Richard O'Connor

Compass began as a five-day raid and became a campaign because O’Connor kept finding that the mechanism he had built still had run left in it. The initial attack at Sidi Barrani exploited a precise structural fault — a gap between fortified camps too wide to be covered by mutual fire, with the camps’ defences facing the wrong way — and the assault went in through the gap and struck the positions from the rear. He rehearsed it in a full-scale exercise beforehand, on ground chosen for its resemblance to the objective, without telling most participants what it was for.

Beda Fomm is the purest statement of the same mind. With the Italian Tenth Army retreating along the coast, O’Connor sent a small armoured force straight across the unmapped interior of the Cyrenaican bulge — bad going, no water, vehicles falling out the whole way — to arrive on the road ahead of them. It was a calculation, not a gamble: he had worked out the relative speeds, accepted the mechanical attrition as a known cost, and understood that a blocking force did not need to be strong if it was in the right place. The entire army surrendered to a force a fraction of its size.

Auxiliary Se made him a commander who ran his campaign at the front edge of it — small headquarters, constant movement, orders given face to face and adjusted on the spot as the situation changed hourly. It is why Compass never stalled: at each point where a conventional headquarters would have paused to re-plan, O’Connor was already there, looking at the thing itself, and pushed on. He argued afterwards, with some justice, that had he been allowed to continue he could have taken Tripoli and closed the North African campaign before the Germans ever landed.

The same habit ended his war. In April 1941, with Rommel driving east and the British command in Cyrenaica disintegrating, O’Connor was flown forward to steady the situation and was travelling by night in a staff car when it ran into a German patrol. A general who commanded from the front had finally gone forward one road too many. He escaped from Italian captivity at the third attempt in 1943, and later commanded a corps in Normandy under Bernard Montgomery — competent, respected, and by then a supporting figure in someone else’s war.

Why ISTP Over ESTP

The contrast is the cluster’s central lesson. O’Connor had the tactical results Rommel is celebrated for and none of the theatre and none of the publicity, while Rommel had a nickname supplied by his enemies. Being right is not the same as being remembered, and in the desert war the difference was largely a matter of who was still in the field when the journalists arrived.