Desert Armour

"Deserts tend to excite the imaginations of armoured tacticians, who envision the wide-open spaces as perfect for swiftly manoeuvring large mechanized forces. However, both Allied and Axis commanders found their pre-war assumptions surrounding mechanized warfare challenged by the opening campaigns in the desert. A partly mechanized Italian army was destroyed in the first three months of the war. The Deutsches Afrika Korps entered the theatre with a battle-proven doctrine for conducting combined arms warfare, tanks that were effective and well-trained leaders and crews, only to find itself undone by a combination of Rommel's unsuitability for independent command and insufficient Axis theatre logistics. The British Army started the campaign with two different concepts of how to use armour -- either as fast, independent mechanized units capable of rapid manoeuvre or as plodding tools of infantry support; both concpets worked well against the Italian Army, but then frequently misfired against the Afrika Korps. In Desert Armour, Robert Forczyk has examined all these forces and operations to provide a focused analytic account of armoured operations in North Africa, placing the emphasis on the tactical and operational-level perspectives of both Allied and Axis combatants." --