“I know.” Wavell spoke mildly. “There is, of course, a small problem with that. I report to both London and Calcutta, and my orders from Calcutta are quite clear. They are to stabilize this area, eliminate any Italian threat to our position here in Egypt and ensure than the Italians will not be able to launch a supporting thrust when the main German attack through Turkey and Iraq starts. Tom and Bernard have received more or less similar orders from their governments, with the codicil that they are to subordinate themselves to me.”
“A divided command and conflicting orders. The old recipe for disaster. I feel for you, Archie.”
“No need to. In the final analysis, I am an Indian Army officer; with the split between London and Calcutta, it is to India that I must look for final authority. If I receive an order like this from Churchill in Ottawa, then I have a problem. At the moment, I do not.” Wavell took the telegraph paper, tore it in half and then applied a match to the remains. “Operation Compass starts tonight on schedule. Warspite is on the move?”
“She is indeed, with a screen of course.” Maitland Wilson looked at the charred paper in Wavell’s ashtray. “Is it really so easy to break with London? And does Egypt realize it has more or less just joined the British Commonwealth?”
“The Commonwealth of Nations.” Wavell corrected Maitland Wilson reprovingly. “There is more to that than just a change in the name, Jumbo.”
Maitland Wilson nodded and left to issue the orders needed to start Operation Compass. Behind him, Wavell also stared at the burned paper in his ashtray. It hadn’t been easy to break with London at all. Wavell knew his decision this day would haunt him for years to come.
“Prepare to open fire.” Admiral Andrew Cunningham gave the order to Captain Douglas Fisher with a certain degree of relish. He was well aware that orders had been received from London ordering an end to the offensive, but they meant little to him. Wavell had ignored them and ordered Operation Compass to proceed. Cunningham was throwing his lot in with Wavell and the Commonwealth. His 15-inch guns were about to provide the most emphatic repudiation of the Halifax government in London that it was possible to imagine.
“Ready, sir.” Fisher saw Cunningham nod and he took the gesture as it was intended. “Main battery open fire on designated targets.”
For a brief moment, General Pietro Maletti believed he was back in his childhood, when he had heard the trains passing through his home town of Castiglione delle Stiviere. His earliest memory, one that came from so far back that he could recollect neither time nor context, was of his father lifting him up so he could see the flashing lights of a train passing in the darkness and hear the roar of its passage. The roar overhead was the same overwhelming pitch as those passing trains so many years before. To his shock, it was followed by a rapid series of brilliant flashes of light. He wondered, for one brief second while trapped between sleep and waking, whether he had somehow gone back to his childhood in Lombardy. Then, as the floor of his dugout heaved beneath him, he knew he had not.
The explosions of the shells across the cantonment occupied by Raggruppamento Maletti were drowned out by the thunderous roars of the big shells hitting the Libya Army Group’s command positions. Maletti guessed, by the size of the explosions he was seeing, that they were naval gunfire; almost certainly the British battleship that had been reported in Alexandria. She must have left after dusk and proceeded up the coast to carry out this bombardment. It seemed an insane thing to think, but seeing the great balls of fire reaching into the sky from the 15-inch shells made Maletti grateful for the 18-pounders that were rippling across his positions.
This wasn’t possible. Maletti was having a hard job forming a mental picture of what was going on. The British were more than a hundred kilometers away, at Mersah Mutruh, where the infantry forming the Italian front line were gathered. They can’t be here. But the guns firing on us are field guns. They have to be here. A grim lesson was running through his mind, one that had been hammered home by his instructors at Modena but was all too often forgotten. Amateurs thought surprise was a matter of a radical new weapon or a clever maneuver nobody else had thought of. It wasn’t. Surprise is the overwhelming result of the situation changing faster than the victim that can adapt to it. The most commonplace maneuver will produce a devastating surprise if it causes the situation to develop before the victim can react. Maletti knew he had been surprised.
He forced himself to sit down and think. Artillery fire means an attack. Field artillery means the attack is coming now. We are far behind our front line, so the forces attacking us must be motorized at the very least. There are tanks coming and tanks mean infantry in support. As if to confirm the analysis he had just made, the rippling crashes of the fire from the 18-pounders was supplement by a crackle of rifle fire. In an odd way, Maletti welcomed it; for it showed he was getting his mind ahead of the situation. That meant he had the opportunity to do something other than just react. To be trapped into reaction was a sure way of losing a battle.
Maletti got to his feet and headed out of his bunker. Over to his left, he could hear the sound of rifle and machine gun fire backed up by the roar of engines. That was where the attack was centered.
Once he had a view of the situation, he realized just how bad things were. There seemed to be British tanks everywhere. They were advancing slowly but steadily through his outer defenses, crushing down the wire with almost contemptuous disregard. Maletti watched their turrets swinging backwards and forwards. The coaxial machine guns cut down his men as they left their dugouts and tried to get to their tanks. A chill swept him as he realized just how easily he could have been one of them, killed in the early stages of the attack before he had ever brought the situation under control.
Not that he had very much chance of controlling this battle now. He recognized the tanks. Matildas. Infantry tanks intended to support an assault on a heavily defended position. Sure enough, there were indeed infantry behind the tanks, swarming over the positions behind the wire and tossing grenades into the foxholes. His eye told him that they were far less experienced than the tank crews; they were going through the drills well enough but they were doing them as drills. They hadn’t developed the familiarity that turned drills into a wellexecuted battle maneuver. Maletti realized it would hardly make much difference now. It was the tanks that were deciding the battle. It was already lost.
How much so was quickly illustrated. Somehow, a crew had reached one of his M11/39 tanks and got it started. The twin machine guns in the turret opened fire. The troops behind the Matildas sprawled for cover. The M11/39 started to turn, to bring its hull-mounted 37mm gun to bear. The movement attracted the attention of the British tanks. Their turreted twopounders could swing much faster. There was a ripple of flashes. The Italian tank was hit at least half a dozen times. There was a brief, split-second, interval that made Maletti hope that it had somehow survived the tattoo of hits. The eruption of smoke from the stricken vehicle showed such hopes were groundless. Despite being diesel-engined, the M11/39 was burning.
The position was nearly hopeless. Maletti could see that. His two tank battalions were already overrun; he was suffering the humiliation of seeing his tanks captured intact. The Matildas were grinding through his infantry; their inexorable progress marked by the streams of tracer fire cutting down his men as they tried to stop the juggernauts with rifle fire. There was only one hope left, his artillery. Firing over open sights, they might be able to stop the Matildas.