World War II Day by Day

Fuehrer HQ on the Obersalzberg, Germany • January 19, 1941

On this date in 1941 Adolf Hitler and Italian leader Benito Mussolini began 2 days of crisis talks at the Berg­hof, Hitler’s pala­tial Alpine resi­dence whose enor­mous sliding win­dow afforded magni­fi­cent views of near­by Berchtes­gaden and, in the dis­tance, Salz­burg, Austria. High on the agenda was the failure of Mus­so­lini’s army to liqui­date Greece in 2 weeks, as the strong­man had boasted to Hitler on Octo­ber 18, 1940, the day the Ital­ian in­va­sion of Greece began.

In North Africa the Italian Tenth Army in Eastern Libya (Cyre­nai­ca) ceased to exist after being mauled by Gen. Archi­bald Wavell’s British Eighth Army in Oper­a­tion Com­pass (Decem­ber 1940 to Febru­ary 1941). Wavell’s army had killed 3,000 Ital­ian soldiers, taken 115,000 pri­soners, and destroyed 400 tanks, nearly 1,300 artil­lery pieces, and almost as many air­craft while suffering few losses of its own. Hitler was con­vinced that the Ital­ian armed forces could neither be trusted nor even know how to use the wea­pons they possessed to reverse their sorry performance.

So it was that Hitler, over­riding his own high com­mand, autho­rized a “blocking force” of sev­eral German motor­ized and ar­mored divi­sions to Italy’s Libyan colony, including the nu­cleus of the famous Deutsches Afrika­korps. Led by 49‑year-old Gen. Erwin Rommel, who had been the HQ com­mander in Poland and a bril­liant tank com­mander in the Nazi inva­sion of France in 1940, the first of these units arrived between mid‑Febru­ary and mid-March 1941. Addi­tional units arrived in late April and into May.

Fate smiled on Rommel as the British drained men and equip­ment from Egypt to inter­vene in a losing cam­paign to save Greece from Mus­so­lini’s and Hitler’s clutches. The imbal­ance of forces in North Africa soon had a dis­as­trous out­come for British for­tunes there, while it turned Rommel into the “Desert Fox,” securing him and the Afrika Korps a legendary place in military history.

The Afrika Korps battled the British back and forth across the dry, hot sands of the West­ern Desert—at places like El Agheila, Gazala, Tobruk, and El Ala­mein—for much of the next 2 years. Neither the Germans nor the Ital­ians would be finished off until mid‑May 1943, when bedraggled rem­nants of their armies in Tunisia surren­dered to the Allies, whose pre­sence had been strength­ened by the Anglo-Amer­ican Torch landings in North­west Africa in Novem­ber 1942. More than 250,000 German and Ital­ian prisoners were taken, which ended the Axis presence in North Africa.

Cyrenaica, Eastern Libya, and Western Egypt, 1941–1942, Site of Seesaw Engagements Between Axis and Allied Armies

Above: Map of Cyrenaica, Eastern Libya, and Western Egypt, 1941–1942.

Left: Approximately 25,000 Italian defended the important harbor town of Tobruk in Cyre­naica. After a 12‑day period building up forces around Tobruk and softening up Italian defenses with heavy artil­lery bom­bardment, Aus­tralian, British, and Free French units took the town 1 day after launching an attack on Janu­ary 21, 1941. The Tobruk prize yielded over 25,000 pri­soners, 236 field and medium guns, 62 tank­ettes (small mili­tary tanks), 23 M11/39 medium tanks, and more than 200 other vehicles.

Right: British Vickers Mark VIB light tanks on desert patrol, August 2, 1940. First produced in 1936 for the dual roles of recon­nais­sance and colonial war­fare, the lightly armored Mk VI possessed a crew of 3—commander/­radio operator, gunner, and driver. Its main arma­ment was a .50‑inch Vickers machine gun. In a Decem­ber 12, 1940, attack, the low-clearance light tanks got bogged down in salt pans and were severely mauled by the Italians.

Left: Like the lightly armored Vickers Mark VI tank, Italy’s Fiat L3 tank­ettes were machine gun-armed. First built in 1933, L3s and their midget vari­ants carried a 2‑man crew (driver and gunner) and were mainly used for light infantry support and recon­nais­sance. Relatively inex­pen­sive to build, 300 Italian tank­ettes saw ser­vice against Haile Selassie’s mostly untrained and poorly equipped sol­diers in Ethi­o­pia (1935–1936), where they fared poorly, and in Spain, France, the Balkans, Libya, and Italian East Africa. In this photo a captured L3 cc on the left and an L3/35 on the right are shown here on the harbor road over­looking Bardia, Libya. At the start of World War II the majority of Italy’s armored vehicles was com­posed of tank­ettes, which Italian sol­diers derisively called “sardine cans” and “vanity cases.” The British Army in North Africa roundly dis­abused Mus­so­lini of his delu­sion that his tank­ette units represented a genuine force of armored might.

Right: Operation Compass was a complete success. Allied forces advanced 500 miles/­805 km from inside Egypt to Central Libya, suffering just over 1,700 casu­al­ties and capturing 130,000 Ital­ian pri­soners, including 22 gene­rals. In this photo from Janu­ary 6, 1941, a column of Italian pri­soners cap­tured during the assault on Bardia, Libya, is marched to a British Army base for even­tual trans­port to prison camps in England, North America, and elsewhere in the Commonwealth.

Axis and Allied Forces Battle for Control of North Africa, 1940–1943