Operation Brevity

Operation Brevity was an attack in mid-May 1941, during the Western Desert Campaign of the Second World War. Conceived by the commander-in-chief of the British Middle East Command, General Archibald Wavell, Brevity was intended to be a rapid blow against weak Axis front-line forces in the Sollum–Capuzzo–Bardia area of the border between Egypt and Libya. Although the operation got off to a promising start, throwing the Axis high command into confusion, most of its early gains were lost to local counter-attacks. With German reinforcements being rushed to the front, the operation was called off after one day. Egypt had been invaded by Libyan-based Italian forces in September 1940, but by February of the following year a British counter-offensive had advanced well into Libya, destroying the Italian 10th Army in the process. British attention then shifted to Greece, which was under the threat of Axis invasion. While Allied divisions were being diverted from North Africa, the Italians reinforced their positions and were supported by the arrival of the German Afrika Korps under Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel. Rapidly taking the offensive against his distracted and over-stretched opponent, by April 1941 Rommel had driven the British and Commonwealth forces in Cyrenaica back across the Egyptian border. Although the battlefront now lay in the border area, the port city of Tobruk—100 mi (160 km) inside Libya—had resisted the Axis advance, and its substantial Australian and British garrison constituted a significant threat to Rommel's lengthy supply chain. He committed his main strength to besieging the city, leaving the front line only thinly held. Wavell defined the objectives of Brevity to be the acquisition of territory from which to launch another offensive toward Tobruk and the depletion of German and Italian forces in the region. With few battle-ready units to draw on, in the wake of Rommel's...