Wavell's Command: The Crucible of War Book 1 by Pitt Barrie

Author:Pitt, Barrie [Pitt, Barrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sharpe Books
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

6: Beda Fomm - The Narrow Victory

’I could hardly believe my eyes’, wrote General O’Connor of the moment when he saw the maps built up by his Intelligence staff of the Italian positions which faced his forces after the fall of Tobruk.

There was not much left of the huge Tenth Army with which he had been faced less than two months before, and what there was seemed so dispersed as to make their destruction in detail, even by the exhausted men of XIII Corps and their worn-out equipment, as easy as possible. Tenth Army Headquarters under Generate d’Armata Tellera was apparently at Cyrene, some sixty mites from any possible battle area, white XX Corps Headquarters - the command for the Italian troops nearest to Tobruk - was at Giovanni Berta, nearly twenty mites behind its main defences. Those defences were anchored on the small port of Derna behind a formidably deep and long wadi, and at Mechili to the south, well out in the desert at the meeting point of a whole network of camel tracks.

Forty mites separated those two points, and if British Intelligence was to be believed, in Derna was concentrated the 60th Sabratha Division less one regiment, white grouped around Mechili was the one detached Sabratha regiment and an armoured brigade consisting of two battalions of medium tanks under command of Generate di Divisione Babini; and there was very little indeed between them. Doubtless there were Sabratha units along the line of the Wadi Derna, and it was known that Babini’s force was extended northwards along the line of a wadi which ted from Mechili back into the foothills of the Jebel Akhdar towards Chaulan and Slonta - but at least twenty-five mites separated the right flank of the Derna force from the left flank of the Mechili force, and it should certainly not be beyond average military competence so to engage the attention of one force that it could do nothing to avert the total destruction of the other.

As the armoured brigade at Mechili was obviously the more important of the two, it was equally obviously both the main target and the prey for 7th Armoured Division. General Creagh was summoned for a conference in which O’Connor impressed upon him the necessity for the total destruction of Babini’s force, while General Mackay was asked to detach one of his brigades from Tobruk as quickly as possible and to send it along the coast to attack the Italian forces in the approaches to Dema and in the port itself.

Time as always was of the essence but some factors were in XIII Corps’s favour, in that even before the fall of Tobruk, 7th Armoured Brigade had moved westwards and come up against some Italian defences at Martuba, while 4th Armoured were already away to the south of Mechili scouring the tracks leading up to it. Needless to say, since mid-January patrols of the 11th Hussars had been probing well to the west of Mechili and up into the

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