Word: tobruch
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While the fleet moved off to help the R. A. F, block the Italian line of retreat to Tobruch, the Australians started pushing again, this time from the north. That afternoon 15,000 of the Italians were in British hands, the rest "confined to a restricted area." The Rome radio warned the Italian people that Bardia was about to fall. The Italians no longer stood by their positions. Three thousand were taken out of one cave. Neither side's casualties were heavy...
...road which the Italian invaders had conveniently built. When Bardia proved too tough a problem for motorized troops with air and naval aid to solve, the British had to spend a fortnight strengthening their land forces and hauling up heavy artillery, while Graziani gained precious time for reorganization at Tobruch...
...tightening ring of British force. But the R. A. F. was present, too, with eight-gun fighters against two-gun crates. Mussolini, far away in Rome, decreed that his troops in Bardia must hold out to the end to permit Marshal Rodolfo Graziani to consolidate a stand at Tobruch, 70 miles westward along the coast of Libya. Holding on stubbornly they had by week's end already given Graziani 14 days to pull his shattered army together...
...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...
...especially steel helmets, barbed wire.) Graziani, in explaining himself to Mussolini, put the blame of his defeat on a shortage of tanks. While Graziani worked desperately to reform his Army, the British surrounded Bardia with artillery and infantry. The R. A. F., ranging even more widely, rained bombs on Tobruch. Derna, even on the main Italian air bases across Libya at Benina, Benghazi, Castel Benito. Graziani had some 200,000 men left and possibly-just possibly-he was lying back to let the British extend themselves into Libya...