Battle of the Marmarica

The moon set soon after midnight in a swirl of blowing sand. Everything was ready. The main body had sneaked up in a remarkable rush, from Matruh the day and night before, 60 miles in one haul, and now they settled down on the cold sands for a valuable nap. Mechanized forces had deployed earlier in a sharp curve to the south and west, using the moonlight to dodge scrub and big desert boulders.

In the stinging blown sand they lay, a polyglot army: Britons, Anzacs, Indians, even some Poles and Free Frenchmen, 40,000 men at most. They manned little tanks, big cruiser tanks, and cruel little balloon-tired armored cars capable of 40 m.p.h. and carrying six machine guns each for killing. Winston Churchill called them The British and Imperial Army of the Nile, but scattered on the dark desert, they looked insignificant. The well-armed Italians slept in their camps.

Head of the expedition was Major General Richard Nugent O'Connor, a Scot with an Irish name, who won a silver medal from the Italians for valor on the Piave Italian front in 1917. Sir Henry Maitland ("Jumbo") Wilson, Commander of the forces in Egypt, had planned this whole adventure on his flower-crowded island in the Nile at Cairo with General Sir Archibald Wavell, Commander in Chief of the Army of the Middle East, who blessed it with a ringing Order of the Day: ". . . In everything but numbers we are superior to the enemy. We are more highly trained. We shoot straighter. We have better equipment. Above all, we have stouter hearts and greater traditions. . . ."

Surprise! Surprise! Behind them in the East the first coldness of daylight spread. At the assigned hour, all units moved. Motors roared. The force facing Maktila and Sidi Barrani made a great noise of gunfire and show. More quietly, holding fire, the second force to the south of Sidi Barrani swung in to attack Italian camps on the desert flank. A third force farther west headed hard for the coast near Buqbuq.

The first blow of the attack was driven home by the R. A. F. under command of Air Commodore Raymond Collishaw, who got the second highest bag of any British flier in World War I (60 planes) and about the most decorations. Everything the R. A. F. could get off the ground went out--from slick new Hurricanes recently brought East, to heavy old Glosters. vibrating like aerial pianos. Just as the Germans did on May 10 in the Low Countries, the R. A. F. and the Fleet Air Arm blinded the enemy. British squadrons bombed airfields from Sidi Barrani right to Tripoli. For hours the Italians could only guess what was happening. At the same time the British Fleet swung in to bombard Maktila, Sidi Barrani and the Italians' road to the rear. The Italians were attacked simultaneously from the right (land) flank by tanks, from the left (sea) flank by the fleet, from the top (air) flank by the R. A. F.

Some of the Italians were at breakfast when the first shells dropped in their camps, shells from the east making them think a frontal attack was coming. A few moments later the British tanks came thundering in from the rear. A camp called Nibeiwa protected the desert flank of the main forward body of Italians at Sidi Barrani. The British tanks roaring in from the rear stampeded horses and mules through the camp. British fire was so severe that the Italians never even reached their own tanks. Said an Italian officer afterward: "It was the nearest thing to hell ever seen on earth." General Pietro Maletti, the Italian commander, died with a bullet through his chest. Two thousand prisoners were captured, and only one British tank was destroyed.

The Clean-Up. Sidi Barrani was outflanked. Soon whole camps of Libyans surrendered. The fleet at sea could hear the tank commanders talking to each other by radio. One called: "I am stopped in the middle of 200--no, 500 men--their hands up. For heaven's sake, send up the bloody infantry."

Confusion, the condition attackers most desire, blossomed in unexpected dimensions. At sea the warships steamed leisurely along, pounding at the camps, chewing the supply road which Marshal Rodolfo Graziani had shored up with 150,000 lorries-full of Libyan stone. The Italians, completely fooled by the fake frontal attack, thought of home, and began to run. The British caught up to a colonel in his pajamas, his bag packed for a hasty trip.

The attacking force heading for the coast made excellent time. A tank commander radioed: "I have just reached the first Buq in Buqbuq." At the coast their force turned sharp right, and at the same time the frontal feint materialized into a real frontal attack and the inland force drove north. All three forces were thus converging on Sidi Barrani. Within their net lay three Italian divisions.

Soon prisoners became a problem because of their numbers. Units of the fleet moved in to ferry them to Alexandria. Near Matruh was a special barbed-wire pen for the elite. Here, only generals, colonels and majors were sent. Colonel Carmelo Guisfreda, General Maletti's second in command, was full of gallantry: "The action was brilliantly conceived and even more brilliantly executed."

Italian morale, what with Taranto and Greece to reflect on, was naturally not high. But as soon as they were captured the soldiers were cheerful enough. One of them said: "The British gave us a big shock attacking from the rear. Well, what we want right now is to get some place where we can write to our families."

By the end of the third day, Sidi Barrani had fallen. The British had taken at least 15,000 prisoners. The main battle was over. The next move, to be undertaken without a pause, was to chase the enemy to Libya.

Rout. The fighting was taking place on the coastal plain, which the Italians call the Marmarica. Some 30 miles inland from Buqbuq an escarpment juts suddenly above the desert, 300-600 feet high. This escarpment runs diagonally towards the coast and meets it at Salum, hard by the Libyan border. Were it a man-made barrier like China's Great Wall, the escarpment could be no more effective as a wall against land warfare. At Salum just two precipitous gullies run from the plain to the top of the plateau and Libya. Into those bottlenecks the British chased the remainder of what British communiques calmly called "the beaten Italian Army." This week they captured Salum and Fort Capuzzo.

The rout was terrible. While British mechanized columns pruned and hacked, the R. A. F. poured bombs and machine-gun lead on motor transport, camps, supply depots, airdromes, and on the soldierly runners. The fleet moved along, throwing everything but the gun turrets at the coastal road. At Bardia some vessels edged in just a half mile from shore and pumped their biggest shells into the town. The fleeing Italians abandoned everything, leaving large supplies of tinned food, oil, water, Chianti, mules, lorries, truckloads of documents, new tanks, guns.

This week Italian communiques admitted that the British had crossed the border, and that there was fierce fighting in the Salum-Bardia-Fort Capuzzo triangle. Italians tried to break up British naval bombardment of the area by sending in the submarine Naiade. Destroyers screening bigger vessels closed in on the Naiade and sank her at once. The R. A. F. carried on tirelessly, and the bag of Italian planes grew into the dozens.

Said the Italian radio last week: "We fail to see the reason for this hysterical condition into which the British press and the British radio have whipped themselves over a temporary advance of a few miles. The very fact that this zone has been crossed by the British in a very short time, and by the Italians, on the previous occasion, in a shorter time still, only goes to prove that the feat can be done."

The difference was that the British had lost nothing like 26,000 prisoners, as the Italians did last week, that the British retired in good order with their army intact. In the battle of the Marmarica the Italians lost all their advance forces. Probably nearly a quarter of their Army in Libya was destroyed as a fighting force. They had lost even more valuable supplies and equipment. It appeared that Egypt would be safe from Italian attack for at least months to come.

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