Dave Shoup
Banned
Hmm. That sure does not sound like XX Corps or the DAK at all. OTOH a Matilda II was a very tough machine. Italian 4.7 cm AT guns would have been useless.
BREVITY was a raid, and nothing more, given the available forces. Even the British mobile forces for BATTLEAXE, which occurred in June, 1941, and was delayed to allow the 7th Armoured to reequip with the 200+ medium tanks shipped through the Med during Operation TIGER in May, amounted to four armoured battalions, two equipped with Matilda IIs, one with a mix of Cruisers, and one with Crusaders, for a grand total of four. These were split into two brigades (4th Armoured, with Matildas, and 7th Armoured, with the other two battalions of mediums). The rest of the British forces amounted to the 4th Indian Division (headquarters and division troops) but with only two infantry brigades, one Indian and one British. Given the reality of the sea-beach-narrow coastal plain-escarpment-high desert, neither operation (BREVITY/BATTLEAXE) was exactly "good tank country" and in both cases, the British were on the offensive against dug-in Axis infantry and artillery, in constricted terrain. The Axis forces, moreover, almost always had more or at lest comparable numbers of armor and mobile troops.
Bottom line, the British were always outnumbered or underequipped in Egypt and Libya for almost all of 1940-41, and they never even got an army-sized force into the field until CRUSADER, in November-December, 1941, at which point Auchinleck - who finally had four (1st Tank, 4th, 7th, and 22nd armoured) reasonably well-equipped armored/mobile brigades, and three infantry division equivalents - managed a victory on the offensive, which seems a clear indicator that absent an equivalently-sized force, any attempt at an offensive in the desert was pretty questionable. O'Connor managed it in 1940 with only three mobile brigades and an infantry division equivalent, but that was against the Italians. Expecting Neame or Beresford-Pierce to do the same with a couple of brigades of mobile troops and an infantry division equivalent (or less) seems pretty unrealistic.