become a line of destroyed and abandoned lorries, about a hundred guns, one hundred knocked out or captured tanks and including Tellera (found mortally wounded in one of the M13s), Bergonzoli and the 10th Army staff. The Babini Group lost more than a hundred and one M13s of which 39, mainly from the XXI Tank Battalion "M", were undamaged. Aftermath Analysis On 15 February, a British analysis found that the Italians had been unable to mass their tanks sufficiently and they had attacked the British piecemeal, which was believed to be because the tanks had been spread through the Italian columns. Prisoners had said that the lack of wireless prevented a tactical reorganisation in the confusion. The VI and XXI Medium battalions in M13s were considered to have shown inferior gunnery while on the move, unlike the III and V Tank Battalion "M"s at Mechili in January; the newer battalions had recently received M13s and possibly were inadequately trained on them. Tests on captured M13s found that armour-piercing shells fired by a 25-pounder field gun at went straight through the tank; when fired with an instantaneous fuze the shell made a large hole in the armour of one side and with a short-delay fuze shells exploded inside the tank. At a Boys anti-tank rifle dented the armour. Examination of wrecked tanks showed that a hit on the crew compartment almost always killed all the occupants, although the reason for this was not apparent. Only a few thousand men of the 10th Army and about nine medium tanks had escaped the disaster in Cyrenaica but the 5th Army had four divisions in Tripolitania and the Italians reinforced the Sirte, Tmed Hassan and Buerat strongholds from Italy, which brought the total of Italian soldiers in Tripolitania to about In 2001, David French wrote that the Italian forces in Libya experienced a "renaissance" during 1941, when the 101st Motorized Division "Trieste", 102nd Motorized Division "Trento", the 132nd Armored Division "Ariete" arrived with better equipment. Italian anti-tank units performed well during Operation Brevity, Operation Battleaxe and the Ariete Division defeated the 22nd Armoured Brigade at Bir el Gubi on 19 November, during Operation Crusader. In 2003, Ian Walker described the loss of the in the Attack on Nibeiwa, the first encounter of Operation Compass, as a disaster which cost the Italians the initiative. The Action at Mechili by the Babini Group on 24 January