A spectacular faller in the Benghazi stakes

What an unedifying affair the war in the North African desert was, at least until November 1942 and the victory at El Alamein. As the author of this brisk study of one of its more admired practitioners writes:

In no particular order, the following were casualties [i.e. sacked]: Wavell, Cunningham, Auchinleck, Norrie, Ritchie, Lumsden, Gatehouse, Rees, Godwin-Austen, Beresford-Pierse, Dorman-Smith, Corbett, Hobart, O’Creagh, Ramsden and Messervy.

There might well have been a separate desk in the military secretary’s department in London dealing with officers who had taken a fall in what was laconically referred to as the Benghazi Stakes.

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And it had all begun so well. In December 1940, 36,000 men of the Western Desert Force under Lieutenant-General Richard O’Connor had counterattacked an Italian army which had advanced into Egypt from Libya and driven them back 500 miles, destroying ten divisions, taking 130,000 prisoners and leaving Mussolini with only the most precarious foothold in North Africa.

But Churchill then diverted men and resources to Greece in an ill-starred attempt to thwart the Axis powers in the Balkans. O’Connor (who would later be taken prisoner) could therefore not finish the job; Hitler sent German troops under Rommel to bolster his lame-duck ally, and when the Desert Fox launched his own attack in March 1941, British and Commonwealth troops were sent reeling, almost to the Egyptian border.

There followed 18 months of see-saw war in the sand, with great advances by both sides, followed by hasty and equally long withdrawals. In all of this the reputation of Rommel grew, while that of one British general after another was destroyed. The nadir was the fall of ‘fortress’ Tobruk, the strategically critical Libyan port, of which Churchill learned to his chagrin during his second meeting as an ally with President Roosevelt on 21 June 1942.