SOUTHERN THEATRE: 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.