Mediterranean and North Africa · Italy vs British Commonwealth
Italian invasion of Egypt
13 September 1940 – 16 September 1940
Graziani's Tenth Army advanced sixty miles into Egypt against light opposition, then stopped at Sidi Barrani and dug in. The fortified camps it built there became the targets of Operation Compass.
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Day by day
— Across the wire
After three months of Mussolini's urging, Graziani sends Berti's Tenth Army over the frontier: five divisions and Maletti's motorised group, some 80,000 men, moving down the Halfaya escarpment on foot and in lorries along the one coast road. Gott's Support Group of the 7th Armoured Division, about 3,000 men, falls back in front of them, shelling and mining as it goes.
— Sidi Barrani
The 1st Blackshirt Division enters Sidi Barrani on the 16th, 95 kilometres from the frontier, and Graziani stops there. He has lost about 120 men. Over the next weeks the army digs itself into a chain of fortified camps from Maktila on the coast to Sofafi on the escarpment, each a day's march from the next and too far apart to help one another. O'Connor, 130 kilometres east at Mersa Matruh, starts to plan a raid.
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