The Humiliation of Mussolini
BACK IN SEPTEMBER, Mussolini had approved sending the 3. Corpo Aereo Italiano (CAI), amounting to some 175 aircraft, to Belgium to support the Luftwaffe’s operations against Britain. It was blatantly a ruse to ensure Italy was seen to be playing an active part in Britain’s downfall, but so obsessed was the Duce with making a good impression on the Luftwaffe that the men were issued with special new grey-blue uniforms and anything that seemed faintly old-fashioned, such as puttees and baggy breeches, was put to one side. They couldn’t hide, however, the fact that most of the planes were Fiat CR.42 biplanes or outmoded bombers.
Maggiore Publio Magini was among those sent to Belgium, even though the Major was still in the process of setting up a flying school in Bologna when he was posted. During its time in Belgium, the CAI was unable to shoot down a single English aircraft, while it lost two dozen of its own and, as time passed, became increasingly beset with problems as the aircraft it had brought were not really designed for operating in cold and damp conditions.
For Magini, this rather pointless involvement in the air battle against Britain made him question what on earth Italy was doing in the war. Assailed by a crisis of conscience, he realized he was increasingly against Italy’s involvement. ‘It was criminal,’ he wrote, ‘to throw away the lives of our folk with such casualness, and to risk the fate of a nation in a contest, in which, sooner or later, our military and industrial weakness would make itself felt.’ The stress helped bring on a stomach ulcer. On a radio he bought in Mons, he listened to Churchill’s speeches, which had been translated into Italian and were broadcast by the BBC. These only alarmed him further.
Neither the RAF pilots who came up against them nor their counterparts in the Luftwaffe were terribly impressed by these Italian aviators. Most were good enough pilots, but they lacked any modern technology, achieved very little, and would have been far better off elsewhere, such as defending their homeland or in Libya.
Meanwhile, the RAF was now sending more pilots, aircrew and aircraft out to the Middle East, including Flight Lieutenant Tony Smyth, who was posted at the end of September. Since it was now recognized that Blenheims were obsolete for daylight work over Europe, it had been decided that each squadron should send a proportion of its strength to the Middle East theatre.
After leave in London – in which he was amazed to discover so many people sheltering in the Underground and shocked by the overpowering stench – Smyth reported to Thorney Island on the south coast, to lead a flight of six Blenheims to Malta, where they would stop and refuel, and then fly on to Egypt. Already painted in desert camouflage, they were equipped with extra auxiliary fuel tanks, but it was still a long trip to Malta, straight across France and down past Sardinia and Sicily, of some 1,400 miles with little margin for error.
It was mid-October when they left, and thankfully for Smyth and his fellows the journey to Malta was an uneventful one. The most fraught part was as they neared the island and so were within easy range of Italian fighters on Sicily, but they saw nothing and successfully landed at Luqa airfield at nine in the morning after a flight of eight hours and twenty minutes, and with just 51 gallons of fuel left. That wasn’t a lot for a twin-engine Blenheim.
Smyth stayed twenty-four hours in Malta, where he discovered the Italians had already stopped any daylight raids and hadn’t bombed the island once in a fortnight. One of the crews remained to join the burgeoning 431 Reconnaissance Flight, but Smyth and the rest then flew onwards a further thousand miles to Egypt, and to sunshine, food, drink and no blackout. Smyth, who had a love for travelling and adventure, was in his element.
At sea in the Mediterranean, an audacious British plan was developing to hit the Italian Fleet with a single devastating attack. The lack of martial drive on the part of the Italian Navy had been picked up only too clearly by the C-in-C of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, a tough, gritty terrier of a sea dog if ever there was one. Cunningham, known to all simply as ‘ABC’, was unusual among flag-rank commanders in that his background was with smaller, agile destroyers rather than capital ships. He’d been a captain of a destroyer in the Mediterranean during the last war and then a destroyer flotilla commander, before being appointed Rear-Admiral Destroyers in the Mediterranean in 1933. It was a part of the world he knew intimately and cared about passionately, and he had absolutely no intention whatsoever of giving the Italians – or anyone else for that matter – an inch. A man of action rather than one careful with his paperwork, his orders tended to be brusque and to the point, and he firmly believed, as many in the Royal Navy did, that skill and superior seamanship counted for a very great deal.
His offensive spirit had been apparent from the start of hostilities against Italy. He had willingly engaged at Calabria and had been distraught when the Italians had turned away, and had supported the troops on the ground with a series of bombardments of Italian coastal forts at Sollum and Fort Capuzzo. It had also been on his watch that the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kébir had been attacked.
Unlike Cavagnari, Cunningham also readily understood that warfare was something that never stood still and that any commander had to constantly look forward and improve not only fighting skills but the means of achieving those skills. The Italian Navy might have had some of the most modern capital ships in the world, but it had no aircraft carriers, for example; Britain, on the other hand, had built its first, HMS Argus, back in 1918. The Royal Navy had long ago recognized that air power was a crucial element of sea power, yet in the Mediterranean Cunningham, much to his frustration, had just one aircraft carrier, the Glorious, at the beginning of June. ‘You may be sure that all in the Fleet are imbued with a burning desire to get at the Italian Fleet,’ he had written to the First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, back on 6 June, ‘but you will appreciate that a policy of seeking and destroying his naval forces requires good and continuous air reconnaissance.’
Indeed, the entire Mediterranean Fleet was understrength for the task demanded of it: to destroy the Italian Fleet as soon as possible, to provide an all-important convoy escort as Britain strove to build up the defences of Malta and Egypt, and to support land operations too. ‘Out here in the Mediterranean,’ wrote ABC, ‘we were also having to contrive and improvise to make bricks with very little straw.’ That was perhaps overstating the case, but Cunningham felt it more keenly now that France had gone; the Mediterranean was more than 2,000 miles long. It was a big area for him to cover.
Yet reinforcements were arriving, despite the nervousness of those defending the British Isles. A second aircraft carrier, HMS Illustrious, brand new and armed with modern Fairey Fulmar fighter aircraft, had joined the Fleet, and it was during a conversation with Rear-Admiral Lumley Lyster, the newly arrived commander of the Carrier Squadron, that the idea of attacking the Italian fleet in harbour arose. Lyster was proposing using carrier-based aircraft to bomb and torpedo the Italians as they lay in Taranto, and Cunningham now gave him every encouragement. In a short time, a plan began to take shape. Codenamed Operation JUDGEMENT, it was to take place on 21 October, which suited Cunningham as it was Trafalgar Day and he was fiercely proud of Britain’s naval tradition. Then a fire on one of Illustrious’s deck hangars forced a delay until the next time there would be a suitable moon. That was the night of 11 November.
It quickly became apparent that for such an attack to have any chance of success, close co-operation would be needed with the RAF based on Malta. Since 10 June, the tiny island fortress had been greatly reinforced with some 2,000 troops, many more light and heavy anti-aircraft guns, as well as Hurricanes, bombers and, crucially, reconnaissance aircraft – or rather, just three reconnaissance aircraft, US-built Glenn Martin Marylands taken over from the French and seconded from 22 Squadron Coastal Command back in England. These three planes now made up what was 431 Reconnaissance Flight, and on the face of it they did not appear to be the pick of the RAF’s best pilots. One, Pilot Officer Adrian Warburton, had proved so hapless he had almost been fired from the RAF – and during the Battle of Britain, too, when trained pilots were at a premium. Utterly feckless, he had managed to get himself married to a barmaid, run up debts and proved to be so bad at taking off and landing that those in 22 Squadron had wondered how he had ever passed his wings examination. Between joining the squadron in the summer of 1939 and being posted to Malta, Warburton had been allowed to fly barely an hour and even on the trip out to Malta had been brought along as a navigator rather than as a pilot.
However, the flight was so small and the demands on them so extensive that when they lost a pilot to illness, there was no other option but to give Warburton his chance. His first flight back in the pilot’s seat was due to have been a reconnaissance trip to Corfu but ‘was abandoned owing to hydraulic failure and aircraft crashed on landing’. This was a polite way of saying Warburton had zig-zagged so badly on take-off that a wheel had come off. It was repairable, but by giving Warburton his chance, the Flight had temporarily lost one of its precious planes.
Had Warburton still been in England, he would almost certainly have been axed after this, but the far-flung nature of the Empire had ensured that mavericks could often find their place, and on Malta, where every piece of equipment and every serviceman counted, that was doubly true. Given a second chance, Warburton managed not only to get himself airborne, but also to land without mishap. Furthermore, he showed that in the air he was a highly skilled pilot and one blessed with phenomenal eyesight. On his first trip to Taranto, where he was back as navigator not pilot, he surprised his CO by picking out all the ships, which were later confirmed by careful examination of the photographs.
On 30 October, he was once again in the pilot’s seat. The weather was poor over Taranto, so he flew in low to take a series of oblique photographs of the Fleet. Anti-aircraft fire was not slow in opening up, but he and his two other crew members still got their pictures. On the return trip, they even shot down an Italian seaplane. By this point, plans for Operation JUDGEMENT were at an advanced stage, which meant further reconnaissance photographs were essential – any small change in the harbour at Taranto had to be known about, and, indeed, a balloon barrage and anti-torpedo nets had recently been added to the anchorage.
In America in that last week of October, Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s friend and the architect of his presidential campaign, was starting to fret. The President had been ahead in the polls, but his opponent, Wendell Willkie, was gaining ground, and while he and the vast majority of the nation were now only too happy to send aid to Britain and China, very few supported US entry into the war. But that, Willkie was telling audiences, was exactly what would happen if Roosevelt was re-elected. Matters were not improved when Roosevelt appeared at the War Department ceremony to pick the first number of the 800,000-man draft. ‘This fellow Willkie,’ said Hopkins, ‘is about to beat the Boss.’
Meanwhile, Hitler had been on the move, having made trips to see Pétain and General Franco, the Spanish dictator. Both meetings had been unsatisfactory. Hitler had stressed to both the importance of bringing the war to a speedy conclusion, but both Pétain and Franco made it clear that actively joining Germany in the war would require generous territorial and material concessions. This was not bargaining but the stark truth: both countries were so impoverished, they would have been worse allies than Italy. Franco even told Hitler that he thought there was little chance of the war ending swiftly. Hitler had wanted complete support from both but was simply not prepared to give them even a fraction of what they wanted. Consequently, not much was achieved, and Hitler, already in a foul mood, flew into an even bigger rage when he received Mussolini’s bellicose letter telling him the Italians were about to invade Greece.
Diverting his train to Florence, he pulled into the station on the morning of 28 October, to be met by a beaming Mussolini. ‘Early this morning,’ the Duce told the Führer, ‘in the dawn twilight, victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albanian border.’ Face to face, Hitler remained cordial enough with Mussolini, but to Major Engel, his Army Adjutant, he was less circumspect. ‘F. in a rage,’ noted Engel. ‘Observed that this occurrence had spoiled many plans he had in mind . . . and doubted if the Italians would be able to defeat Greece.’
This quickly proved to be the case, as the campaign unravelled in spectacular style. In addition to the 70,000 Italian troops already in Albania, more were sent over by ship, but because of the demobilization and the ridiculous speed with which the campaign had been put together, most of these were only partially trained and poorly equipped. The majority were deposited at Durazzo, the only port big enough, but there they found the docks already full of Italian ships unloading marble for building projects in Albania. Consequently, troops were packed off to the front but were separated from much of their equipment. It soon began to rain, and roads – unmetalled – quickly turned to mud. Troops were sent to the wrong places, supply lines were stretched, and morale swiftly plummeted. Nor was it improved when a consignment of boots was sent to the front – all left-footed.
Mussolini was paying for his hubristic impatience, and Ciano his breathtaking arrogance. Both men had chosen to believe what they had wanted to hear rather than listening to more measured advice – including that from SIM, the secret intelligence service, which had compiled a 200-page report that was, in fact, pretty accurate. Rather than having just 30,000 troops as claimed by the hawks, the Greek Army was ten times that size, just as SIM had warned. In terms of equipment, it was about on a par with the Italians. Added to that was their far greater motivation to defend their country, as well as home advantage. But the report had been ignored. Furthermore, the attack came as no sur-prise to the Greeks, who recognized the Italians had been spoiling for a fight, had mobilized some weeks before, and were ready to meet that aggression.
By 1 November, a huge hole had been blown in the Italian line. That same day, Ciano had joined in, flying a ‘spectacular’ bombing mission to Salonika. On his return, he was attacked by Greek fighter planes. ‘Two of theirs went down,’ he commented, ‘but I must confess that it is the first time that I had them on my tail. It is an ugly sensation.’ It was not as ugly as the slaughter of Italian troops on the ground below. By 4 November, Italian forces were being driven back into Albania.
On Friday, 1 November, Jock Colville had travelled in Churchill’s car to Chequers, the PM’s country retreat. Churchill was in a good mood and optimistic about the forthcoming presidential election in the US, telling Colville that Roosevelt would win by a far greater majority than most had been predicting. He also thought America would come into the war. As it turned out, Churchill was quite right about the election.
On that election day, the President had returned to his home at Hyde Park with his wife and sons, Harry Hopkins, and a few other close friends and colleagues. After supper at Eleanor Roosevelt’s cottage, they drove back through the woods, a favourite spot of the President’s, to Springwood, the ‘Big House’. There, FDR pitched camp around the cluttered dining room table, while Hopkins went upstairs to his bedroom, where he listened to the results on a cheap radio set and began noting them down on a chart. At first, Willkie appeared to have made some gains; Hopkins was still worried. He needn’t have been, however. By 9 p.m., the big industrial states had voted for FDR, and by ten o’clock it was clear he was heading for victory. By midnight, it was not only victory but a big victory: 55 per cent of the popular vote but 449 Electoral College votes to Willkie’s 82. Roosevelt would be President for a historic third term. More importantly, he would be President for the next four years. No president was ever as powerful as in his first year, and what a critical year it was to be. For so long, Roosevelt had had one arm tied behind his back, but now the spectre of the election was over and he was free to oversee America’s full commitment to rearmament. The United States had always had the potential to become the biggest armaments manufacturer the world had ever known, but Roosevelt’s vision for an army of millions, for 50,000 aircraft a year, for huge military aid to Britain, to China and elsewhere, was now a massive step closer to becoming a reality.
Roosevelt’s re-election and the disastrous Italian campaign in Greece were two events for the British to cheer about as Luftwaffe bombs continued to batter its cities on a nightly basis. Its war leaders hoped there might be more to celebrate soon in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, as two quite separate operations were about to be launched.
The first was Operation JUDGEMENT, the Royal Navy’s attack on the Italian Fleet at Taranto, for which reconnaissance from Malta-based aircraft continued to be critical. Adrian Warburton flew over Taranto again just a few days before the attack. The weather over southern Italy was just as poor as over Greece, but he insisted on going. When they reached Taranto, having flown below the dense cloud all the way, Warburton and his crew saw the balloon barrage had been lowered; the Italians were not expecting visitors. Making the most of their surprise arrival, they circled twice, calling out the names of the ships as the camera clicked. By the time they had completed the second circuit, the ack-ack was firing at them furiously, but as they skimmed away, they realized they had counted six battleships when the previous day there had been only five reported. Undeterred, Warburton turned around and flew over the harbour again, this time so low they were almost touching the water. They counted five – they had mistaken a cruiser for a battleship.
Incredibly, they got away a second time, although they were pursued by four Italian aircraft. They shot down one, the other three then turned for home, and Warburton and his crew safely made it back to Malta, where they discovered part of an aerial from one of the ships caught in the tail wheel. They flew over once more on the 7th of November, and again on the 10th, and finally on the 11th, the afternoon of the planned attack, by which time a sixth battleship had arrived. In addition, there were fourteen cruisers and twenty-seven destroyers – rich pickings indeed if the attack could possibly be made a success.
At 6 p.m. that evening, Cunningham sent a good-luck message to Rear-Admiral Lyster and his men, now 170 miles off Taranto. ‘As may be imagined,’ noted Cunningham, ‘we spent the night on tenterhooks.’ The plan was to attack in two waves of twelve Fairey Swordfish, naval biplanes known as ‘Stringbags’. They were hardly modern, but they were highly manoeuvrable and very robust, so were ideal for the kind of attack planned. At 8.35 p.m., the first squadron of Swordfish took off with the moon high and clear. It was just before 11 p.m. when they were approaching the harbour. The plan was that these first aircraft would drop flares to light up the battleships in the outer harbour, then dive-bomb the cruisers and destroyers in the inner harbour. As they reached Taranto, the anti-aircraft guns both on the warships and around the harbour immediately opened up, yet most of the attackers managed to complete their runs successfully and then make good their escape. Around midnight, the second wave of Swordfish arrived and were also able to complete their mission as planned. Just two were lost, and reconnaissance photographs the following morning showed that three battleships had been sunk or damaged, and a cruiser and two destroyers damaged. Half the Italian battle fleet had been put out of action in one go. To lose one battleship was disastrous; but to lose three of these most expensive, enormous and powerful warships at once was little short of catastrophic, and while two of them would eventually be recovered, it was only at great cost of money and time.
‘Admirably planned and most gallantly executed’ was Cunningham’s view of the attack; from his flagship, HMS Warspite, he signalled with his flags, ‘Illustrious manoeuvre well executed’, which he admitted was something of an understatement.
Yet while there can be no doubt that Warburton and his fellows in 431 Flight and the Fleet Air Arm did gallant and sterling work, the Italians should never have let it happen. No matter how intense the anti-aircraft barrage was at Taranto, it was nothing like adequate; it was not, for example, even as intense as that now guarding the harbours of Malta, where the Mediterranean Fleet was not even based. Co-ordination between searchlights and flak was also poor, and some weeks earlier Maresciallo Badoglio had already suggested to Count Ciano that the Fleet should be moved. Three weeks later, with the moon high and with the British Fleet clearly out at sea, nothing had been done.
‘A black day,’ Ciano noted on 12 November. It was, and by then the Army was already suffering an even greater humiliation.
The second British operation was a planned attack against Maresciallo Graziani’s forces now halted thirty miles inside Egypt. Codenamed COMPASS, this was to be the first major land attack against the Italians and had evolved after many long discussions between London and Cairo. In July, Wavell had flown to London for strategy discussions, and then in October Anthony Eden, the Minister of War, had flown out to Cairo for more talks. From the outset, Churchill had made it clear to Wavell that he should not sit on the defensive for long – he wanted action against the Italians just as soon as it was feasible. On the other hand, Wavell, while every bit as keen to act, was also hamstrung by the vastness of his command and the varying demands upon him.
The strategic importance of the Middle East and Mediterranean to Britain had only increased since the fall of France and the entry of Italy into the war. On the face of it, Britain’s insistence on continuing the fight there might seem misplaced. ‘Atlantic trade,’ the First Sea Lord had signalled to Admiral Cunningham back in June, ‘must be our first consideration.’ In this, he was unquestionably right. Keeping the supply chains open was the most important factor for any nation now caught up in this war. Without those key ingredients, there could be no strategy, no tactical developments. As such, the battle raging at sea in the Atlantic, now, at the end of 1940, had to be the most important priority for Britain.
So why was Britain already focusing so much energy on the Mediterranean and the Middle East? After all, the oilfields of Abadan in Iran and Kirkuk–Mosul in Iraq were not its prime supplier and were nothing like as significant as those in Baku in the USSR, or in Venezuela or the United States, the biggest producer of all. Even if Axis forces had reached the oilfields of Iraq and Iran, they would have been able to make little use of them as they would be unable to ship the oil by sea and there was no way they could transport a significant amount of the stuff across land; pipelines were still in their infancy and did not exist in these far-flung parts of the world. The British oil facilities in Iraq and Iran only really supplied Britain’s forces in the Middle East. If the armed forces weren’t there, Britain wouldn’t need the oil.
British protection of the Middle East was not, then, about oil, as has so often been claimed. There were, however, other important considerations. While no strategy should have been allowed to compete with the Atlantic supply lines, Britain was none the less not in the war to survive. It was in the war to win – and primarily to beat Germany and rid the world of Nazism. Back in Britain, it was now clear that the threat of invasion had, for the time being at any rate, passed. That being the case, and with the Battle of Britain won, there was no longer any immediate threat to its sovereignty, and while ground troops were still needed for the defence of the United Kingdom, its war leaders could release divisions for other theatres. More importantly, they could also afford to send tanks, artillery, transport and other equipment, as well as air and naval forces. Even back in July, the War Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff had agreed to sending 150 tanks to the Middle East. This has always been seen as an incredibly brave decision considering the threat from Germany, yet it was also a calculated and measured risk based on the assumption that, although Britain’s position was precarious, a successful German invasion attempt was still very unlikely. Furthermore, the Middle East was the one part of the war where Britain could most easily concentrate the assets of the empire, whether manpower or supplies – from India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
The first objective was to use the Middle East and Mediterranean to blunt Italian ambitions, then to make the Italians even more of a liability to Germany, and then to defeat them. Britain had hoped to create an eastern Mediterranean bloc with Turkey – by far the strongest power in the region – Greece and Yugoslavia, but after agreeing mutual friendship, Turkey had then stopped short of an alliance and in June had declared itself resolutely neutral. Britain’s failure to secure Turkey as an ally had merely reinforced the importance of Egypt as the cradle of British strategy. From here, Britain could possibly push into Vichy-held Syria too and influence Franco’s Spain. It was already holding Franco’s broken country to ransom with the threat of cutting off its much-needed supplies, but Gibraltar – British, and the gateway to the Mediterranean – remained vulnerable owing to its proximity to Fascist Spain. Then there were the Balkans; the closer Britain could get to Ploești in Romania, now Germany’s prime source of crude oil, the better.
It was, then, a largely opportunistic approach, but in the circumstances it made very good sense. After all, following a largely defensive land strategy in the first year of war had not done the Allies much good.
The second part of Britain’s overall strategy was to continue to grow the bomber force and strike back ever harder at the Reich from the air. Finally, Churchill hoped to undermine Nazi occupation and help those now under the German yoke to rise up. There were the Commandos, formed in early July, who would carry out harassing raids, and there was the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, under the control of a new Ministry of Economic Warfare. SOE would foster resistance, carry out sabotage, and spread dissent and chaos. It would, Churchill hoped, set Europe ablaze.
But first it was time to test the water in the desert, so to speak. For some weeks, British forces had been harrying the Italian positions. Patrols and larger formations had been probing Italian defences and even getting right behind their series of makeshift forts and disrupting supply lines. Certainly, the men of 2nd Rifle Brigade had been busy through much of October. Part of the recently formed 7th Armoured Division, the Rifle Brigade had been created during the Napoleonic Wars as scouts, skirmishers and sharpshooters; somewhat confusingly, they were not a brigade at all, but rather a regiment, and now, in Egypt’s Western Desert, they were once more carrying out exactly what they had originally been formed to do.
For Albert Martin, a young man from Poplar in London’s East End, these forays had been an ideal means of completing his training. After arriving in Port Suez in September, he been sent on a hardening course to prepare him for life in the desert, and had then been sent to join A Company. Normally, each platoon had three sections of ten men, but 2RB was divided into four sections of six instead – and each six-man section was assigned a single 15 cwt Morris truck, stripped of any glass or excess fixtures and fittings. ‘Our truck was a friendly haven,’ he wrote. ‘We ate with it, slept with it, travelled in it, crawled under it for shade, hung equipment to its side. It was also a mobile larder and an occasional social centre.’ Four of the men in his section were pre-war Regulars who had served in Palestine, India, the Northwest Frontier and elsewhere; these men knew a whole host of tricks about how to make food and water last, navigating using the sun and the stars, how to barter with Bedouins, making a mug of tea in two and a half minutes using a cut-in-half tin and lighting petrol-soaked sand, and how to cleverly camouflage their truck so that from a hundred yards it could barely be seen at all.
What Martin and his fellows also learned very quickly was that the Italians were obviously not embracing the desert in the same way. The platoon found it all too easy to pluck prisoners from Italian positions and realized that their enemy was unlikely to venture from the forts created to the south of Sidi Barrani. One night, they were supporting an attack on an Italian strong point at Maktila on the approach to Sidi Barrani. Leaving their truck, they then approached on foot, only to come under intense machine-gun fire. Martin was rather mesmerized by this, his first time under enemy fire. One of his mates pulled him to the ground, but he needn’t have worried – the Italian firing was way too high. They were easily able to advance and helped take the position with no casualties at all.
After this, they were formed into larger mobile columns. An entire company of trucked infantry would be joined by two troops of mobile 25-pounder field guns, a troop of 2-pounder anti-tank guns, armoured cars and supporting sappers (engineers), signals and field ambulances. These columns would then rove further south and west, outflanking the Italian positions and attacking any supply vehicles they saw feeding the Italian troops at the front. ‘We had total freedom of movement,’ noted Martin, ‘the Italians preferring to stay in their defensive enclaves and, when they did venture out, travelling close together along well-defined tracks and presenting themselves as tasty targets.’
These raids were all part of the softening-up process for the main assault. Martin and his mates knew something was brewing by the volume of traffic, the assembly of tanks and supporting vehicles, and the growing number of field guns arriving a short way behind them. Large fuel and ammunition dumps were also created. On the night of 8 December, Martin and the rest of the column moved out, assembling in a patch of desert now called Piccadilly Circus, about thirty-five miles south of Sidi Barrani. ‘And believe me,’ noted Martin, ‘it really was like Piccadilly Circus. I had never seen so many of our troops, armour and vehicles in one place.’ Commanding this force of 7th Armoured and 4th Indian Divisions was Major-General Richard O’Connor. His plan was to punch a hole fifteen miles wide. Half of 7th Armoured would strike at a series of forts above an escarpment thirty miles from the coast, the rest of the division – including Martin’s A Company – would drive straight for Buq Buq, fifteen miles beyond Sidi Barrani, and so cut the coast road, while 4th Indian turned towards the town itself and other forts closer to the coast. At the same time, a further column, called Selby Force, would strike west directly along the coast. Meanwhile, the RAF had blasted Italian airfields on the 7th and 8th, while fighter patrols shooed away any Italian reconnaissance planes.
As first light crept over the desert, O’Connor’s Western Desert Force smashed into the Italian positions, achieving complete surprise. At one fort, Nibiewa, 4th Indian attacked from the rear as the Italians were barely rousing. Generale Pietro Maletti, wounded as he tried to rally his troops, retreated to his tent with a machine gun and was firing from his camp bed when he was killed. Nibiewa was captured in just half an hour. The story was repeated elsewhere. Two days later, on 11 December, it was all over: the forts destroyed, Sidi Barrani taken, Albert Martin and 2nd Rifle Brigade in Buq Buq as planned, and some 38,300 prisoners in the bag, along with 237 guns and seventy-three Italian tanks. Rarely could a battle have gone so completely to plan.