Graziani takes command in Libya

On 1 July 1940 Marshal of Italy Rodolfo Graziani arrived in Tripoli to take up the posts of Governor-General of Italian Libya and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces in North Africa. He replaced Air Marshal Italo Balbo, who three days earlier had been killed over Tobruk, shot down in error by his own anti-aircraft guns. The appointment was made in haste in Rome, where Graziani had returned after the brief war with France. He did not give up his existing office: he remained Chief of the Army General Staff, and from then on the staff’s business in Rome was handled on his behalf by his deputy, General Mario Roatta. The planning of the land war and command on the only front where Italy could strike directly at the British Empire were thus concentrated in one pair of hands.

A marshal of colonial wars

Graziani seemed the obvious choice. He was Italy’s best-known colonial commander and knew Libya as few others did: in the 1920s he had led the fast columns that reconquered Tripolitania and the Fezzan, and in the early 1930s, as Vice-Governor of Cyrenaica, he had crushed the Senussi rising by herding tens of thousands of nomads into camps where many of them died. He then commanded the southern front in the war against Ethiopia and served as Viceroy of Italian East Africa. Fascist propaganda called him “the pacifier of Libya”. His experience, however, was of wars against poorly armed opponents with no aircraft and no armour. Now he faced a regular British army, smaller in numbers but motorised.

Like Balbo, Graziani had not favoured Italy’s entry into the war at Hitler’s side. In June 1940, as Chief of the Army Staff, he had taken part in the short and unsuccessful operations against France in the Alps, so he knew how poorly prepared the Italian army was. He went to Libya without enthusiasm.

An army without lorries

On paper the forces he took over numbered more than two hundred thousand men. In the west, facing French Tunisia, stood General Italo Gariboldi’s Fifth Army; in the east, on the Egyptian frontier, General Mario Berti’s Tenth Army. After the armistice with France the Tunisian front ceased to exist, and by the end of June some divisions were already moving east from Tripolitania. But this was an infantry army, made up largely of Libyan and Blackshirt divisions, with obsolete artillery, light tankettes and only a few dozen medium tanks, which were only just arriving from Italy. There was a shortage of lorries, water tankers, anti-tank guns and spare parts. For many months Balbo had demanded this equipment in letters to the Chief of the Supreme General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, and had received mostly promises.

On the other side of the frontier, in Egypt, General Archibald Wavell, the British Commander-in-Chief Middle East, had about 36,000 troops according to most accounts. The forces on the frontier itself, General Richard O’Connor’s Western Desert Force with the under-strength 7th Armoured Division of General Michael O’Moore Creagh, were small but fully motorised and had trained for years in desert warfare.

The first weeks on the frontier

Graziani arrived when the British had been masters of the frontier for three weeks. On the night of 11–12 June, immediately after Italy’s declaration of war, British patrols crossed the border and surprised Italian outposts whose garrisons sometimes did not yet know that war had broken out. On 14 June armoured cars of the 11th Hussars and tanks of the 7th Armoured Division took the frontier forts of Capuzzo and Maddalena, capturing some 220 prisoners. On 16 June, on the road from Tobruk to Bardia, the British destroyed a column of vehicles and took 88 men prisoner, among them Brigadier General Romolo Lastrucci, the Tenth Army’s chief engineer. The same day, at Nezuet Ghirba, they routed an Italian detachment with a dozen or so tankettes. On 21 June the harbour at Bardia was shelled by British warships and the French battleship Lorraine, in one of the last joint actions of the Allied fleets. British bombers raided Tobruk again and again, and one of these raids preceded Balbo’s fatal flight.

In the following weeks the Italians brought reinforcements up to the frontier, retook Fort Capuzzo, which the British had in any case not intended to hold permanently, and began to fortify their positions. British patrols nevertheless continued to control the border strip as far as the outskirts of Tobruk. According to British figures, between 11 June and 9 September they inflicted some 3,500 casualties on the Italians for the loss of about 150 men of their own. For the Italian command, however, the most alarming thing was what these skirmishes proved: in the open desert, infantry without vehicles was helpless against an enemy who could cover a hundred kilometres in a single night.

Mussolini demands an offensive

Mussolini had no intention of waiting. After the fall of France he was convinced that the war would be over within a few weeks, once the Germans landed in England, and he wanted Italy to be able to point at the peace table to conquests rather than merely a few days of fighting in the Alps. The objective was Egypt and the Suez Canal. While Balbo was still alive, an attack on Sollum had been prepared in Rome, to begin around 15 July, at the same time as the expected invasion of the British Isles. Graziani was ordered to prepare an offensive as quickly as possible, according to some accounts by 8 August.

From the outset the new commander insisted that his army was not ready. He demanded lorries, tanks and water, expanded his rear services and kept pushing back the dates. On 3 August the Under-Secretary of State at the War Ministry, General Ubaldo Soddu, told Galeazzo Ciano that Graziani wanted to postpone the attack until the spring, chiefly because of the summer heat. On 5 August Ciano noted in his diary that Mussolini was displeased, because Graziani, “who had put so much of the blame on Balbo”, now himself “does not want to attack in Egypt”. The marshal was summoned to Rome. On 8 August Graziani told Ciano that an attack on Egypt was a very serious undertaking, that the water supply was wholly inadequate and that the army was heading for a defeat which “in the desert must inevitably turn into a rapid and total disaster”. He also accused Badoglio of failing to restrain Mussolini’s ambitions. The dictator remarked that one should not give posts to men who are no longer waiting for promotion, because they have too much to lose.

On 19 August Mussolini sent Graziani a telegram in which, taking the responsibility upon himself, he ordered him to advance into Egypt on the day the first German unit landed in England. Graziani replied with a report showing that all his generals were opposed to the offensive. When at the beginning of September he asked for a further month’s postponement, Mussolini refused and on 7 September threatened to dismiss him if he did not attack within two days.

Place in the war

Graziani’s appointment meant that the fate of Italy’s war in North Africa rested in the hands of a commander who did not believe the task entrusted to him could succeed, yet lacked the strength or the will to persuade Mussolini to adopt a different strategy. Graziani’s caution was well founded, but instead of using the months of delay to rebuild his army, he prepared for war on the colonial model: a mass of infantry advancing along the single coastal road.

On 13 September 1940 the Tenth Army crossed the Egyptian frontier, took Sollum and, after four days’ march, halted at Sidi Barrani, more than a hundred kilometres short of the main British base at Mersa Matruh. Ciano noted that never before had a military operation been undertaken so much against the will of its commanders. Around Sidi Barrani the Italians built a chain of fortified camps and waited three months for a water pipeline and a road. On 9 December 1940 the British struck in Operation Compass and within two months destroyed the Tenth Army, taking some 130,000 prisoners. In February 1941 Graziani was recalled, and the German Afrika Korps arrived in Libya. The war that Mussolini had wanted to wage as a “parallel” war, independent of Germany, ended in North Africa after six months in dependence on Hitler’s help.