The Italians had a battalion of light tanks in theirMaletti Group, consisting of thirty-five M11/39 medium tanks and an equal number of L3/35 lighttankettes. Their crews were just settling in to morning breakfast when the attack came in. Twenty-three of the better tanks had been deployed to guard the entrance to the camp, where no mines had been sewn, and this was where the 43 Matildas of the 7th RTR were heading. They caught the Italian armor completely by surprise, their 2 pounder guns brewing up one tank after another in the opening salvoes, some before the shocked tank crews even had time to reach their vehicles.
GeneralMaletti ran from his dugout field bunker and was cut down before he could utter a single order, so he did not see the systematic destruction of his unit, wiped out in just ten minutes by the heavier British tanks.
As the alarm was raised, frightened Italian soldiers grabbed any weapon they could find. Some fought, others ran for cover. Frantic artillery crews tried to turn their field pieces on the British tanks, firing at near point blank range, yet they were astonished to see their rounds simply could not penetrate the heavy armor on the Matildas. Faced with an enemy they could not kill, the camps fell one by one, the first easily, the second more stubbornly, but the outcome was the same. The Matildas would breach the enemy perimeter, and the Indian infantry would follow them in, rooting out one fox hole and machine gun nest after another.
Along the coast, a mixed force of 1800 troops under Brigadier General Selby was coming up fromMersaMatruh. They had been busy earlier building dummy wooden tanks inland in the desert as a good target for the Italian planes if they showed up, all a part of the deception O’Connor had planned.
By mid day the inland encampments had fallen and the British were mounting up the infantry in lorries to move on the coastal town ofSidiBarani. The thirsty Matildas had refueled and taken on fresh ammunition, and the bulk of all the 7th Armored Division’s artillery was setting up to support this renewed attack. By nightfall the town had fallen and the British column had reached the sea, bagging several Italian divisions that were now cut off from any escape.
The Italians began to surrender en masse, causing a snarl as groups of 2000 men might be herded off by no more than a platoon of British soldiers to watch them. The fight had simply gone out of them. They were conscripts, sent by Mussolini to conquer Egypt, but had little real stomach for combat once cut off and with no sign of relief anywhere apparent.
“O’Connor’s Raid” had been a resounding success, yet it was not over in spite of an unexpected setback when General Wavell radioed to inform O’Connor that the 4th Indian Division must now be withdrawn for duty in the Sudan.
O’Connor was surprised by the news, as he had not been told about this in advance, and it was most disconcerting. He would get the 6th Australian Division as a replacement, but not for some days, which meant he would have no infantry support. Any other commander would have stopped his offensive there and then, but O’Connor was determined to exploit his initial successes, and decided to press forward with 7th Armored Division alone. He would soon turn the Italian retreat into a rout of historic proportions, a debacle in the desert not replicated again until the 1st Gulf War when half a million Coalition troops routed the armies of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait.
But O’Connor did not have half a million men. He had begun his offensive with no more than 30,000 against a force of 150,000 Italians. He had destroyed 73 Italian tanks, 237 artillery pieces and bagged over 38,000 prisoners in the first round of fighting. In doing so he had taken only 70 casualties. Now his numbers were cut in half, but rather than consolidating his gains, he did the unexpected and attacked.
The Italians had retreated up the road toward their bastion at the small port of Bardia. A rocky escarpment angled in towards the town from the desert, stretching some thirty kilometers to the southeast, creating a kind of stone funnel that any force advancing up the coast had to enter. As they moved forward to the west, the attacker would be compressed by this escarpment, which had only one natural opening at a place calledHalfaya Pass.
To cork this bottleneck, Graziani had rallied a small armored force to defend the pass. The British 3rd Hussars were now in the lead, but they were mainly equipped with the light Mark VI machine guntankettes, and ran into heavy Italian artillery fire when they reached the town of BugBug about half way to the pass.
“We’ll meet fire with fire,” said O’Connor as he sized up the situation. “Bring up the division artillery. And get word to the sea bombardment force that they are to keep as much fire as possible on that road.”
