Tobruk 1941

by Chester Wilmot

  2 For the Bardia Battle Parer had been aboard one of the bombarding warships and he was now filming his first land action. He soon earned a name as one of the finest and gamest of war photographers.

  3 Mitchell gained command of the 8th Battalion in the 1st A.I.F. at the age of twenty-six. He was the only commander of a 1st A.I.F. Battalion to receive command of the same battalion in the 2nd A.I.F.

  4 The Boyes anti-tank rifle, which in these days was the infantier’s chief defence against tanks, is a heavy, long-barrelled rifle, firing a 1/2-inch armour-piercing shot. It was carried by one man and could penetrate a light tank and, at very close range, even an Italian medium.

  5 The British hand-grenade or Mills bomb has a lever which is kept in place by a split pin. Even though the pin is removed the grenade will not explode until four or seven seconds (according to the setting of the fuse) after the lever has been released on leaving the thrower’s hand.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE THRUST TO THE TOWN

  News of the impending counter-attack from the west did not deflect Brigadier Robertson from his determination to continue his drive northwards and capture the Tobruk Fortress H.Q. before dark. A commander less bold, less self-confident, might well have stood his ground at the El Adem crossroads awaiting the attack, or have sent his main strength forward to meet it. But both these courses were foreign to Robertson’s fighting temperament. Thanks to the delay that the R.A.F.’s bombing had imposed on Della Mura’s preparations, and the speed with which Robertson had pushed his brigade through to the El Adem crossroads, the Australian advance could go on.

  At his Battle H.Q. (a staff car, an office van, and a couple of signal trucks near the crossroads) early in the afternoon Robertson explained his plan to a group of British, Australian and American correspondents. ‘My troops have already reached their planned objective,’ he said, ‘but I intend to push on north and west this afternoon. I want to capture the headquarters of the Tobruk garrison to-day. So far as I know it’s in an old Roman fort – Solaro – about three miles nor’-nor’-west of here. My attack begins at two o’clock. That’s the earliest the artillery can get up. I’m sending the 4th Battalion against Solaro, and I’ve ordered it to go on, if possible, and cut the Derna road at Airente – another old Roman fort. If they do that they’ll have driven a wedge between the town and the western sector. I’m protecting their right flank by sending the 11th Battalion north to the south shore of the harbour, and I’m sending the 8th westward along the top of the escarpment to Fort Pilastrino. The Italians are trying to organize a counter-attack with tanks there. I want to stop that.

  ‘If we capture Solaro and Pilastrino to-night we should have all the Italian generals in the bag. I hope to bring my tally to six. I captured one major-general in the last war and I’ve now got two in this campaign. But I’m going to have a new job to-morrow – accepting the surrender of the Italian cruiser San Giorgio, which is aground in the harbour. I’m not very sure of the procedure in capturing admirals, but it should be interesting. If the attack goes very well we may get into the town to-night.’

  British correspondents – so long held at arm’s length by their own senior officers – were delighted to find a commander who would and could talk. It took a year’s work by the Middle East Public Relations Department and a special memorandum from Wavell to all British units to break down the tendency to regard the war correspondent as first cousin to a fifth columnist. At least during the first year of the war in the Middle East, Australian correspondents with the A.I.F. were trusted more, told more and given greater freedom of movement than correspondents attached to other forces. To our British colleagues therefore Robertson’s frankness was something new and in the next few days comments by ‘a sunburnt, red-headed Australian Brigadier’ hit the headlines of the British press – not because he said something startling, but because he had said anything at all.

  Meantime, R.A.F. spotting planes hovered unconcernedly above the battlefield, picking targets for the artillery and reporting enemy movements to the waiting infantry. They drew heavy ack-ack fire and the bright blue sky around them was soon speckled with puffs of black and grey smoke. The desert to the south was alive with vehicles bringing up ammunition and fuel in the wake of the infantry, guns and tanks. Heading the other way was a ragged column of the morning’s prisoners. Italian guns in the west, which had been switched round to fire east, and coastal guns which had been turned south, were searching the area between the original bridgehead and the El Adem crossroads. Some of their shells fell among the unfortunate prisoners. In a flash the marching column disappeared as the Italians not unnaturally buried themselves in the dust.

  As the Diggers waited for the attack to begin, some of them ferreted stray Italians from sangars1 and dug-outs in the wadis on the escarpment north of the crossroads. Soon a party of twenty-five prisoners straggled up the hill towards the correspondents, who were looking for a vantage point. The leading Italian held out a piece of paper to us. On it was written, ‘Itie soldati. Please direct to Tom Blamney’s prison camp.’ The writer was a little astray in his geography, for Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Blamney’s headquarters were then in Palestine and he and his Corps H.Q. were not called upon to take part in the drive through Cyrenaica. However, we pointed to the road and they tramped off towards the vast prisoner-of-war cage, which the Italians had built near the El Adem crossroads to house British prisoners.

  While waiting for the attack to begin Edward Ward of the B.B.C., Dick McMillan of United Press, and several other correspondents, including myself, were exploring one of the wadis when we heard a noise from a small stone hut. McMillan drew back the curtain covering the doorway and there, seated at a table sipping their after-luncheon coffee, were thirteen Italian officers. At the sight of McMillan their hands automatically went up. ‘We are ready to go,’ said one, and they filed out carrying their ready-packed bags with them. They needed no escort and we put them on the road leading southwards. It would be unfair to the troops who had to fight for their prisoners not to point out that these were officers of the ordnance branch, which in the Italian Army appears to be hardly a combatant force.

  This was certainly no indication of the enemy resistance still to come, as the 2/8th Battalion soon found in their drive to Pilastrino, which began at 2 p.m. At once they struck trouble. West of the crossroads were a number of buildings and the large wire-fenced prisoners’ cage. While consolidating there about midday, the 2/8th had come under heavy machine-gun and mortar fire from the wadis that scarred the face of the escarpment to the north-west.

  As Coombes’s company, in the centre, moved out to deal with this and clear a start-line for the afternoon attack, three medium tanks lumbered out of a wadi and rammed a carrier that was leading the attack. The crew was captured and the tanks continued on. They were soon disabled, however, by anti-tank rifle fire directed at their tracks and the crews were either captured or silenced in the now conventional style with grenades.

  Nevertheless, Coombes’s company, and McDonald’s on the right, were still held up by fire from the wadis. If the battalion had had the full issue of carriers and mortars, they could soon have silenced this. But instead of fourteen mortars, the 2/8th had two, and one of these had been patched up with Italian spare parts. They had only two of their ten carriers. (This was fairly typical of the equipment position in the 6th Division – apart from the 16th Brigade. Consequently the troops were bitterly scornful of Army Minister Spender’s reported statement that they were ‘the best-equipped in the world’.) Because of this shortage in supporting weapons, these two companies were checked until the guns could give them covering fire. Then the wadis were soon scoured and among the prisoners the Diggers discovered General Umberto Barberis, who had eluded the 2/4th when they over-ran the eastern sector H.Q. during the morning.

  Meantime, Campbell’s company on the left had gone more than a mile and a half west of the El Adem road. On the way it had cleaned up thirty-seven dug-in tanks, but th
is had been costly. At about 2.30 it was still heavily engaged and all available men from H.Q. Company were sent to reinforce it. From the roof of a building near the crossroads, Colonel Mitchell and his Intelligence Officer (Lieutenant Allan Fleming) could see the Italian counter-attack developing, and it was clear that Campbell’s company would have to bear the main shock. After the battle Fleming told me:

  We saw several hundred Italians moving towards us from Pilastrino, led by more than a dozen medium tanks covered by a barrage. The barrage lifted – either by design or because our guns got on to theirs. The Italian infantry seemed to waver but the tanks kept moving towards our left company. The colonel sent the reserve company – under Jack Smith – to help them and ordered the two companies on the right to press on as fast as they could. But before any of them arrived Campbell’s company had taken the first brunt of the attack by seven of the enemy tanks, and for a while they had a sticky time.

  Campbell was fatally wounded and Major A. S. Key of H.Q. Company took over command when things were at their worst. He told me later how the situation was eventually restored:

  As the tanks came on we couldn’t check them because we had no 2-pounders and most of the men with anti-tank rifles were hit before the tanks got close enough for our weapons to do much damage. The forward platoon was overrun and several men were forced to surrender. The rest of us took cover in sangars and shallow trenches, and fired at the tanks whenever we could. In several cases, men played hide and seek with a tank, sheltering behind sangars, moving as it moved, to keep clear of its fire, and then taking a quick shot with a Boyes rifle. The tanks came up so close that we disabled several – even though they were M13s.2

  In this kind of fighting, however, the enemy had every advantage and the forward troops suffered heavily. In ‘C’ Company four officers out of five were killed or wounded and the casualties among the men were also heavy. But help arrived in time when the two companies on the right came into the battle and prevented the Italian infantry from taking advantage of their tanks’ success.

  The tanks, too, were soon dealt with, even though another half dozen came up. A sergeant appeared from nowhere trailing a captured anti-tank gun and with one of his first shots knocked out an M13. About the same time the Boyes rifles scored telling hits on three others, and two anti-tank guns of the 3rd Royal Horse Artillery arrived and accounted for two more. To clinch the victory, two ‘I’ tanks appeared in the distance. On seeing them the Italian tanks withdrew leaving six knocked out on the battlefield.

  As they pulled back, the Diggers followed and attacked the Italian infantry who had been sheltering behind low stone walls. In Fleming’s words: ‘With wild yells and fixed bayonets, the troops went for the sangars from which rifles, machine-guns and small mortars were still firing. Some of the enemy were bayoneted; the rest crumbled and so did the counter-attack.’

  This, however, did not end the battalion’s difficulties. They were advancing along the crest of the escarpment and by now they had drawn fire from field guns on their front and both flanks. To make matters worse, at this juncture some of the guns that had been supporting them were switched to help the 16th Brigade, and communication with their remaining guns broke down. The battalion was left without any artillery support.

  The advance of the 2/4th to Solaro, however, stopped some of the shelling from the north and the commander of one ‘I’ tank, seeing that the counter-attack was broken, swung away to the south to deal with the troublesome guns there. Nevertheless, it was an hour before the shell abated sufficiently for the infantry to continue.

  As they neared Pilastrino in the late afternoon, they came under severe fire from mortars and machine-guns, which the setting sun made it difficult to locate. Still more trouble came from four heavy A.A. guns using shrapnel at a range of about half a mile. Fortunately, just when it seemed that the advance would again be checked, an officer of the R.H.A. arrived in a carrier and asked Mitchell how he could help.

  Pointing towards Pilastrino Mitchell said, ‘Get those bloody guns.’ Within ten minutes, to the relief of the troops, one salvo of shells was followed by a terrific explosion, which – to quote Fleming again –

  . . . sent a column of smoke and debris three hundred feet into the air and dulled all other sounds. It came from the area of the A.A. battery. Later we found our shells had hit a magazine and the guns had been lifted from their concrete emplacements and left twisted wrecks.

  With the A.A. battery silenced, progress was quicker, even though the troops had to fight their way through heavily wired machine-gun posts. By dusk we were within striking distance of the fort. Spasmodic scrapping continued after dark, but by 9.30 p.m. we had our H.Q. in Fort Pilastrino, which proved to be little more than a collection of barracks buildings surrounded by a solid stone wall.

  The 2/8th had reason to be proud of their day’s work. They had marched more than fifteen miles and from 9 a.m. until after dark had been engaged in hard and almost continuous fighting. They had captured the two main strongpoints inside the perimeter, rolled up the enemy’s reserve line and smashed his main counter-attacking force. Their casualties – more than a hundred killed or wounded3 – were twice as heavy as those of any other battalion; but in view of what they had accomplished it is remarkable that their losses were not double that number.

  By taking the full brunt of the counter-attack, the 2/8th made it easier for the 2/4th in their attack on Solaro, and beyond. The success of this drive was largely due to the stirring leadership of the 2/4th’s C.O., Lieutenant-Colonel I. N. Dougherty. Riding in the battalion’s only carrier, he covered many miles during the afternoon, controlling, directing and urging on his troops as they became more and more spread out in pursuit of the enemy.

  From the crest of the escarpment which overlooked Solaro, Ward and I watched the 2/4th attack. As the guns of the 104th R.H.A. and the 2/3rd Field Regiment put down a screen of shellfire on Solaro and on enemy batteries beyond and beside it, great dust-spouts shot up around the pile of rubble that the map flattered with the name ‘fort’. Soon even Solaro’s tall observation tower was blotted out by the rising cloud of dust and smoke.

  Under cover of this fire the 2/4th advanced steadily across the flat, west of the main Tobruk road. They had marched more than twelve miles during the morning, but they still kept to their amazing pace of nearly a hundred yards a minute. They might have been marching along a road instead of over a desert surface that was alternately rock, sand and camel-thorn. The machine-gun fire that came from Solaro did not worry them, for they were well dispersed in extended line. As we looked down from the escarpment, the desert seemed to be covered with moving dots. Several Italian tanks appeared from the west, but these were driven off by two of the R.H.A.’s anti-tank guns, mounted on trucks, which were travelling with the leading companies.

  Then an ack-ack battery on a rise east of Solaro turned its guns on them. Moving from one to the other in his carrier, Dougherty ordered his leading companies to keep going, switched some of the 104th’s guns on to the Italian battery and under their fire sent in his right reserve company to capture it. This they did, and by four o’clock the two leading companies (commanded by Captain H. S. Conkey and Captain C. B. N. Rolfe) had taken possession of the low knoll on which Solaro stands. They had met only light machine-gun fire over the last stage and most of the garrison had fled westward before the Australians arrived. In the words of one Digger, ‘When we got ’ere, there was nothin’; not even loot.’

  Nor was there any sign of the prize Dougherty sought so keenly – the Tobruk Fortress H.Q. – though there were tunnels beneath the ruins which might have housed it. They were empty, so Dougherty urged his men westward in the hope of finding the headquarters before dark. By six o’clock Rolfe’s company was half a mile beyond the Pilastrino–Tobruk road and fully occupied in trying to cut off Italians fleeing to the west; but still there was no trace of the headquarters. Enemy guns from the west, south-west and north were now shelling the Solaro area heavil
y and Italians in machine-gun posts on the right, where the Pilastrino–Tobruk road cut through an escarpment, were fighting back strongly.

  Captain J. McCarty’s company was sent to deal with them and, as Dougherty followed in his carrier, he was met by an excited runner from the leading platoon who said they had captured the posts and a general. Dougherty told me of the incident later:

  I went down the road and through the cutting and found myself among a throng of Italians, of various ranks, who were being rounded up by my lads. Soon a naval officer, speaking perfect English, was brought to me, and then an Egyptian, who was an officer of the Italian Army, and could speak reasonably good English. There was also a priest, dressed in the gaudiest raiment imaginable, who looked at me with a supercilious air.

  I was presented with our captive general, and was assured by the English-speaking officer that he was Petasso Manella, the commander of Tobruk. He was an old man, dignified, quiet and very tired. He had fought beside the Allies in the last war.

  I was told we had another general, commander of the Tobruk artillery. There were scores of other officers, senior and junior. In all we had captured about 1600 prisoners in the last hour. By this time it was too late to go on to Airente, and, as we had captured the Tobruk H.Q., I decided to take our chief prisoners back to Brigade.

  The only available vehicle was a captured gun tractor. In this the two generals, Manella’s chief-of-staff, the English-speaking naval officer, myself and an armed escort, drove off. Our prisoners feared that I might take them over a minefield, but we reached Brigade H.Q. safely. As we drove back, pillars of flame leapt heavenwards from the fuel and ammunition dumps which the Italians were demolishing in the west. But when Manella was paraded to Brigadier Robertson he stated that the Italians had their orders to fight to a finish and that he would not surrender the garrison of Tobruk.