The Italians invade Egypt

Early on the morning of 13 September 1940 Italian artillery opened fire on a patch of desert just across the Libyan–Egyptian border. The shells fell on Musaid, an abandoned post on the Egyptian side of the wire, and then on the empty barracks and landing ground above the port of Sollum. When the dust settled, British observers saw to the west an Italian army drawn up almost as if for a parade: motorcyclists, tankettes, lorries full of infantry and batteries of guns. The columns of the 10th Army set off into the Kingdom of Egypt. After three months of border skirmishing and a long tug of war between Rome and Tripoli, the Italian invasion of Egypt had begun – the first great land offensive of the war in North Africa.

Popular chronologies spread the start of the offensive over two days. Under 9 September they record that the Italian forces in Libya under General Mario Berti advanced from their defensive positions towards the Egyptian border, and under 13 September that, having reoccupied Fort Capuzzo, they crossed the border, captured Sollum and met only a light British screen, which withdrew. In its broad outline this account agrees with the sources, but it needs a few additions. Berti did indeed command the 10th Army, but the operation as a whole was directed by his superior, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, commander-in-chief of the Italian forces in North Africa. The core of the invading force consisted of Italian infantry divisions and a Blackshirt division, accompanied by two Libyan divisions. On 9 September only the moves to the start lines began; the border was crossed four days later.

A marshal who did not want to attack

Graziani had taken command in Libya at the beginning of July, after his predecessor, Air Marshal Italo Balbo, was killed over Tobruk, shot down by his own anti-aircraft guns. He inherited from Balbo not only an army but also a quarrel with Rome. Benito Mussolini, who had declared war on Britain and France on 10 June in the belief that the war would be over in a few weeks, wanted conquests in hand before he sat down at the peace table. The nearest and most promising prize was Egypt with the Suez Canal, the artery linking Britain with India, Australia and the oil of the Middle East.

Graziani answered each new prodding with reports of shortages. His 10th Army was overwhelmingly an army on foot, with obsolete artillery, light L3 tankettes and only a few dozen M11/39 medium tanks, which were only just arriving from Italy. It lacked lorries, water tankers and anti-tank guns, and ahead of it lay a desert where the asphalt Via Balbia ended at the frontier and beyond which there was only a poor coast road running east. One date for the attack after another was missed. The first plan, drawn up under Balbo, envisaged a strike in mid-July, simultaneous with the expected German landing in England announced in Hitler’s directive on Operation Sea Lion. The second, limited to the capture of Sollum, was to go ahead on 22 August but was postponed because of the heat. On 19 August Mussolini, taking responsibility upon himself, ordered an attack on the day the first German soldier set foot on English soil, and Graziani replied with a report making it clear that his generals were opposed to an offensive.

The landing in England kept being delayed, and the dictator’s patience was running out. When at the beginning of September Graziani asked for yet another postponement, this time until October, Mussolini on 7 September gave him a categorical order: the attack was to start in two days, whether or not the Germans landed in England, and if it did not, the marshal would be dismissed. According to the British official history, Graziani had already presented his staff a few days earlier with a plan of attack whose objective was Sidi Barrani. It made no mention of the Suez Canal, nor even of Mersa Matruh, the main British base in the Western Desert. The expedition to Suez had shrunk to a bound of less than a hundred kilometres.

The British screen

On the other side of the border, the British Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, had some 36,000 troops in the whole of Egypt, scattered between the desert, the Nile Delta and the Canal Zone. The forces in the desert, the Western Desert Force, were commanded by General Richard O’Connor. His main strength was General Michael O’Moore Creagh’s 7th Armoured Division, under strength and with tanks worn out in the summer skirmishes, but fully motorised and long accustomed to the desert. In June and July its patrols dominated the frontier belt, capturing Italian posts and laying ambushes on the road to Bardia. On 14 June they took the frontier Fort Capuzzo, which, however, they made no attempt to hold permanently. According to British figures, the Italians lost some 3,500 men in these clashes up to 9 September, the British about 150. In mid-August, to spare his worn-out vehicles, O’Connor called off the raids, and the tanks were pulled back closer to Mersa Matruh.

Wavell’s and O’Connor’s plan was simple and deliberately modest. They did not intend to defend either the frontier or Sollum. From 13 August the border, along a stretch of some hundred kilometres from Sollum to Fort Maddalena, was watched only by the Support Group of the 7th Armoured Division under Brigadier William Gott: three motorised infantry battalions, including the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards, horse artillery and machine guns, with the armoured cars of the 11th Hussars out in front. On the coast they were supported by a company of French marines from the Free French forces. The Support Group was to delay the Italian advance, inflict losses on it and avoid being pinned down, demolishing the road as it fell back. The real battle was to be fought only at Mersa Matruh. There the Italians, exhausted by their march across the desert and far from their supplies, would be met by infantry in fortified positions, while the armoured brigades would strike their exposed flank from deep in the desert, from the plateau above the coast.

Wavell was playing for time. In August, at the height of the Battle of Britain, the government in London had decided to send him round Africa some of the tanks that were in short supply in Britain as well. The convoy was not due to reach Egypt until the end of September. Every week of delay on the Italian side therefore worked in Britain’s favour.

9–12 September: moving to the start lines

On 9 September, the day Mussolini had fixed, Italian air activity over the frontier increased markedly. That same day reinforcements arrived from Italy for the 5th Air Fleet (5ª Squadra Aerea) – by British tallies several dozen bombers, ground-attack and reconnaissance aircraft. In all the Italians had some three hundred aircraft at their disposal, including Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bombers and Fiat CR.42 fighters. The British, with several times fewer machines, most of them obsolete, responded with Blenheim raids on Italian airfields, depots and Tobruk. Air reconnaissance spotted heavy traffic of columns near Bardia, at Sidi Azeiz and towards Sidi Omar, and the British took it to be the start of the invasion.

The original Italian plan provided for two thrusts. The Italian divisions, advancing along the coast, were to take Sollum and the Halfaya Pass, one of the few places where vehicles could climb the steep escarpment separating the narrow coastal strip from the desert plateau. The Libyan divisions and General Pietro Maletti’s motorised group were to go deeper into the desert and outflank the British from the south. The plan fell apart before a shot was fired. The Maletti Group, made up of motorised Libyan battalions and almost all the Italian medium tanks, got lost in the desert on its way to its start line near Sidi Omar, because the staff had not provided it with proper maps or navigational equipment. Reconnaissance aircraft had to go and find it. The Libyan divisions arrived late at the assembly area near Fort Capuzzo. On 10 September the armoured cars of the 11th Hussars, hidden by mist, shadowed the slow Italian concentrations until, once the mist lifted, they were attacked by Italian aircraft, tanks and artillery.

After these experiences Graziani and the commander of the assault corps, General Annibale Bergonzoli, changed the plan. Instead of a manoeuvre through the desert, the 10th Army was to advance in a solid mass along the coast, through Sollum and Buq Buq, to Sidi Barrani. It was a way of fighting tried out in Ethiopia, where the enemy had had neither tanks nor aircraft. The attack was put back to 13 September.

13 September: across the border

The assault was led by the XXIII Corps of Bergonzoli, known to his soldiers as “Electric Beard”. The first wave consisted of two partly motorised infantry divisions, the 62nd “Marmarica” and the 63rd “Cirene”; the 1st Blackshirt Division “23 Marzo”, hastily equipped with lorries for the invasion; two Libyan divisions, which had to go on foot; and the Maletti Group. Behind them, in reserve, further divisions stood near Tobruk and Bardia. Some studies say that on the morning of 13 September the “23 Marzo” division reoccupied Fort Capuzzo. But since the Italians had already regained the fort in the summer, this was more a matter of garrisoning it as a jumping-off point for the attack than of fighting for it.

The artillery fire fell first on Musaid, which the Italians promptly occupied, and then on Sollum. The barracks and landing ground were empty, but the bombardment raised a cloud of dust, and when it settled the advancing army came into view. Facing it on the coast stood only part of the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards, a few batteries and a machine-gun company. The Italians moved along the road with two divisions abreast, behind a screen of motorcyclists, tankettes, motorised infantry and guns. Such a mass was a perfect target for the British artillery and the few bombers, but they could not stop it. The 1st Libyan Division occupied the barracks in upper Sollum and began to descend the escarpment to the port. Sollum, a small harbour with a handful of buildings just across the border, was the first Egyptian town in Italian hands.

On the plateau the Italians advanced on the Halfaya Pass. It was held by a weak covering force – a company of Guardsmen, a platoon of Northumberland Fusiliers and some artillery – which withdrew as planned in the afternoon, when more Italian infantry and tanks came up. By evening two large columns were converging on the pass: one, made up of the 2nd Libyan Division, the “Cirene” division and the Maletti Group, coming from Musaid, the other, with the “Marmarica” division, from Sidi Omar.

14 September: the withdrawal to Buq Buq

The next day Italian units began to descend through the pass to the coastal plain to join the column advancing along the road from Sollum. The British harried them from the plateau: a squadron of the 11th Hussars, the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and cruiser tanks of the 1st Royal Tank Regiment fired on the Italian columns and vanished before they could deploy for battle. Shortly after midday the commander of the coastal sector withdrew his force to a prepared position east of Buq Buq, where he was joined by reinforcements of Hussars and French marines. This was enough to keep contact with the enemy.

The RAF in the Middle East, commanded in the desert by Air Commodore Raymond Collishaw, had too few aircraft to halt the advance, but its bombers attacked the Italian columns, airfields and depots. Fighters were so scarce that in the summer the only Hurricane available in the desert had been moved from landing ground to landing ground to make the Italians believe there were more of them. The Italian air force held command of the air over the columns and attacked British landing grounds and positions. Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet, on the other hand, ruled the sea: since the summer its ships had been shelling Italian positions on the coast, and when the Italians came to a halt at Sidi Barrani they brought the new front line under fire as well.

The British fell back further in stages: on 15 September to a position near Alam Hamid, and on 16 September to Alam el Dab, just short of Sidi Barrani, blowing up stretches of the road behind them. The 10th Army advanced at about twenty kilometres a day, so that the infantry, marching in the heat in full kit, could keep up. Vehicles sank in the sand, broke down and clogged with dust, and water was rationed to the litre. Even so, the Italians pressed on and the enemy gave way.

Its place in the war

The crossing of the Egyptian border on 13 September 1940 was Italy’s first, and for a long time its only, independent large-scale land offensive against the British Empire. It was greeted with enthusiasm in Rome, and Mussolini could believe that his “parallel war”, waged alongside Germany’s war but independently of it, was at last gathering momentum. Egypt was formally neutral and did not declare war on Italy even after this invasion. It did so only in February 1945. From that moment, however, its territory became a battlefield for foreign armies.

The first days of the offensive also revealed the weaknesses of both sides. The Italians had overwhelming numerical superiority, but their army could not manoeuvre in the desert, and its motorised units, instead of seeking a decision on the flank, escorted the infantry along the coast. The British were too weak to defend the frontier, but their screen fell back in good order, inflicting losses while losing little. Wavell later judged in his dispatch that the withdrawal of Gott’s Support Group had been carried out coolly and efficiently. After four days’ march the 10th Army reached Sidi Barrani and halted there, without even approaching the British positions at Mersa Matruh. Three months later, in December 1940, O’Connor’s forces struck the Italian camps around Sidi Barrani and within two months destroyed the 10th Army, a defeat that brought German troops and Erwin Rommel to North Africa.