The Battle of Giarabub - the First Test of the 2nd AIF

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Copyright: Davis, Peter
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Abstract
In 1911 Italy seized Libya, then in 1935 Mussolini’s Italian forces occupied Ethiopia. In June 1940 Mussolini declared war on the British Empire with designs of advancing into Egypt with his sights set on the strategically significant Suez Canal. The Italian 10th Army stalled close to the Egyptian – Libyan border, confronted by a numerically inferior Allied force attacking west from Egypt, along the Libyan coast. Far to the south in the Sahara Desert there existed an alternative route for military forces travelling east or west. This route transited a fortress called Giarabub located at the southern end of a string of Italian forts spaced along a 300 kilometre north–south barbed wire fence. Allied troops finally conquered the Giarabub garrison following a siege from which the defenders had little hope of escape. This thesis seeks to answer the question of why this garrison behaved so differently from all the other Italian forces, who generally capitulated rapidly, involved in the First Libyan Campaign. Further questions address the wider impacts resulting from this battle for the Italians and Australians involved. The garrison’s tenacity appears to have been largely a result of the determination of its leader, Lieutenant Colonel Castagna, to never surrender. The methods used have included study of all the available literature including contemporaneous Italian and British records located in archives in Italy, Australia and Britain. Interviews with survivors of Mussolini’s regime and younger Italians have further added to the body of knowledge. Many inequities between the Italian and Allied forces at Giarabub have been identified and analysed as reasons for the final dominance by the Allies, such as disparity in weapons, training, logistics, transport, communications and strategic and tactical leadership ability. Numerous mistakes in the Australian Official History and others have also been identified. This thesis goes some way to redressing these and fills the gap pertaining to Giarabub in Australian historiography.
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Author(s)
Davis, Peter
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Stockings, Craig
Connor, John
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Publication Year
2013
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Thesis
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Masters Thesis
UNSW Faculty
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