I've grown a little tired of these early AK battles where the Australians have to capture all the Italian trenches, but I actually enjoyed this one because it was such a wild see-saw ride. The Australians made initial progress capturing the two northernmost trench positions, but then completely bogged down for hours trying to move any further south or to take the artillery position to the east. The Italian artillery was doing a lot of damage to the Australians and causing lots of command disruption, so much so that the Italians launched a broad but scattered counterattack hoping to knock the Australians out. Unfortunately their poor morale and the surrender rule snuffed that out as quickly as it developed, but the Italians fell back into strongpoints that were a series of very tough nuts to crack for the weakening Australians.

The greatest asset were the British tanks, but they spent hours disrupted and demoralized from a plucky Italian assault, severely limiting their ability to force surrenders.

As the fifth hour of battle began, the Australians had taken 23 step losses, twice the victory condition for the Italians, and still had multiple well-defended (and most importantly well-led) Italian trenches to take, plus many more weakly-held trenches. I called the battle, since I think the Australians wouldn't force the issue with greater than 50% casualties.

Italian victory.