failed, the Italians decided to wait for further orders from behind, where Electric Beard Bergonzoli was furious that his escape to Tripoli should be blocked by such a small British force.

Darkness put a merciful end to the chaos of that day. A few British fuel trucks had finally made it all the way from Bardia, and the rest of the tanks that had joined the action were able to refuel. The Division, if it could still be called that, now could count nineteen tanks in the 2nd RTR, and a division reserve of 10 cruiser tanks. The men passed a sleepless night, cold, with the threat of rain on the crisp desert air.

To the north, Bergonzoli was also busy organizing his last attempt to break through at dawn the following morning. He would execute a small flanking maneuver, turning east off the road, and charge in with the last of his tanks, a force some 60 strong. Once they had tied down the British tanks and guns, his infantry would push on up the road, where he hoped his sheer numbers would overwhelm the 2nd King’s Rifle Battalion, still dug in and huddled over tins of Bully Beef and cold water.

The next morning, Brigadier J.A.L. Caunter would organize the defense, setting out his 19 tanks to receive the enemy when they discovered what Bergonzoli was up to. “Blood” Caunter, as he was called, was a man who never flinched from a tough job. When he went fishing, it was not for carp or herring, but sharks, and he would later write a book about angling for the most dangerous sharks he could find in British waters. Now, however, he was angling to catch Bergonzoli’s armor by surprise, and the last tank battle of the campaign was about to be joined near a small rise, studded with the blanched white sandstone dome of an old Arab mosque.

The British called it “the Pimple,” and it would be a landmark for their well rehearsed battle maneuvers. Blood Caunter had the advantage of experience, grit, and good radios in his tanks to coordinate his movements. Even though the enemy outnumbered him three to one, the Italians had no radios, and had to rely on flag signals from one tank formation to another to coordinate their attack.

But on they came, flags fluttering as the first wave of thirty tanks led the attack. Caunter had a bugler take a quick swig from a canteen and sound “stand to,” and the British crews leapt into their well positioned tanks, waiting for the enemy. They would get in the all important first shot, trying to even the odds before the Italians could rush in at close quarters and overwhelm them with sheer numbers. Eight Italian tanks brewed up in the first wave, whereupon Caunter executed a smart backward withdrawal, placing his tanks below the line of the low ridge he had been on.

Thinking they finally had the enemy on the run, the Italians blundered forward, some units stopping near the mosque to await further orders by flag as to where they should go next. Those that saw the signal to move ahead ended up being sky-lined on the ridge, and Caunter’s tanks savaged them again, sending them reeling back towards the mosque.

At this Caunter sent in his reserve of ten cruiser tanks. “All stations, tanks left and attack the pimple. I repeat, tanks left and attack the pimple!”

The cruisers swept away, the tracks churning up the dust and sand as they wheeled in a well coordinated turn, storming in and taking the last of Bergonzoli’s tanks in the flank, smashing up an already badly disorganized formation. It was the final straw, and the Italians had had enough. They were not going to break through at Beda Fomm, and would soon be herded back to become prisoners for the long duration of the war.

Operation Compass had come to its wheezing end, over nearly 800 kilometers of inhospitable desert, against a force five times its size. The brilliance and determination of General O’Connor, and all the Brigadiers that commanded the dogged troops he led into battle, had given Great Britain the one thing it so desperately needed at that time, a victory.

O’Connor’s face would make the news, the energetic British Terrier that had beaten the Italians senseless in the Libyan Desert, defending Egypt and liberating all of Cyrenaica. He had taken two small ports in Bardia, Tobruk and soon added Benghazi as the Australians continued to press the Italians from behind. The airfields he had secured would be vital to the defense of Malta, for when the Italians moved into Egypt, the only way the British could get more Hurricanes to Malta was by carrier. Now they would have plenty of new airfields to leap frog the fighters forward.

It was a jubilant time, and a much needed relief from the anxiety that the Italian advance into Egypt had caused. Secretary of War Anthony Eden took a leaf from Churchill’s book and characterized the victory in a single phrase: “Never has so much been surrendered by so many to so few.”

Churchill himself was a bit more direct: “It looks as if these people were corn ripe for the sickle,” he said in a congratulatory message to Wavell. The stalwart General placed the praise on O’Connor’s handling of the battle, getting the utmost from the slim resources he had, with imagination, skill and considerable daring. Yet O’Connor never sought the limelight and considered his actions as nothing more than the simple performance of his duty. His face did make the news, however, and more than an admiring population in Great Britain would see the magazine covers. Dark eyes would soon take interest in what was happening there in the Western Desert. A conjunction of minds and forces was soon about to change everything again, as Germany decided how it would now deal with the sudden and complete defeat of the Italians in North Africa.

Aboard Kirov, Anton Fedorov had been following all these developments closely from any reports Nikolin could fish from the wire traffic. He knew what lay ahead, at least in one telling of these events, and he had been amazed at the integrity of the history concerning O’Connor’s Raid and Operation Compass. He turned to Admiral Volsky, explaining that all this was about to be reversed, and wondering what they could do about it.

“You mean to say that after such a resounding victory this British General will be defeated by the Italians now?” Volsky did not understand.

“No sir, not the Italians, though they will reinforce their position in Tripolitania and continue to fight. If the history continues to hold this course, the British will soon be sent reeling across the desert in retreat by the Germans, and principally by one man, General Erwin Rommel, the man who will come to be called the Desert Fox. He’s out there somewhere even as we speak, waiting in the wings, and he is about to take center stage if things hold together. In fact, O’Connor may soon be captured, along with many other Brigadiers who just fought this victorious battle against the Italians. Britain will lose one of its most daring generals just as a foe of equal skill comes on the scene for the other side. This reversal sets back British plans for half a year, and in this history it could be even more significant, possibly fatal.”

“My,” said Volsky. “History can be a stubborn mule at times. Must this happen, Fedorov? Might it not change?”

“It might if I could do one thing, sir.”

“What is that?”

“Warn General O’Connor, so the British will not be deprived of his brilliance. We must warn them, sir. Information is as much a weapon as anything else in this war, and that we have in abundance, no matter how many missiles remain in our magazine.”

“Admiral Tovey has sent word that there will be a meeting in Cairo to plan the defense of Egypt and the future course of the war. We are invited as observers and agents of the Soviet government. It is either that or we sail for Murmansk to arrange these convoys, but Admiral Golovko can handle that for the time being. These old bones are starting to feel the cold up here. Warmer waters would be most welcome. Would you like to go?”

“Of course!” Fedorov was elated.

He thought it would be a perfect time to discretely offer the British the benefit of his foreknowledge of what was to come. Nothing was certain, but he might help them avoid some key blunders, like the ill fated and futile effort to reinforce Greece. He might also let them know how important Malta will become to the future war in the desert.

As he pondered this, another event was about to happen that would now weigh heavily in the balance. It would begin with a simple coded signal, heralding an arrival that had been long expected, and one that would change the entire course of the war.