The Italians halt at Sidi Barrani

On the evening of 16 September 1940 troops of the 1st Blackshirt Division “23 Marzo” entered Sidi Barrani, a small settlement on the Egyptian coast on the road from the Libyan border to the main British base at Mersa Matruh. On 13 September the Italian 10th Army had crossed the Egyptian border and taken Sollum. Now, after a march along the coast during which the British screen fell back before it step by step, it had reached the objective set for it by Marshal Rodolfo Graziani. And there it stopped. Some five Italian divisions, having covered about 95 kilometres, settled down at Sidi Barrani in a series of fortified camps and never came near the main British positions at Mersa Matruh. The distance is given variously: from the border at Sollum to Sidi Barrani it is some 95 kilometres in a straight line, while studies that measure the route from the start lines speak of 100–105 kilometres.

The last day of the march

On 16 September the British, withdrawing from Sollum in stages, were holding a position at Alam el Dab, just short of Sidi Barrani. That day an Italian column of some fifty tanks, motorised infantry and artillery tried to outflank them from the desert side and forced a company of the Coldstream Guards to fall back. When it came under fire from British field artillery, however, it pressed the attack no further. At dusk the “23 Marzo” division occupied the settlement. On the plateau above the escarpment the British covering forces withdrew in step with those on the coast, and the feared Italian thrust deep into the desert, against the flank of the British positions, never came. British reconnaissance aircraft and bombers circled over the battlefield, while the Italian air force attacked British landing grounds and positions in raids of sometimes as many as a hundred fighters and bombers.

The balance of the four days’ march was modest for both sides. According to figures cited by historians, the 10th Army lost some 120 killed and 410 wounded between 9 and 16 September. Some authors give far higher figures, up to about two thousand men, probably including the sick and accident victims. The British, by their own account, lost about forty men and a few tanks, armoured cars and lorries. The Italians had gained ground, but had failed to inflict any serious losses on the British screen.

Trams in Sidi Barrani

In Rome the capture of Sidi Barrani was announced as a great victory. According to the British official history, Italian radio spoke of the capture of “the key to Egypt” and of half the British war matériel, and declared that the road to the Suez Canal lay open. A Rome radio broadcast, cited in British memoirs and histories, passed into legend: according to it, all was quiet in Sidi Barrani and the trams were running again in the streets. In reality the settlement consisted of a handful of buildings, many of them wrecked. There had never been any trams there. Fascist propaganda, however, needed victories, all the more so since in those same days Germany was fighting decisive battles over England, while Italy could so far boast only of a brief war in the Alps and the capture of British Somaliland.

Why Graziani stopped

The British had expected the Italians to stop at Sidi Barrani and Sofafi. Italian radio announced a further advance, but patrols of the 11th Hussars soon found that the Italians were digging in. This was neither an accident nor a temporary pause. From the outset Graziani had treated Sidi Barrani as the end of the first stage and had no intention of going further until he had secured his rear.

There were several reasons, and all of them had to do with logistics. The asphalt Via Balbia, built by Balbo along the Libyan coast, ended at the border. Beyond it ran a narrow road, which the retreating British had blown up in many places and which the heavy traffic of the Italian columns churned up still further. Supplies for five divisions had to be brought by lorry from Bardia and Tobruk, and lorries were still in short supply. The most acute shortage was water. There were few wells on the coast between Sollum and Mersa Matruh, and the infantry divisions needed thousands of tons of it. Finally, Graziani overestimated the British forces and was convinced that superior armoured forces were waiting for him deep in the desert.

Before any further advance, therefore, Graziani decided to build a proper road, named the Via della Vittoria (Road of Victory), as an eastward extension of the Via Balbia from Bardia, and a water pipeline from Libya to Sidi Barrani. According to the plans, they could not be ready before mid-December. Only then was the army to advance on Mersa Matruh, some 130 kilometres from Sidi Barrani. The Italians never attacked the main British positions.

A chain of camps

Instead, the 10th Army spread out in a wide arc to the south and south-west of Sidi Barrani. On the coast stood the camp at Maktila, further into the desert two camps at Tummar, and further still the camp at Nibeiwa, where General Pietro Maletti’s group was stationed. On the plateau above the escarpment the Sofafi area was fortified, and second-line divisions held Buq Buq, Sidi Omar and the Halfaya Pass. The camps were surrounded by stone walls, ditches and minefields, with artillery and tanks inside. Each was strong, but they were separated by gaps several kilometres wide, especially between Nibeiwa and Sofafi, which could not be patrolled effectively by infantry without vehicles. The camps could not support one another.

The situation resembled the one Balbo and Graziani himself had warned against: infantry without transport, deployed in the open desert facing an enemy that could drive a hundred kilometres in a night and strike wherever it chose.

The British harass the enemy

The British had no intention of making this time easy for the Italians. General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, thought highly of the way the withdrawal had been conducted, and in his dispatch gave the credit to Brigadier William Gott, commander of the 7th Armoured Division’s Support Group, to his artillery commander and to the troops for their “endurance and tactical skill”. The Support Group was withdrawn to rest, and the 7th Armoured Division prepared to receive an attack on Mersa Matruh that never came. The Hussars’ armoured cars and small motorised columns roamed around the Italian camps, gathering information and dominating the no-man’s-land.

From the next day blows rained down on the Italians from the sea and the air. Aircraft from the carrier HMS Illustrious mined the harbour of Benghazi and torpedoed the ships lying there, sinking the destroyer Borea, while a second destroyer struck a mine. A gunboat shelled the road on the escarpment near Sollum, and destroyers shelled targets near Sidi Barrani. An attempt by the cruiser HMS Kent to bombard Bardia was foiled by Italian torpedo bombers, which hit her in the stern. The bombardment from the sea continued throughout the autumn and forced the Italians to move their camps and depots inland.

The long pause

Mussolini was pleased at first, but he grew more impatient by the week. According to a letter of 26 October cited by historians, he asked Graziani whom exactly this forty-day halt was serving, answered himself that it served the enemy more, and finally asked whether the marshal wished to remain in command at all. Two days later Italy attacked Greece, and Rome’s attention shifted to the Balkans. Graziani could prepare his attack on Mersa Matruh, set for mid-December, in peace. For the time being Mussolini rejected German help. In October the German General Wilhelm von Thoma came to Libya to assess whether it was worth sending armoured forces there, and returned with a very critical view of the Italian army and its preparations.

Its place in the war

The halt at Sidi Barrani sealed the fate of the Italian offensive. The invasion that was to have opened the road to the Suez Canal ended after four days’ march on the edge of the desert, more than a hundred kilometres short of the enemy’s first serious position. Wavell gained what he needed most: time. In the autumn the British tanks sent round Africa in August reached Egypt, including Matilda heavy infantry tanks, together with reinforcements from India, Australia and New Zealand. British reconnaissance thoroughly mapped the gaps between the Italian camps.

On the night of 8–9 December 1940 the forces of General Richard O’Connor passed through precisely the gap between Nibeiwa and Sofafi and struck the camps from the rear. In Operation Compass, conceived by Wavell as a raid of a few days, the British took all the camps around Sidi Barrani within three days, and then pursued the remnants of the 10th Army across the whole of Cyrenaica, as far as Beda Fomm in February 1941. They took some 130,000 prisoners. Graziani was recalled, and German forces under Erwin Rommel arrived in Libya to save their ally from losing the entire colony. Mussolini’s “parallel war” in North Africa had ended after six months, and for more than two years the Libyan–Egyptian front became one of the main theatres of the war.