Free The Second World War by Antony Beevor Page B

was considered unlikely to succeed. His thoughts were mostly fixed on the invasion of the Soviet Union, although he vacillated, and considered its postponement. In early November, the OKW nevertheless prepared contingency plans codenamed Operation Felix, for the seizure of Gibraltar and the Atlantic islands.
    In the autumn of 1940, Hitler had hoped to seal off Britain and drive the Royal Navy from the Mediterranean before embarking on his overriding scheme, the invasion of the Soviet Union. He then convinced himself that the easiest way to force Britain to terms was to defeat the Soviet Union. For the Kriegsmarine this was frustrating, as armament priority passed to the army and Luftwaffe.
    Hitler was certainly prepared to assist the Italians in their plan to launch an attack from their colony of Libya on British forces in Egypt and the Suez Canal, as that would tie down the British and threaten their communications with India and Australasia. The Italians, however, while happy to receive Luftwaffe support, were unwilling to have the Wehrmacht’s ground forces in their area of operations. They knew that the Germans would want to run everything.
    Hitler was particularly interested in the Balkans, since they represented the base of his southern flank for the invasion of Russia. After the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, Hitler, unwilling to disturb the Nazi–Soviet pact for the moment, had advised the Romanian government to ‘ accept everything for the time being ’. He decided to send a military mission and troops to Romania to secure the oilfields of Ploesti. The one thing Hitler did not want was Mussolini stirring up the Balkans with an attack on Yugoslavia or Greece from Italian-occupied Albania. Unwisely, he counted on Italian inertia.
    At first, it looked as if Mussolini would do little. The Italian navy, despite its earlier claims of aggressive action, had failed to put to sea, except to escort convoys to Libya. Not wanting to take on the Royal Navy, it left the air force to bomb Malta. And in Libya, the governor-general Marshal Italo Balbo held back, insisting that he would advance against the British in Egypt only when the Germans invaded England.
    The British in Egypt wasted little time in getting the measure of their opponent. On the evening of 11 June, just after Mussolini’s declaration ofwar, the 11th Hussars in their elderly Rolls-Royce armoured cars moved off towards the setting sun and crossed the Libyan frontier just after dark. They headed for Fort Maddalena and Fort Capuzzo, the two main Italian defensive positions on the border. Laying ambushes, they took seventy prisoners.
    The Italian prisoners were most upset. Nobody had bothered to tell them that their government had declared war. On 13 June, both forts were captured and destroyed. In another raid two days later on the road between Bardia and Tobruk, the 11th Hussars captured another hundred soldiers. Their haul included a fat Italian general in a Lancia staff car accompanied by a ‘ lady friend ’, who was heavily pregnant and not his wife. This caused a scandal in Italy. More importantly for the British, the general had with him all the plans showing the defences of Bardia.
    Marshal Balbo’s command in Libya was short lived. On 28 June, over-enthusiastic Italian anti-aircraft batteries in Tobruk shot down his plane by mistake. Less than a week later, his replacement Marshal Rodolfo Graziani was horrified when he received Mussolini’s order to advance into Egypt on 15 July. The Duce regarded the march on Alexandria as a ‘ foregone conclusion ’. Predictably, Graziani did everything he could to postpone operations, arguing first that he could not attack in high summer, and then that he lacked equipment.
    In August the Duke of Aosta, the viceroy of Italian East Africa, had achieved an easy victory by advancing from Abyssinia into British Somali-land, forcing its few defenders to withdraw across the gulf to Aden. But Aosta