In Egypt in September 1939, Britain invoked a clause of its treaty with Farouk which obliged him, in the event of a war, to provide ‘all the facilities and assistance in his power, including the use of ports, aerodromes and means of communication’. Thereafter, the British treated the country as a colonial possession, governed through their ambassador Sir Miles Lampson. They based their Mediterranean fleet at Alexandria, and in February 1942 deployed troops in Cairo to stifle a nascent Egyptian rebellion. In the course of the war, desperate hunger among the peasantry caused several food riots; the plight of the Egyptian felaheen contrasted starkly with the sybaritic lifestyle of the British military colony centred upon Middle East headquarters, Shepheard’s Hotel, the Gezira Sporting Club and a nexus of barracks, supply and repair bases throughout the Nile Delta, where contempt for ‘the wogs’ was almost universal.
American visitors were dismayed by the lassitude and imperial condescension of the British in Egypt, who seemed to regard the conflict being waged in the western wilderness as a mere event in a sporting calendar. This perception was unjust to those doing the fighting and dying: it failed to recognise the British Army’s tradition of seeking to make war with a light heart. But a core of truth about the North African campaign was that the British role until late 1942 was characterised by an amateurishness that was occasionally inspired, but more often crippled its endeavours.
So large was the paper strength of Mussolini’s armies that in the summer of 1940 it seemed possible they would expel the British from northern and eastern Africa. There were 600,000 Italian and colonial troops in Libya and Abyssinia, confronting fewer than a hundred thousand men under Wavell’s orders in the Middle East, Kenya, Sudan and Somaliland. In August, to Churchill’s fury the Italians seized Somaliland almost bloodlessly. Mussolini’s people had little stomach for hard fighting, but a hearty appetite for victories. During the brief period when cheap African conquests seemed in prospect while the Luftwaffe’s efforts against Britain were visibly flagging, an Italian journalist wrote proudly, and with an earnestness that reflected his people’s genius for self-delusion: ‘We want to reach Suez with our own forces alone; perhaps we will win the war and not the Germans.’ But Mussolini’s operations were handicapped by his confusion about both means and purposes: at home, he demobilised part of his army to bring in the harvest. Ignoring the vital principle of concentration of force, he prepared to launch an invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. He failed to exploit a critical window of opportunity to seize Malta. In North Africa, his commanders lacked equipment, skill and resolve. In September 1940, in a gesture symbolic of Italy’s generals’ insouciance about the struggle, the Ministry of War in Rome reverted to its peacetime practice of closing for business each day at 2 p.m.
An Italian diplomat vented his disgust on the mood he encountered during a visit to Milan: ‘Everyone thinks only of eating, enjoying themselves, making money and relaying witticisms about the great and powerful. Anyone who gets killed is a jerk…He who supplies the troops with cardboard shoes is considered a sort of hero.’ A young Italian officer wrote home from Libya: ‘We’re trying to fight this war as though it were a colonial war in Africa. But this is a European war…fought with European weapons against a European enemy. We take too little account of this in building our stone forts and equipping ourselves with such luxury.’
Mussolini dismissed Hitler’s offer of two armoured divisions for North Africa, which might have been decisive in securing a swift Axis victory: he was determined to keep the Germans out of his own jealously defined sphere of influence. A quarter of Italy’s combat aircraft were dispatched to join the Luftwaffe’s attack on Britain, leaving Italian troops in Libya almost without air support, while a large army in Albania – occupied by Mussolini in 1939 – was held in readiness to attack either Yugoslavia or Greece, as the Duce deemed expedient. The Italians made policy and strategy in the belief that they were participating in the residual military operations of a short war soon to conclude in Axis victory. Mussolini was fearful that the British might make terms with Hitler before he had achieved his own conquests. Instead, Italy would become the only nation whose strategic fortunes were decisively affected by events in Africa, where it lost progressively twenty-six divisions, half its air force and its entire tank inventory, together with any vestige of military credibility.
The British began operations in the summer of 1940 with a succession of raids across the Libyan border. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani deployed some 250,000 men against 36,000 British in Egypt and a further 27,000 – including a division of horsed yeomanry – in Palestine. Mussolini’s commander had made his reputation by destroying the Abyssinian army in 1935 with liberal infusions of poison gas. In 1940 he showed himself a resolute defeatist with no stomach for battle. Graziani advanced cautiously into Egypt in September until, unnerved by the British show of aggression and a gross overestimate of Wavell’s strength, he halted and dug in south and east of Sidi Barrani. One of his generals, Annibale Bergonzoli, christened ‘electric whiskers’ by the British, found some of his artillery officers so craven that during British air attacks he was obliged to hit and kick them back to their guns from the trenches where they had taken refuge. A three-month pause ensued, during which Mussolini chafed, still anxious that the war might come to an end before he had conquered Egypt; Churchill, meanwhile, was equally impatient at the delay before Wavell was ready to launch his counter-strokes.
On 19 January 1941, Maj. Gen. William Platt led a small army from Sudan into Eritrea, seizing the formidable fortress of Keren after heavy fighting on 27 March, at a cost of 536 killed, mostly Indian soldiers, and 3,229 wounded. Meanwhile in February, another British force under Gen. Alan Cunningham, brother of the admiral, advanced from Kenya into Somaliland, marched up the coast to Mogadishu, then turned north for a thrust 774 miles overland to Harar. By 6 April, Cunningham had taken Addis Ababa, Abyssinia’s capital, having suffered only 501 battle casualties. Fighting persisted for another six months against pockets of Italian resistance, but the Abyssinian campaign was crowned with British success, after some hard fighting on short commons. Though combat losses were few, 74,550 men succumbed to sickness or accidents and 744 of them died, as did 15,000 camels supporting the British advance. More than 300,000 Italians became prisoners.
But the most dramatic offensive took place in Egypt, where on 6 December 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 everyday 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.