Cryhavoc101
Donor
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