The Approach to Battle
AT FORT BENNING in Georgia, the US 1st Infantry Division continued to train its men and incorporate new recruits. The ‘Big Red One’, as it was known, was one of only four Regular divisions that had remained in full service following the end of the First World War. In truth, the division was not so very different from the outfit it had been twenty years earlier. They still used the same bolt-action 1907 Springfield rifles they had back then; still wore the same British-style steel Tommy-helmet; still wore thigh-length wool service coats; and when not wearing their tin hats, wore the same beaver-coloured Boy Scout wide-brimmed hat. Tactically, they had not progressed much either. Manoeuvres were carried out every year, but these large-scale training exercises involved little integration with other arms, such as artillery and cavalry, most of the latter, in any case, still mounted on horseback rather than inside a tank. ‘In our summer training for war,’ wrote Lieutenant Gerald Clarke, a young officer new to the division, ‘we had broomstick handles for practice because rifles weren’t available. To represent cannons, we had logs mounted between two old wooden wagon wheels. Everything was simulated. Our military was really in a hopeless condition to start fighting a war.’
Two other new men were Tom and Henry ‘Dee’ Bowles, who had joined back in March. Identical twins, they were from America’s Deep South, in north-west Alabama. The Bowleses were poor, although both Dee and Tom were happy enough growing up, always with plenty to eat and enough going on to amuse themselves. Life had been tough, though. They lost first a brother and then their mother when they were just twelve years old. Their father was a farmer, growing fruit and vegetables that he would then load on to a cart and sell in town, but being a smallholder in the Depression-era Deep South was hardly lucrative, and so, soon after their mother died, the family moved to the cotton mill town of Russellville. The twins left school and went out to work – the extra bucks they brought home made all the difference.
By 1940, however, the cotton mill in Russellville was already in terminal decline, even though the rest of the country was lifting itself out of the Depression. ‘We wanted to go to work,’ said Tom Bowles, ‘but there wasn’t no work around.’ They’d applied for places in the Civil Conservation Corps – one of the New Deal schemes that had been set up, and which was an attempt to combat massive soil erosion and declining timber resources by using the large numbers of young unemployed. But they were turned down. Instead, in March 1940, two months after their eighteenth birthdays, the twins decided to enlist into the Army. Of the two, Tom tended to be the decision maker, so he was the first to hitch a ride to Birmingham, the state capital, in order to find out about joining up. Since they were only eighteen, their father had to give his consent. ‘I remember his hand was pretty shaky when he signed that,’ said Tom. Four days later, on 9 March, Dee followed. ‘We hadn’t heard from Tom,’ said Dee, ‘so I told Dad I was going too. He said, “Son, make good soldiers”, and we always tried to remember that.’ After being given three meal tickets in Birmingham and a promise of eventual service in Hawaii, Dee was sent to Fort Benning, one of the country’s largest training camps. He still wasn’t sure where his brother was – or even if he had actually enlisted – until eventually he got a letter from his father with Tom’s address. It turned out they were only a quarter of a mile apart and that both were in 1st Infantry Division, even though Tom was in 18th Infantry Regiment and Dee the 26th.
Unsurprisingly, their basic training had been just that. On arrival at Benning they were told to read the Articles of War, then they were given a serial number and told to make sure they never forgot it. After eight weeks’ training – drill, route marches, occasional rifle practice and plenty of tough discipline – they had been considered to be soldiers. They were living in pup tents but eating more than enough food and surrounded by young lads of a similar age, so as far as the Bowles twins were concerned life in the Regular Army seemed pretty good, and a lot more fun than back home in Russellville, Alabama.
Training continued. More marching – three-mile hikes, then ten-mile, then twenty-five-mile hikes with a light pack and eventually thirty-five miles with a heavy pack. A mile from home, they were greeted by the drum and bugle corps, who played them the last stretch back into camp. But while this was doing wonders for their stamina and levels of fitness, they were hardly ready to fight a modern war, should it ever come to it.
Those running both the country and the US Army were all too aware of these shortcomings. The new Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had wasted no time in pushing for a massive increase in the size of the Army, and to achieve that it needed personnel as well as equipment. Quite simply, he argued, if Congress wanted an army large enough to defend the country, it had to introduce compulsory service. In much the same way as Chamberlain had resisted calls for conscription right up until the spring of 1939, so now did the President. Since the American Revolution, military conscription in peacetime had been considered deeply un-American. It didn’t matter that Stimson was a Republican; an election was just around the corner, and FDR was reluctant to scupper his re-election chances over the issue.
The Selective Service Bill was introduced by a Republican and a Democrat rather than by Stimson, and immediately caused an outcry from isolationists, college students, labour leaders and others, but it was Stimson who pushed hardest. Roosevelt got around the quandary it caused him by largely keeping out of the debate and letting Congress decide, and, despite the outcry in certain quarters, by mid-August polls suggested at least 65 per cent of the nation were in favour. Soon after, the bill was approved in both houses and finally signed by the President on 16 September. It was an important step.
Now that the Army was about to dramatically increase in size, structures were needed to enable this to happen. At the end of July, a new General Headquarters, US Army, was established at the US Army War College in Washington to oversee the command of these enlarged field forces and, most importantly, get them trained.
Chief of Staff of GHQ was General Leslie ‘Buck’ McNair and among his new team was Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Clark, who had impressed General Marshall, in particular, with the training exercises he had devised for 3rd Division. Now he and his family were heading to Washington, where Clark would take on the position of G-3, responsible for the training of troops.
Clark was forty-four, six feet two inches tall and a career soldier. He had served in France in 1918 and been wounded, but had returned and proved a most capable and dependable staff officer and trainer of men. Promotion since the end of the last war had been slow for most officers, and Clark was no exception; he had spent fifteen years as a captain. He had, however, since been earmarked for higher things, having been sent to the staff course at the War College. Now, under McNair, and with Marshall having already singled him out, he had the chance to help shape the future of the US Army as it began its exponential growth. ‘Our goal, of course,’ wrote Clark, ‘was to integrate and speed up training in order to develop an Army for combat in the shortest possible time.’ Just how this was to be done was for McNair and Clark, especially, to work out.
Over southern Britain, the air battles continued, with a particularly heavy day on Sunday, 15 September, the original date for SEALION; the invasion, however, had already been postponed, as the sky was self-evidently not clear of the RAF. One of those flying that day was a twenty-year-old Luftwaffe fighter pilot called Hans-Joachim Marseille, although he was always known as ‘Jochen’. The son of an army general, he had been raised in a strict military family in Berlin, but despite the best efforts of his parents their son had been a tearaway. Always in trouble, and with a blatant disregard for any kind of authority, this bright, good-looking young man had been a hopeless student and had only begun to show his considerable brains when he had managed to get into the Luftwaffe as a trainee pilot – and that had only been after strings had been pulled by his father.
Marseille had immediately shown enormous natural aptitude, but his acrobatic stunts had repeatedly got him into trouble. In fact, he had excelled at every aspect of flight school except for discipline, but despite this he had still managed to graduate with honours for gunnery and aerobatics on 18 July. Posted to I (Jagd) Lehrgeschwader 2, he had joined his unit at Calais-Marck three days before Adlertag and had shot down his first British fighter, a Hurricane, two weeks later. However, in doing so, he had left the man he was supposed to have been protecting, and also without warning; these were cardinal sins, and he was duly roasted by his Staffel commander. Of far greater concern to Marseille, however, had been the thought that he had killed a man. ‘Today, I shot down my first opponent,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘It does not sit well with me. I keep thinking about how the mother of this young man must feel when she gets the news of her son’s death.’
Since then, he had shot down two more, and had run out of fuel and crash-landed on the beach in Calais; he had also received the Iron Cross Second Class and a further reprimand for leaving his comrades. Marseille, it seemed, was immune to discipline. It was a dilemma for his commanding officer because he was also clearly an exceptional pilot.
On Sunday the 15th, he was flying over London and ‘bounced’ – surprised – a Hurricane over the River Thames and saw it go down. This, however, was after he had once again become separated from his Schwarm – his four-aircraft flight – although, for once, he managed to rejoin them.
Also in action that day were 609 Squadron, who had been scrambled early to patrol over London and had then been sent up again mid-morning. Both Squadron Leader George Darley and the American pilot officer ‘Red’ Tobin were in action. Their principal task was to take on the escorting Me109s, and on this second occasion they were soon being dived on by around fifty of the German fighters. A desperate mêlée followed. Tobin, who had now been fully operational for around a month and already had one kill to his name, now managed to escape the 109s, then shot down a Dornier 17, and saw it crash-land on farmland near Sevenoaks in Kent. Circling overhead, Tobin saw the German crew clamber out dragging a wounded man with them. A short distance away, both a Spitfire and a Hurricane had also crashed. ‘But the white billowy folds of two parachutes nearby showed that their pilots were safe,’ said Tobin. ‘Crashed planes were a dime a dozen.’ He had still been watching this scene when tracer sped past him. Quickly looking around, he realized it was meant not for him but another Spitfire, and saw above him a 109 and a Spitfire duelling a few thousand feet higher. Tobin climbed up to help, but by that time the Me109 had been sent down in a long sickening spin and suddenly the air was clear.
The squadron had been scrambled twice more that day, but Tobin, whose Spitfire had been damaged, had not been able to get a replacement until the following morning, and so had been forced to sit out. Darley, though, had twice more led 609. During the fighting, he had made just one claim: opening fire at extreme range and from the starboard quarter, he had pulled off an extraordinary full-deflection shot that had hit a bomber in the starboard engine. The squadron had shot down four confirmed that day, but had lost one of their own, a blow that was felt keenly in this close-knit unit. ‘Today was the toughest day,’ jotted Tobin in his diary that night. ‘We were in a terrific battle over London. Geoffrey Gaunt, one of my best friends, is missing. I saw a Spitfire during the fight spinning down on fire. I sure hope it wasn’t Jeff.’
It had been another big day for air fighting. Park, especially, was continuing to marshal his forces with an exceptionally deft hand, yet despite this an argument had begun to develop between him and Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory commanding 12 Group. Leigh-Mallory, at the urging of one of his squadron commanders, Douglas Bader, had been proposing using ‘Big Wings’ of massed Spitfires and Hurricanes to intercept the enemy as they crossed the Channel. The problem was that it took too long to get the five or so squadrons needed for a Big Wing in formation so that the enemy had already crossed and was over London by the time they arrived on the scene. The truth was that Big Wings were more about the egos of Leigh-Mallory and Bader, both of whom wanted to get more involved in the battle, than about introducing sensible new tactics.
In fact, the one person who was doing that was Park, who was continually trying to hone tactics and improve 11 Group’s kill/loss ratio. The Luftwaffe’s switch to London allowed him to do this very effectively. Massed formations heading for London were far easier to predict, and his answer was to allow them to get near the capital, which gave him more time to send up squadrons, now operating in pairs, ever higher. Hurricane squadrons would attack the bombers, while the Spitfires, at 25,000–30,000 feet, would get the sun behind them and dive down and attack the fighters as they were turning for home and thus short of fuel. It meant London was being pummelled, but it was saving fighters. In September 1940, that was more important. Occasionally, the Duxford Big Wing would arrive on the scene, as it did on 15 September. Regardless of the flawed tactic, it none the less proved to the Luftwaffe that the RAF was far from defeated. It had been assured that the British were on their last legs. The battles on that day and over the fortnight that followed proved otherwise.
The Luftwaffe was also sharpening its tactics. There was a far greater culture of talking shop in the Luftwaffe than there was in the RAF, and Staffeln and Gruppen would spend a lot of time analysing actions, writing reports and sharing ideas. Regardless of the orders from higher up, fighter leaders were still able to influence how they fought at the tactical level. Adolf Galland adopted a system of sending one or two Schwärme of four fighters each some twenty minutes ahead of the rest of the fighters and operating at high altitude. These were designed to draw the RAF up. Once this happened, these scouting fighters would engage, drawing the enemy fighters away from the bombers. Just as the Spitfires and Hurricanes were getting low on fuel, the rest of the fighters would arrive. ‘That was when we in the second wave had the advantage with a reserve of fuel,’ said Macky Steinhoff. ‘That was how many of us scored kills.’
Spitfires and Hurricanes had nothing like the punch of Me109s, nor the fuel injection, which meant that when they dived, the sudden downward force pushed the fuel to the top of the float chamber and the carburettor would then flood with fuel. This caused the engine to cut out. This would quickly right itself but gave the Me109 precious seconds to get away or catch up, depending on the situation.
Despite the superiority of the Me109, Göring’s tactical interference hindered the fighter pilots and meant they could not always get the best from their machines. There were, however, a number of other disadvantages. If they were shot down over England, they would be baling out or crash-landing into captivity, whereas British fighter pilots could be airborne again within hours. There was also the Channel, which looked very small and insignificant from high up but was unfathomably huge if a pilot found himself bobbing about on the surface. The chances of ever being picked up were slight. Siegfried Bethke hated flying over the Channel and especially when he was based in Normandy. ‘I have to admit that the thought of the Channel and everything behind it made my stomach churn,’ he noted on 10 August. A week later, it wasn’t getting any easier. ‘Our conversations now revolve almost solely on the Channel and all that water,’ he wrote. ‘It is so terribly disagreeable to us all.’
Nor was there ever much chance to let their hair down. In the evening, there were reports to write, while sleep was often interrupted by sirens, anti-aircraft guns and the arrival of British bombers. British fighter pilots were able to head off base should they wish to – more often than not to the nearest pub, where they were slapped on the back and generally made to feel like heroes. By contrast, German aircrew, if they had time for a drink, could expect no such gratitude from the local, and recently conquered, Frenchmen.
One of the means of improving pilot numbers was for Dowding to overcome earlier reservations about foreign pilots and bring them into front-line squadrons. Two Polish squadrons, and one Czech, were introduced and they quickly proved themselves to be first-class and particularly determined pilots, so much so that 303 (Polish) Squadron soon became the top-scoring squadron in the Battle of Britain. Others, like Jean Offenberg, were still up in Scotland in 13 Group, but by the latter half of September the benefit of Park’s squadron categorization was beginning to be felt. Heading south on 17 September, for example, was Bam Bamberger, who having had over a fortnight in the north was now posted to 41 Squadron based at Hornchurch in Essex. Between then and the end of the month, he completed twenty operational sorties, and he felt that with each one he was adding to the sum of his experience and therefore increasing his chances of survival. ‘But,’ he admits, ‘I was still scared.’ On one sortie, he was hit by an Me109, and after he had taken drastic action to get himself clear, the Spitfire shuddered and then began to dive, spiralling towards the ground. Thinking he should bale out, he unfastened his harness and was ready to jump, then changed his mind, determined to try and get out of the spin. Much to his relief, he managed it, the plane levelled out, and although it was damaged he was still able to nurse it back to base. His skill and experience were growing.
On Friday, 13 September, the Italian Tenth Army in Libya, under Maresciallo Rodolfo Graziani, had crossed into Egypt after repeated chivvying from Mussolini. The Marshal, who had earlier served in East Africa, had been sent to replace Italo Balbo, who had been killed at the end of June when he had been shot down over Tobruk, hit by over-excited Italian gunners who mistook his plane for an enemy aircraft.
The Duce, still concerned that Italy would miss out on the spoils of a negotiated German peace with Britain, had been chomping at the bit every day since he had declared war. So anxious was he not to miss out that he had even offered an Italian expeditionary force to help in the attack on Britain, which went against his plans for a parallel war. Hitler, however, had turned down the offer.
Both Maresciallo Badoglio and Graziani did their best to postpone any attack on Egypt, rather as the OKH had done with Hitler the previous autumn, but by the beginning of September Mussolini was insisting. ‘If Graziani does not attack on Monday,’ noted Count Ciano on Saturday, 7 September, ‘he will be replaced. He has also given orders to the Navy to make a move to seek out the British fleet and give battle.’ The Regia Marina was every bit as reluctant to pick a fight as the Army, however; back in July, it had tentatively ventured out of port and had clashed with the British Mediterranean Fleet at Calabria and received a bloody nose for its trouble, which had done little to instil confidence.
Like Hitler, Mussolini believed battle should be joined and won purely through his own will. The difference was that for all the shortcomings of the German armed forces, in terms of size, tactics and discipline – if not machinery – they were still better than any other in 1940. Italy was a very different kettle of fish in terms of military prowess.
The country was, like Germany, young, founded a decade earlier than its ally in 1861, but it remained, even in 1940, more of a geographical concept than a tightly unified nation state. Among the young in the larger cities there was a fairly broad degree of enthusiasm for Fascism, but Italy was still a predominantly agrarian society, which had never undergone either an agricultural or an industrial revolution, and was riven by more regional patois than any other country in Europe. A third of the population were illiterate, not least because more than half the population did not speak true Italian but regional versions of it; nearly 18 per cent had never finished elementary school.
To make matters worse, Italy had fewer natural resources than Germany, and despite demonstrating an early love affair with the motor car had just eleven vehicles for every thousand people. Also like Germany, Italy suffered from producing too many models of different types of vehicle in insufficient quantities, with all the ensuing logistical headaches that brought about. The lack of industrialization, of education and of technological know-how meant that Italy was fifty years behind Germany in becoming an industrial society. This was not good news for a dictator who believed Italy would become a new Roman empire with himself as its new Caesar.
Mussolini’s other problem was keeping the people sweet. Although a dictator and the political leader of Italy, because of the King and the Army generals he knew he still needed to maintain a groundswell of popular support, not least among Italy’s fledgling industries. Even with the declaration of war, workers in the industrial north were kept on peacetime working conditions, rather than being placed on a wartime footing, and so what armaments factories there were still operated without the urgency that any nation in a time of war requires. Moreover, in his concern for his workers, the Duce resisted foreign investment and turned to companies like Fiat to make tanks and aircraft. Fiat and its partner, Ansaldo, then created a monopoly in armoured military vehicles, which would not have mattered had they been any good; unfortunately, they were not. Under-powered, under-armoured and under-armed, they were already massively out of date by the time Italy entered the war.
Money had poured into the armed services throughout the 1930s, and especially into the Army, which accounted for over two-thirds of all military expenditure. Much of this money was then washed down the drain again, lost amid a labyrinthine military bureaucracy. Each and every new piece of equipment required the approval of the different arms and departments of the military that would be using it, as well as the relevant part of the ministry, the inspectorate branch concerned, the training section and then the Ministry Secretariat. If any modification was proposed, the whole process had to start all over again. In July 1940, a month after war had been declared, the Ministry Secretariat, the mechanism of government, proposed a return to the traditional daily closing hour of 2 p.m. This was approved. Meanwhile, at Pinerolo, the horse cavalry school continued to absorb nearly 4,000 men, none of whom were doing anything to further the war effort but were simply a drain on Army coffers.
The Army itself was commanded by ageing marshals and generals who steadfastly refused to embrace any kind of advancement in tactics and technology. Maresciallo Badoglio, the Chief of Staff, rigidly believed that infantry in vast numbers was the key to modern warfare. Handed a perceptive intelligence analysis of the German tactics during the 1940 Battle of France, he said, ‘We’ll study it when the war is over.’ There were seventy-one divisions in the Italian Army in 1940, of which a mere four were armoured, i.e. with any tanks at all. Even Generale Ettore Bastico, one of very few commanders with experience of using armoured units in combat, questioned the tank’s importance. ‘The tank is a powerful tool,’ he said, ‘but let us not idolise it; let us reserve our reverence for the infantryman and the mule.’
The Italian Air Force, the Regia Aeronautica, was similarly riven with a lack of vision and foresight. As a result, Italy entered the war with lightweight and obsolete two- and three-engine bombers that simply did not have the range, speed or payload to make any significant impact, while most fighter aircraft were biplanes. Right after the declaration of war, Maggiore Publio Magini had been told the flying school would be closed down immediately. The Major could scarcely believe it, but he and the other instructors were assured the war would be won quickly, so what they needed right now was pilots, not instructors.
The day after the declaration of war, the Regia Aeronautica had sent over bombers to attack Malta, one of the most important pieces of real estate in the entire Mediterranean. From Malta, Britain had the potential to strike at Italian convoys heading to North Africa. It was also an important staging post. For Italy, the swift capture of Malta would have been a hugely important stepping stone, one that would not only have denied Britain its use, but would also have offered an important asset for its own operations. In the summer of 1940, Malta had been poorly defended, with a shortage of anti-aircraft guns and, initially, just a handful of Gloster Gladiator biplanes to protect it.
Within a short time, Britain had sent over precious Hurricanes as reinforcements, but even so these were hardly enough to stave off a concerted attack. Yet the offensive against this tiny island had been pathetic. Bombers had flown over too high, had half-heartedly dropped their bombs and that had been it. No attempt at suppression had been made, no plan to invade. Malta was getting stronger by the week; a golden opportunity to take it had been passed over due to a lack of proper forward planning and a lack of offensive drive from the military.
The only beacon of modernity was the Italian Navy, although it had been designed in the belief that future naval engagements would be much like they had been in the last war: at long range using big guns. There were no aircraft carriers and there was a shortage of torpedo boats. There were, however, plenty of submarines – some seventy-one in June 1940, which was more than anyone else had at the time, but that they were operating in often clear Mediterranean waters in which they could easily be seen from the air by British planes does not appear to have occurred to pre-war planners. By the end of July, thirteen of these precious submarines had been sunk. Because of its modernity, the Navy did attract some of the best volunteers – men like the dashing and highly intelligent aristocrat Valerio Borghese – but for the most part the Regia Marina was undermanned and lacked the experience that formed the bedrock of the Royal Navy.
At every level, ineptitude and a lack of foresight ran riot through Italy’s armed forces. As in Germany, image was all-important, so uniforms were varied and elaborate. Italian troops also used a staggering array of headwear: Alpine hats, pith helmets, tin helmets, fezzes, peaked caps, tropical bustinas, continental bustinas, sidecaps, leather helmets; the options were many. Nazi uniforms might have been extravagant, but they did at least convey the right image; it was hard to say the same for an Italian wearing a helmet with black cockerel feathers stuck on one side.
Even something as straightforward as arming the infantry with rifles and machine guns was made more complicated than it needed to be. Italian rifles were made by a firm called Carcano and were a pre-1914 design that came in three versions: the standard rifle and two shorter carbines. All three used a 6.5mm bullet, which was too small a calibre for modern war, so in 1937 a new, more powerful 7.35mm calibre rifle was introduced. Unfortunately, not enough were manufactured in time to equip more than a small portion of the Army by June 1940, and the new rifle programme was shelved as a result. Both rifle and carbine types were now in circulation, which, of course, required two types of ammunition. To complicate matters more, an 8mm carbine was introduced, which meant yet another calibre of bullet, while the Fascist Youth units were given a further type of carbine, which fired a 5.5mm bullet. As if that were not enough to make the supply authorities’ heads spin, Italian forces were also equipped with variety of 9mm and 10.35mm calibre pistols and revolvers.
Breda made a superb sub-machine gun, but it required an altogether different type of round to its handgun equivalents. In contrast, the Breda Model 30 light machine gun was not as good as most others coming into action at the time, not least because it also fired the underpowered and smaller 6.5mm calibre bullet and was prone to jam because the type of lubricating oil it used was thick and tended to pick up grit and dirt. Like the MG34, it also tended to overheat rapidly, although it had a rate of fire of only 400 rounds per minute. It also had no carrying handle, but, unlike German machine-gunners, Italian soldiers were not issued with asbestos mitts. These technical issues were significant because they caused both endless logistical headaches as well as questionable performance.
Artillery, by which Badoglio and his fellow senior commanders set great store, was largely 1914–18 vintage and in terms of both velocity and range came nowhere near to being as powerful and effective as most British equivalents.
Training was basic and rigid, and initiative was stifled. Many middle-ranking officers were reserves, hastily re-recruited, and were frequently too old and as unversed in modern fighting techniques as the senior commanders. In almost every regard, the Italian armed forces were woefully out of date, and while the young men of the cities – lads like William Cremonini – were well indoctrinated and highly motivated, and understood concepts of honour and discipline, they were a comparative minority in a highly regionalized and still predominantly rural society.
In any case, William Cremonini and his comrades were not heading anywhere just yet. Having been trained, some 25,000 of these young volunteers found that their battalions had been dissolved and they were ordered home, part of some 600,000 fighting men who were released from active service because of the endemic lack of arms and equipment. ‘We were so disillusioned,’ says Cremonini, ‘we staged the funeral of the Fascist Party.’ Collecting some packing crates, they stacked them high, draped them in black sheets and set them on fire, singing funeral marches as the flames took hold.
Graziani had been citing a lack of equipment as his reason for holding off attacking Egypt, but in fact he had plenty: 8,500 motor vehicles and over 300 tanks (albeit not very good ones). His two armies of around 167,000 men were all equipped with rifles, machine guns and other small arms, and although their guns and armour lagged behind those of Britain, he still had a sizeable force at his disposal, which should have been confident of taking on the 36,000 British troops in Egypt.
There was, however, a pronounced lack of will and tactical ingenuity that began at the top with Graziani and went all the way down. His officer corps were disconnected from their men and lived in lavish style compared with the troops they commanded, eating pasta and parmesan and drinking wine, all of which took up valuable shipping space.
Few Italians in North Africa were interested in taking on the British – only Mussolini, it seemed, had the will for a scrap. And so Graziani’s Tenth Army marched into Egypt and, after lethargically advancing forty-odd miles to Sidi Barrani, then stopped.