7th Armoured Division (United Kingdom) of Major-General Richard O'Connor, was massively outnumbered. However, the Italian Army consisted largely of leg infantry; its artillery dated back to the First World War, it had no armoured cars and a few antitank weapons, which were effective only against light and cruiser tanks. As such, it proved to be no match for the British. The Western Desert Force captured 130,000 Italians as prisoners of war (POWs) between December 1940 and February 1941 in piecemeal battles. During the Italian retreat in January 1941, Major-General O'Connor ordered the Desert Rats to travel south of the Jebel Akhdar and cut off the
7th Armoured Division (United Kingdom) to the Rhine. The division's performance in Normandy and the rest of France has been called into question and it has been claimed they did not match those of its earlier campaigns. In early August 1944, Major General George Erskine, the division's GOC, who had been in command of the division since January 1943, Brigadier William Hinde, commanding the 22nd Armoured Brigade, and up to 100 other officers of the division were removed from their positions and reassigned. Erskine was replaced by Major General Gerald Lloyd-Verney. Historians largely agree that this was a consequence of the "failure" at Villers-Bocage and