The British enter Libya

On 16 December 1940 the last Italian units left the Libyan–Egyptian frontier and took refuge behind the defences of Bardia, a coastal fortress some 25 kilometres beyond the border. The British followed them into the small port of Sollum, the last Egyptian settlement before Libya, climbed the Halfaya Pass onto the plateau and occupied the abandoned Fort Capuzzo on the Libyan side of the frontier. That evening the tanks of the 4th Armoured Brigade took Sidi Omar, the last centre of resistance on the border. A week after the start of Operation Compass there was not a single Italian soldier left in Egypt outside the prisoner-of-war cages, and the war in North Africa had moved onto the territory of Italy’s colony.

It is usually recorded under this date that the British held Sollum in Egypt and captured Fort Capuzzo in Libya. The date agrees with the sources, but the word “captured” needs explaining. Neither Sollum nor Capuzzo was taken by storm. According to the British official history and Gavin Long’s Australian official history, the Italians withdrew from the Sollum–Capuzzo triangle to Bardia during the day and night of 16 December on the orders of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, with British patrols following close on their heels. Some studies place the occupation of Sollum and Halfaya on 15 December; the British official history gives 16 December as the day on which the port passed into British hands.

The pursuit after Sidi Barrani

In three days, from 9 to 11 December, General Richard O’Connor’s Western Desert Force overran all the Italian camps around Sidi Barrani and took, according to the British official history, some 38,300 Italian and Libyan prisoners. The second-line divisions of the Italian Tenth Army, standing further west, did not counter-attack but began to fall back towards the frontier. The Cirene Division managed to slip away from the camps at Sofafi to the Halfaya Pass, whereas the Catanzaro Division, caught on the march by the armoured cars of the 11th Hussars, lost most of its men and equipment. The retreating columns, crowded onto the coast road, were shelled throughout 11 December and for much of the following night by the monitor HMS Terror and two river gunboats.

By the evening of 12 December the Italians held in Egypt only the immediate approaches to Sollum and, on the plateau, the area of Sidi Omar just beyond the border. The pursuit was carried out by the 7th Armoured Division alone: its 7th Armoured Brigade advanced along the coast, while the 4th Armoured Brigade and the Support Group moved across the plateau above the escarpment. Supplies allowed nothing more. Wavell and O’Connor had originally planned a raid lasting a few days, not a major offensive, so the dumps of fuel, water and food were left far behind, and there were twenty times as many prisoners as expected. They all had to be given water, fed and sent to the rear. Captured Italian stores and lorries saved the situation: on 12 December a newly arrived transport company that had no vehicles of its own took over eighty captured Italian diesel lorries.

The Bardia–Tobruk road is cut

On 13 December O’Connor decided to cut Bardia off from Tobruk. The 7th Armoured Division’s advanced guard, made up of part of the 11th Hussars, a battery of horse artillery and a squadron of tanks, crossed the desert west of the frontier, cut the Trigh Capuzzo caravan track, and on the morning of 14 December its patrols reached the Bardia–Tobruk road and tore down the telephone lines. By evening patrols from a strong detachment of the 4th Armoured Brigade were already standing on the road. That same day the British established that the Italians were still holding Fort Capuzzo, Sollum, Sidi Suleiman, Halfaya and the encircled Sidi Omar.

Keeping troops so far to the west, however, proved beyond the strength of the British rear services. The advanced guard was under constant attack from the Italian air force, which after the defeat at Sidi Barrani was trying to give the ground forces at least a moment’s respite. On 15 December the 7th Armoured Brigade, moving north between Capuzzo and Sidi Omar, tried to cut the road from Capuzzo to Bardia but was stopped by heavy artillery fire from an Italian flank guard, placed there precisely so that the garrisons of Capuzzo and Sollum could withdraw to the fortress. On 16 December the Hussars were pulled back into reserve and the 4th Armoured Brigade was ordered to take Sidi Omar. It did so that evening.

The Italian choice: Bardia

On the Italian side the defeat at Sidi Barrani threw the command into chaos. The commander of the Tenth Army, General Mario Berti, was in Italy on sick leave, and his place was taken by General Italo Gariboldi. On 12 December Graziani himself telegraphed Rome that, rather than sacrifice his “useless person” on the spot, he would prefer to go to Tripoli so as to keep the Italian flag flying there at least. Mussolini replied the same evening that he was counting on him as always and that there were enough guns and men between Bardia and Tobruk to break the enemy’s advance. Recalling a second marshal within a few days, after the dismissal of the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who had been blamed for the defeats in Greece, would have been too embarrassing for the regime.

Graziani ordered that both Bardia and Tobruk be defended. Faced with the threat of being outflanked from the desert, on 14 December he ordered the troops on the frontier to be brought back to positions that could be held. The commander of XXIII Corps, General Annibale Bergonzoli, a veteran of Ethiopia and Spain whom his soldiers called “Electric Beard”, reported on 15 December that without the units from Capuzzo and Sollum he did not have enough men to man Bardia. Graziani ordered them to withdraw, and on 17 December proposed the opposite to Mussolini: since Bardia could not be reinforced and would sooner or later fall, it would be better to concentrate all forces in Tobruk and await reinforcements from Italy there. The Duce rejected the idea. According to the British official history, he replied that everything had to be done to delay and wear down the enemy, and that a long resistance at Bardia would be a valuable contribution to that end.

16 December on the frontier

During the day and night of 16 December the Italian garrisons abandoned Sollum, the Halfaya Pass and Fort Capuzzo. The detachment from Capuzzo slipped past the 7th Armoured Brigade in the dark and reached Bardia. Patrols of the 7th Armoured Division’s Support Group followed the retreating columns right up to the fortress wire. At the same time the Italians abandoned the posts stretching along the frontier from Sidi Omar southwards into the desert. By the evening of 16 December they held only two centres of resistance in eastern Cyrenaica: the fortress of Bardia on the coast and the oasis of Jarabub on the edge of the Great Sand Sea, some 240 kilometres south of Sollum.

By then Fort Capuzzo had become a symbol of this war. It was a small stone fort built by the Italians beside the barbed-wire frontier fence which, in the early 1930s, Graziani himself had had run from the sea deep into the desert to cut the Senussi rebels off from help from Egypt. On 14 June 1940 it had been taken by armoured cars of the 11th Hussars, who had no intention of holding it, and on 13 September the Italians had started their march on Egypt from there. Now, wrecked by shelling and bombing, it passed into British hands for the second time. The water tanks at Capuzzo, normally filled by the pipeline from Bardia, turned out to be full of salt water.

Sollum, taken without a fight, mattered to the British above all as a port. It was a port only in name: two small jetties without cranes on an open, wind-swept bay. Even so, from then on the troops on the frontier could be supplied by sea, and not solely by lorry from Mersa Matruh, more than 200 kilometres away.

Australians instead of Indians

The pursuit was weakened by a decision that General Archibald Wavell had taken before the battle and confirmed on 11 December. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East was planning an offensive against the Italians in Eritrea for early 1941 and needed a second Indian division for it. He also judged that without the port of Tobruk he could supply only one infantry division in Cyrenaica alongside the armoured division. So immediately after the victory at Sidi Barrani, General Noel Beresford-Peirse’s 4th Indian Division was withdrawn from the front and sent to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where it was to reinforce General William Platt’s forces before the advance into Eritrea as part of the East African campaign. On 14 December the division left the battlefield for Maaten Bagush. Only its British 16th Infantry Brigade remained in the desert. O’Connor, who had not been told in advance so as not to add to his worries during the preparations, received the decision as an unpleasant surprise.

The Indians’ place was taken by Major General Iven Mackay’s 6th Australian Division, the first large formation of the Second Australian Imperial Force, raised in the autumn of 1939 and trained in Palestine and Egypt. Its soldiers, who had followed news of the victory from afar, feared that the tank men would crush the Italians before they themselves could get into the fight. On 14 December Mackay attended a conference at O’Connor’s headquarters, at which Wavell was also present. The mood was optimistic. Western Desert Force intelligence judged that the Italian army in Libya had “undoubtedly ceased to exist” as a fighting force and believed that Bardia would be abandoned. Wavell even ordered an Australian brigade to be made ready in Alexandria to be shipped forward by sea, in case the fortress merely had to be occupied.

The Australian 16th Infantry Brigade arrived at Sollum by lorry on 18 December, passing abandoned Italian camps along the way, full of wrecked tanks, weapons and torn papers. On 19 December its battalions climbed the Halfaya Pass onto the plateau and entered Cyrenaica. At noon on 21 December Mackay took command of all troops in the Sollum area, and the 7th Armoured Division moved west to watch the roads from Tobruk and El Adem. On 27 December a second Australian brigade reached Bardia.

Bergonzoli’s fortress

By then it was already clear that the Italians intended neither to surrender nor to break out to Tobruk. For three days from 14 December the monitor Terror systematically shelled the fortress, and at dawn on 17 December the gunboat HMS Aphis entered Bardia harbour and for an hour fired at close range on the ships and buildings there. Between 14 and 19 December the RAF flew more than 150 sorties over Bardia, the heaviest raid, by 36 aircraft, coming on the night of 15/16 December. The hope was that the garrison, shaken by defeat, would give in. It did not.

Mussolini wrote to Bergonzoli that he was entrusting him with the difficult task of defending Bardia to the last and was sure that “Electric Beard” and his soldiers would hold out at any cost. Bergonzoli replied that he had passed on to his men Mussolini’s “simple and unequivocal” message: “In Bardia we are, and here we stay.” The fortress had a perimeter of 29 kilometres, an almost continuous anti-tank ditch, wire entanglements and two rows of concrete posts spaced a few hundred metres apart. According to the British official history, Bergonzoli had gathered within it all or part of five divisions: the 1st and 2nd Blackshirt Divisions (“23 Marzo” and “28 Ottobre”), the 62nd Marmarica, the 63rd Cirene and the remnants of the 64th Catanzaro – together with frontier guards and fortress troops some 45,000 men and over 400 guns. He also had a dozen or so M13/40 medium tanks and more than a hundred tankettes. The British at the time put the garrison at about 20,000, less than half the true figure.

Meanwhile Graziani was replacing commanders. General Berti returned to Libya but was recalled on 23 December, and command of the Tenth Army passed to Graziani’s chief of staff, General Giuseppe Tellera. Within a few weeks the army thus had three successive commanders.

Winter before Bardia

The last days of December were spent preparing for the assault, above all struggling with supply. At Sollum, from 18 December, soldiers of the 16th Brigade, and later sappers from Cyprus and Palestine and a New Zealand transport company, unloaded lighters under fire from the long-range guns at Bardia, which the Australians called “Bardia Bill”, and under the bombs of Italian aircraft. On Christmas Eve a raid on the port killed or wounded sixty New Zealanders and Cypriots. The shortage of water was the worst hardship: for several days the men received half a gallon, about two litres, a day. The situation was saved by the navy, which brought more than 3,000 tons of water to Sollum in gunboats and the water tanker Myriel. On 24 December O’Connor told Mackay to prepare an attack on Bardia. The Australian commander did not share the corps staff’s optimism and planned the assault like a 1918-style break-in against a fortified line, with heavy artillery support. Bringing up the ammunition took time, and on 26 December the commanders-in-chief in the Middle East decided that operations in Libya should take priority over all others, at least until Tobruk had been taken.

Place in the war

The Italian departure from Egypt and the British entry into Libya closed the first act of Operation Compass. What Wavell had conceived as a raid of a few days to push the Tenth Army away from Mersa Matruh had turned into a pursuit, and Mussolini’s decision to defend Bardia, and then Tobruk, delivered into British hands tens of thousands more soldiers shut up in fortresses from which there was no escape. The British also gained time to bring up supplies and exchange divisions, because the Italian army, instead of attempting to manoeuvre, waited behind its defences.

The assault on Bardia began on 3 January 1941. After three days of fighting the 6th Australian Division had taken, by various counts, from 36,000 to over 40,000 Italian prisoners. Bergonzoli, with a group of officers and men, made his way on foot across the desert to Tobruk, which fell on 22 January. The remnants of the Tenth Army, retreating across Cyrenaica, were cut off at Beda Fomm on 5–7 February. There Bergonzoli himself was taken prisoner, and General Tellera was mortally wounded. The disaster prompted Hitler to send German troops to Libya under Erwin Rommel, and the Libyan–Egyptian frontier that the British had crossed in December 1940 became, for more than two years, the scene of fighting that swept back and forth. Sollum, the Halfaya Pass and Fort Capuzzo were to change hands several more times.