Rommel arrived for the first time in North Africa when his plane touched down at noon on 12 February, 1941. At that time the Italians were still in full retreat toward Tripoli - the British hard on their heels. Rommel found the senior Italian officers and bureaucrats in Tripoli busy packing to catch whatever ship they could to get back to Italy and safety before the British arrived. There was definitely no fight left in the Italians.

General Graziani had led the pathetic invasion of Egypt that began on 13 September 1940. After an advance of a miserable 80 kilometres into Egypt he halted at Sidi Barani – destined never to resume his march. To be fair he commanded purely infantry forces in terrain where only motorised forces would do. On top of that his infantry were poorly trained, and badly led conscripts for the most part. Britain was supposed to have surrendered after France fell, or at the latest when it lost the Battle of Britain. But it didn’t lose the Battle of Britain, and their leader Winston Churchill was not in a frame of mind to surrender.

On 7 December 1940, the brilliant British general Wavell launched Operation Compass, attacking the Italians. The outcome of that battle was that the Italians had been unceremoniously driven not only out of Egypt, but out of most of their own province of Cyrenaica in Libya. By the time Rommel arrived, General Graziani had been replaced as field commander by General Italo Gariboldi. David Irving describes Gariboldi:

[He] was a burly North Italian with a white moustache and not much more tact than the average noncommissioned officer.

But with Rommel things were going to change – it couldn’t have been otherwise.

Tag words: Ian Walker; Iron Hulls, Iron Hearts; Field Marshall Erwin Rommel; General Graziani; Operation Compass; General Italo Gariboldi; Mario Roatta; Pour le Mérite; Battle of Caporetto; Deutsche Afrika Korps;