Italian Invasion of Egypt successful?

I said should have been a formality - 30,000 in the field is not a huge number and a handful of well equipped Italian divisions would still heavily outnumber what the British had available. Soon after Rommel made those British look very ordinary - again.

Rommel managed to attack a different army!

Basically that force that had thrashed the Italians so effectively had been swapped out for a green force with not enough equipment - they were using captured Italian and worn out British tanks (1 battalion of each) for a single understrength armoured Brigade (whose commander had advised Wavell that his tanks would be ineffective after a days combat through breakdowns etc which proved to be true) and the infantry component did not have enough trucks.

The problem was several fold - Wavell was being asked to fight in Greece, the Middle east, East Africa and maintain a force to cover the Italians in Cyrenaica - and was not even approaching enough men for any of those tasks.

Also that highly trained force of 30,000 that had not been scattered across that region of the world needed some serious R and R as they had been fighting for months (in the Desert!) and their equipment was fucked!

Also the British were reading Rommel's mail back to his Commanders so they were confident enough to keep that covering force under strength while sending the better units South, North and East where they knew that tehy would be fighting (Wavell would admit that this was his biggest error of the war). Awkward thing is....Rommel was actually lying to them for several reasons and attacked far before the British thought he would.

And even Rommel didn't get the logistics to work! ;)

As for the rest - yep
 
Soon after Rommel made those British look very ordinary - again.

Further to Cryhavoc's point about not actually making those troops look ordinary due largely to not facing those troops making the ones he did face look ordinary meant beating them in Libya. Libya as the Egyptians and Libyans will both very forcefully tell you, is not Egypt. Rommel's success rate in Egypt was, to put it politely, undistinguished. Ordinary is clearly fine when defending Egypt.

Which is the problem for the Italians in going further than Egypt if we hand wave quite how they conquered it and conversely might be a bit of an issue for the British in getting it back post hand wave.
 
Although I think a successful invasion of Egypt from Libya would only be possible between June and September 1940 and with a POD (at the latest) in September 1939 to allow the Italian armed forces to be better prepared for war in June 1940 there is a significant problem.

That is what I think the Italians would prepare for is a more effective attack on Metropolitan France in support of the German offensive to the north.

Libya would receive more supplies and specialists to help it resist the expected joint attack by Britain and France from Egypt and Tunisia respectively. They wouldn't be preparing for a blitzkrieg on Egypt and Tunisia.

Similarly Italian East Africa would be given more supplies and specialists to help it hold out longer. They wouldn't be preparing for coups de main on Khartoum, Port Sudan and Aden.
 
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Well say they need a 3:1 advantage so they need about 90,000 men. That leaves 110,000 men the Italians had could have been used as line of communication troops to keep the supplies going (some could start building a railway), and to guard the French border. They would have to take the weapons and vehicles away from the 110,000 and give them to the 90,000, and ensure that entire units were fully equipped, as far as possible with the same basic weapons (e.g. the same rifles). They would have to organise the divisions to have four regiments on the German model (three infantry and one artillery) instead of two. They would have a plan to invade Malta as soon as war was declared, using neutrality as a way of getting inside the harbour before the war started (like the Germans did in Copenhagen). They would have had more ships based in their east African bases so they could effectively counter British trade in that reason, and a better plan to defend their East African colonies. Basically they would not have had a snap decision made in a hurry to be in the war before it was won, but planned early entry into the war, making the best use of what they had, despite acknowledging that they weren't ready for a war at least until 1943.
The Italians did have 8 submarines, 7 large destroyers and 2 small destroyers of the torpedo boat type in East Africa in June 1940. The Red Sea Division of the British Mediterranean Fleet only had one C class AA cruiser and 4 destroyers.

However, AFAIK the destroyers didn't actually attack any British shipping in the Red Sea. AFAIK that was a combination of the Italians expecting a short war of a few months duration which would be decided by the Germans winning the Battle of Britain and following it up with Operation S-word - plus insufficient fuel, ammunition and spare parts for sustained operations and because they were a wasting asset as there was no possibility of reinforcements to replace losses.

Therefore it was better to maintain the force as a fleet in being for as long as possible to tie down the largest Royal Navy force possible for as long as possible.

So rather than more ships in East Africa I would prefer to build up a bigger stock of fuel, ammunition and spare parts for the existing ships.
 
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BooNZ

Banned
Further to Cryhavoc's point about not actually making those troops look ordinary due largely to not facing those troops making the ones he did face look ordinary meant beating them in Libya. Libya as the Egyptians and Libyans will both very forcefully tell you, is not Egypt. Rommel's success rate in Egypt was, to put it politely, undistinguished. Ordinary is clearly fine when defending Egypt.

Thank you for the geography lesson. The Libyan-Egyption border is still less than 400 miles from Alexandria. Rommel never enjoyed the overwhelming numbers and/or the supply the Italians could have easily accumulated on the Libyan-Egyption border by June 1940. OTL the service of the Italian Trieste and Ariete divisions (for example) was respectable, which would have been more than adequate to overwhelm heavily outnumbered British forces. As outlined repeatedly above, Italian military reforms and allocation of resources would have needed to be significantly more effective than OTL to create a 'respectable' performance in 1940, but nothing out of the ordinary.
 
Thank you for the geography lesson. The Libyan-Egyption border is still less than 400 miles from Alexandria. Rommel never enjoyed the overwhelming numbers and/or the supply the Italians could have easily accumulated on the Libyan-Egyption border by June 1940. OTL the service of the Italian Trieste and Ariete divisions (for example) was respectable, which would have been more than adequate to overwhelm heavily outnumbered British forces. As outlined repeatedly above, Italian military reforms and allocation of resources would have needed to be significantly more effective than OTL to create a 'respectable' performance in 1940, but nothing out of the ordinary.

From Sallum (near the border) to Alexandria by road is just a shade over 300 miles, this however becomes an issue when you realise that a typical mechanised offensive runs out of steam at about 250 miles from its start line. It may in fact have been that Italian generals did understand just how difficult it was to invade Egypt, the incompetence only came in when they ought to have been successfully defending their Libyan territories but history does show us offensives are hard. The issue is not simply amassing the 'overwhelming numbers' but actually getting them to Alex before British reinforcements over ground that can get surprisingly swampy if someone opens the watercourses as you approach the Nile Delta.

The problem is not some mythical intrinsic Italian incompetence but rather that invading Egypt from Libya is not exactly easy against any opposition that manages to attain ordinary or better.
 
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