World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE DESERT: Failure of an Offensive

The War Office had apparently fumbled commanders again. In the fusty voice of an "official spokesman." London announced last week that Lieut. General Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham, Commander of the Eighth Army in the Western Desert, had suffered a "serious overstrain," had been replaced by Major General Neil Methuen Ritchie eight days after Britain's Libyan offensive was launched. This may have been an admission that General Cunningham's battle tactics* had failed. It was providing history with a scapegoat for the immediate failure of the British forces to clean the Axis from Libya.

With an eye on the Clausewitz theory that time...