british Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://louis1j1sheehan.us

n early 1941 British forces were engaged in Operation Compass, an attempt to drive the Italians out of North Africa. On January 21, 1941 the Australian 6th Division made an assault to capture the Italian garrison of Tobruk which offered one of the few good harbour between Alexandria and Tripoli. http://louis1j1sheehan.us

The Italian troops generally offered little resistance - large numbers surrendered without fighting. The Italian commander, General Petassi Manella surrendered himself after only 12 hours, but he had refused to order the surrender of his forces, which meant that it took a further day to clean up any resistance. Australian casualties were 49 dead and 306 wounded, while capturing 27,000 Italian POWs, 208 guns, 28 tanks, many good quality trucks and a large amount of supplies. http://louis1j1sheehan.usThey also found that the Italians had constructed some impressive defences, including a perimeter of concrete pits.

The Australian commander, Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead divided the 50 kilometres (31 mi) perimeter into three rough sectors. It would be the job of the three Australian brigades to ensure these were not breached. The 26th would hold the western sector, the 20th would hold the south and the 24th would hold the east. The 9th Division was reinforced by the Australian 18th Brigade (detached from the 7th Division) and British artillery units. Morshead also ordered all Italian signal cables to be re-laid. He wanted to know what was happening, and where, so he could adjust his forces accordingly. He also kept a reserve of runners in case the telephone lines were disrupted by the German attack.

By the end of the first week in February Operation Compass had resulted in the Italian forces being driven from Cyrenaica and in the surrender of the Italian Tenth Army.

However, the Allies were unable to take advantage of their victory. With the Italians close to collapse, Winston Churchill commanded the British General Staff to call a halt to the offensive in order to allow many of the most experienced units from Richard O'Connor's XIII Corps to be moved to Greece to fight in the Battle of Greece. XIII Corps was wound down to become a static HQ and O'Connor became commander British Troops Egypt (in Cairo) while Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson became military governor of Cyrenaica. Cyrenaica was left with only the inexperienced and under-strength 2nd Armoured Division and the newly-arrived (and only partly-trained) 9th Australian Division.^[3]

Meanwhile the Germans had started to concentrate in Africa the two divisions of the Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel (see Operation Sonnenblume) in an attempt to prevent total collapse of the Italian forces. The British High command was ignorant to this. Even when German reconnaissance units were spotted in Africa they insisted that there were no Germans forces in North Africa.

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