Word: graziani
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Rome and Naples bubbled joyously one day last week. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani's "Terribili" legions in Libya had turned terribly on their British attackers and terribly smashed them to bits. They had taken 50,000-100,000-150,000 prisoners. They were marching triumphantly eastward again along their Via Vittoria (Victory Road) to Sidi Barrani in Egypt. Roman history had been made...
...emplacements, 15 miles in perimeter. After the British mechanized units, commanded by Major General Michael O'Moore Creagh had pinned them in, the encircled men tried to run for it, thousands at a time. As they fled on the coast road around the rim of Cyrenaica toward Marshal Graziani's main fortified base at Tobruch, 70 miles west, the R. A. F. and the mechanized British attacked them and occasionally fleet units shelled the road. At length the Bardia troops resigned themselves to being bottled up, praying for rescue...
This was not forthcoming last week. Having lost from one-fifth to one-quarter of all his troops-and probably having nearly half his Army so disorganized as to be out of action-Marshal Graziani was in turn praying for help from home. The disorganization of his armies was the more complete in that most of their attack equipment, massed in the east for a drive on Alexandria and Cairo, had been lost. (The British were astonished at how heavily the Italians had planned to travel, and also at curious shortages in the equipment, especially steel helmets, barbed wire.) Graziani...
...British were out, not to capture territory, but to smash Graziani once & for all. Their chance of doing so with some 40,000 men, of whom by last week they had lost relatively few, was enormously enhanced by the crushing power of their fleet's big guns, so easy to move from place to place, so easy (apparently) to defend against Italian planes...
...Arthur Longmore and Lieut. General Sir Henry Maitland ("Jumbo") Wilson to see how cleanly, how terribly the British & Imperial Army of the Nile, plus the R. N. and the R. A. F., had swept his country's desert fringe clear of Italians. But a man who awaited Graziani's further defeat with even keener relish was Seyyid Idris el Senussi, swart chieftain of the Libyan desert tribes whom Graziani "pacified" in 1930, executing their leaders, reputedly dropping their bodies into their camps from airplanes, then burning the camps and villages, impressing survivors into labor gangs and conscript regiments...