Italy held Libya, and across the wire to the east lay Egypt, officially neutral but garrisoned by a small British and Commonwealth force guarding the Suez Canal - Britain's lifeline to India and the Far East. On paper the imbalance favored Italy enormously. The 10th Army fielded ten divisions against a thin British screen. But numbers concealed deep problems. Italian armored doctrine had drifted toward the frontal assault and away from the fast, mobile warfare the open desert demanded. Tanks were few and lightly armored. There were never enough trucks, so most of the infantry simply had to walk. The plan was repeatedly drawn up and cancelled - four times deadlines were set and abandoned - until the objective was scaled back from the Suez Canal to a modest push as far as the coastal village of Sidi Barrani.

The desert humbled the invaders before a serious shot was fired. The Maletti Group, a motorized force built around most of Italy's armor in Libya, was ordered to swing south through open country to outflank the British on the escarpment. But the Italian staff failed to supply proper maps or navigation gear, and the group promptly got lost on its way to the start line. Headquarters had to send aircraft aloft to find its own troops and guide them into position. Desert travel was a skill earned by experience - reading the sun, the stars, the lay of the gravel - and the Italians had little of it. Meanwhile the British covering force, the armored cars of the 11th Hussars among them, shadowed the slow Italian assembly through the morning mist, watching and waiting.

The main advance crawled forward along the coast, a day's progress measured in single-digit miles so the marching infantry could keep pace. British rearguards - the 3rd Coldstream Guards, riflemen, gunners, a company of Free French marines - fell back deliberately, demolishing the road as they retired and inflicting losses where they could without being pinned. On 16 September the Italian "23 Marzo" Blackshirt division occupied Sidi Barrani, and the 10th Army halted. It had advanced about sixty-five miles. The cost of the whole operation was strikingly light on both sides: by one careful accounting the Italians lost around 530 men - roughly 120 killed - against some 40 British dead. No bold armored stroke had been attempted. Then, rather than press on toward the British base at Mersa Matruh, the army stopped to build a chain of fortified camps and waited for engineers to extend the coast road and lay a water pipe.

The camps were the mistake. They were spaced too far apart to support one another, scattered in an arc south and west of Sidi Barrani, and the army settled in to wait out the autumn. Mussolini's attention drifted: on 28 October Italy invaded Greece, and Graziani was left to plan the next push at his leisure, with an advance on Matruh pencilled in for mid-December. The British struck first. On the night of 8-9 December the Western Desert Force, under Lieutenant-General Richard O'Connor, launched Operation Compass - planned as a five-day raid against the isolated camps. It became a rout. The fortifications fell one after another, and in the days that followed the 10th Army was shattered. The British, never numbering more than a fraction of their enemy, pursued the wreckage across the Libyan frontier and eventually took tens of thousands of prisoners. The hesitant advance that had stopped at Sidi Barrani had handed Britain its first decisive land victory of the Second World War.