Tobruk 1941

by Chester Wilmot

  Neither the censor nor Ward then knew what the two M.Ps told me later. When I asked them what their idea was in arresting a perfectly good B.B.C. correspondent, one of them replied: ‘That was all right. We knew he was on the level right from the jump, but we wanted an excuse to get into the town to look around, so we picked him up. As an excuse he was pretty good.’

  For the troops who had been out in the desert for over a month, there was plenty to see in the town. In peacetime the Italians had done their best to make it livable, and as desert garrison towns go it must have ranked high. Tobruk is built on the rocky headland which forms the northern short of the harbour and extends about a mile along the waterfront and half a mile inshore. Its normal peacetime population was a garrison of some 10 000 Italian and native troops, and 1000 Italian civil servants and shopkeepers. There were a further 9000 Arab civilians, the majority of whom lived in a native village half a mile north of the Italian town. Before the war nearly all troops were quartered outside, but the senior officers and civilians, many of whom had their families with them, lived in comfortable houses in the town itself. These were mostly grouped in a dozen streets around the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, and architecturally these and the military buildings showed signs of Fascist regimentation. They were almost entirely constructed of brick or stone covered with white plaster, relieved only by blue or green wooden shutters.

  The town boasted a ‘Grand Hotel’ and two other inns; a restaurant-cabaret, known as ‘The Lido’, where Italian officers had dined and danced or watched a film on the piazza overlooking the harbour. Its bank and town hall – symbols of commercial and civic respectability – were good buildings. There was a fine school – named, inevitably, after Mussolini; a handsome church; a mosque and a first-rate hospital. Dominating all was the huge three-storied, concrete naval headquarters standing on a bluff above the harbour. It was only three-parts finished but was well built and later withstood a direct hit by a 500-pound German bomb.

  By the waterfront stood an electric power station, a couple of big godowns, and a huge cool-store which kept fresh the garrison’s meat. At considerable cost the Italians had also tunnelled into the slope of the headland to make a number of bomb-proof air-raid shelters, and storage places for fuel, ammunition and vital supplies.

  We had expected to find little more than a rubble heap after our bombing and shelling, and Italian sabotage. But the remarkable thing was not how much was destroyed, but how much was still intact. Evidently the speed with which the attack succeeded had prevented the Italians from carrying out their planned demolitions. Some of these attempts had misfired; in other cases the charges were found ready for blowing. The enemy had tried very clumsily to set alight the main power station, but an Australian naval officer (Lieutenant Arnold Green, Liaison Officer attached to 13th Corps H.Q.) was attracted by smoke drifting from the building, and put the fire out before any serious damage had been done.

  From the top of the naval building on January 23rd I studied the main prize of the battle – the harbour. One pier had been completely demolished by R.A.F. bombs, but the Italian attempt to wreck the other main jetty had resulted in nothing more than a small gap on one side. Lying sunk or beached were a dozen victims of R.A.F. bombing, but fortunately none blocked the channel. Obligingly the Italians had left undamaged six auxiliary schooners, twenty large pontoons, a couple of dozen lighters and several fast launches. With these available the demolition of the main jetty and of the two main cranes did not much matter. Within three days minesweepers had cleared the channel and the port was once more in operation.

  The Italian gunners had carried out their demolitions better than the sailors. Of the twelve main coast defence guns only two were intact. There was nothing but a huge crater where ‘Tobruk Tom’, the 12-inch naval gun, had been emplaced. Its crew had blown up the ammunition dump, housed in a tunnel beneath the gun position. Most of the anti-aircraft guns had also been destroyed, but there were twenty 105 mm and twelve 149 mm guns undamaged in an ordnance store – brand new. These were a boon to the Greeks, to whom they were soon shipped together with a mass of other captured war material.

  The vital Tobruk water supply plant was intact, though, of course, the pipeline by which the Italians had brought water more than a hundred miles from Derna was cut. The two distilleries, however, which delivered 20 000 gallons a day and the sub-artesian wells which could provide a further 20 000 were untouched. It may well be that the Italians were reluctant to destroy the water resources lest they – as prisoners – should be the first to suffer from any shortage. The normal ration budgeted for in the desert was one gallon per man per day for all purposes, cooking, drinking and washing, though the troops frequently had to carry on with as little as half a gallon. Even with the Tobruk supplies they now had very little more than this.

  The Italians, however, had left substantial stores of Chianti, cognac, aniseed brandy and a mineral water named Recoaro. The Chianti was good but the brandy was fiery and the aniseed worse. The Recoaro was excellent and the Italians had shipped hundreds of thousands of cases of it from Italy. Apparently this was the only water their officers drank and it was occasionally issued to the men. They had even carried thousands of cases of Recoaro with them when they advanced to Sidi Barrani, and I saw Recoaro bottles strewn from their forward camps almost back to El Agheila. In Tobruk there was one huge iron shed packed with cases of it and almost every mess in General O’Connor’s forces was soon well supplied.

  Tobruk was stocked with enough tinned food for a garrison of 25 000 for two months – a windfall for our troops who had been existing on little but bully-beef, biscuits, butter, jam and tea. The Italian tinned fruit and vegetables were as good as Australia’s best. In one store in Tobruk there were vast supplies of tinned cherries, strawberries, pears, apricots, beans, peas, and carrots, and these were soon being issued along with regular British rations. Most welcome of all were square 2-gallon tins of pulped tomatoes and great boxes of spaghetti; but packets of powdered garlic had few takers. Even the cool-store was well stocked with meat, and in one dump there were several hundred tons of flour which went straight to our field bakeries.

  There was little stock in the Tobruk shops, for most of the civilian owners were evidently evacuated immediately after the Sidi Barrani battle. The date stamps in the bank were still set for December 15th. Nearly all the Tobruk shops had been run under government monopoly. They were generally poorly stocked, but they did carry some surprising items. In one, for instance, there were a dozen Singer sewing-machines, several good radios, and typewriters. Peacetime stock must have been more extensive, judging by what I saw in officers’ houses. One colonel’s home might have been lifted intact from a modern suburb in Rome, with all the requisites of bourgeois comfort – radio, electric stove, refrigerator, hot water system, a tiled bathroom, a kitchen bright with chromium fittings, a cellar stocked with good Italian wines.

  In the colonel’s wardrobe were half a dozen gaudy uniforms, with tight waists, silk-linings, bright trimmings and velvet collars. In other houses I saw even more elaborate wardrobes complete with dress sword, jack-boots, tasselled sashes, satin-lined swagger capes, and officers’ ‘dressing-tables’ stocked with perfume, powder and heavily scented hair oil. The colonel’s family had apparently been with him – at least until the outbreak of war; for one room was littered with children’s toys and books. Over everything now lay a coating of dust, broken glass and fallen plaster, shaken down by bombing. In one room a splinter from an R.A.F. bomb had gone through the window and buried itself in the wall a foot or two over the head of a bed. Above the splinter the colonel had scrabbled his signature, the date, and in large letters ‘Viva il Duce’.

  It is not surprising that the Italian houses were well equipped, for Tobruk was an important peacetime garrison. In most British or American garrison towns of similar importance you would find much the same standard of comfort in officers’ billets. There would be the traditional mess and ceremonial uniforms and the
gay trappings, with which any army likes to surround itself in peacetime. But the British and Australians shed these accessories in the desert in time of war. They lived hard and travelled light. When necessary they existed on a tin of bully-beef, two packets of biscuits and a bottle of salty water per day; they slept on the hard dust-swept ground and carried only shorts and shirts and simple battle-dress. They adapted themselves to the desert’s hard conditions and by doing so gained freedom of action. The desert was their sea. Over it they privateered and struck – equipped as lightly as could be for personal comfort, as heavily as could be for the job of discomfiting the enemy.

  The Italian policy was the direct opposite. They feared the desert and set out to make themselves comfortable in spite of it. When they advanced to Sidi Barrani in September 1940 they were followed by trucks carrying crates of Recoaro water and flagons of Chianti, tinned delicacies and even fresh rolls brought up from Bardia wrapped in cellophane. They brought their dandies’ uniforms, flash accoutrements and boxes of clothes as grand as those we found in Tobruk. I saw all these things lying in the sand at the Italian camps the British over-ran near Sidi Barrani in 1940.

  The Italians were not prepared to accept or adapt themselves to the rigours the desert inflicts on those who fight across its wastes. In the battle against it they squandered time, effort and transport that would have been better employed in the real fight.

  This difference in the attitude of the British and Italians to the desert was symptomatic of their fundamentally different attitude to the war. The Tommies and Diggers knew that war was a serious, hard and brutal business. They had no illusions – but they were prepared to endure hardship and reverse because the things they were fighting for mattered to them personally. They needed no fancy rations to maintain their spirits; no glittering uniforms to keep up their confidence.

  But to the Italians such luxurious trappings were natural and necessary. They were an essential part of the illusion Mussolini had fostered in the hope of inspiring them with a warlike spirit and an Imperial ambition. In his speeches and propaganda he had glamorized war and sought to sell them the idea that it was a grand adventure, with power, plunder and glory as the prizes. To bolster their faint hearts he had told them that the young, virile Fascist legions had only to march and the jaded, effete British would collapse. It was fitting that the Duce’s conquering army should live well and carry with it into the desert the panoply of victorious heroes so that they could make a proper show when they goose-stepped through the streets of Alexandria and Cairo.

  They soon found that there was no glory or glamour for them in desert warfare, only danger and hardship. Over this their spirit could not triumph in spite of Graziani’s pampering. When the prospect of power and plunder turned into the reality of defeat and disgrace at the hands of the enemy they had been taught to despise, their illusion was shattered.

  Another blow to the spirit of the Italians in Tobruk came from the Duce himself. When the bulk of his great army was routed and captured at Sidi Barrani and Bardia he explained away the disaster by declaring that the British had gathered an irresistible weight of men and metal. At Bardia they had used, according to Rome Radio, ‘hordes of bloody-thirsty Australians’ – three divisions of them, plus two British armoured divisions. In justifying himself to his own people with this gross exaggeration Mussolini had put a shot in the heart of his forces in Tobruk.

  They had little left to die for. No doubt they wanted the same things from life as the Diggers and the Tommies – peace, freedom, security. But they must have realized that Mussolini and his Fascists were not fighting for these; that Fascism was nothing but a false front. Italians with whom I talked found it hard to believe that the Australians were volunteers. They understood their own position. They had been sent to Libya to win glory for Mussolini. They presumed that the Tommies were there merely to defend British Imperial interests. But why were the Australian volunteers there?

  The ordinary Digger would have found it rather hard to tell you. If you had ever persuaded him to talk he would not have spoken of defending freedom, or removing injustice, or of saving the Empire. He might have said, ‘Oh, I wanted a bit of fun;’ or else, ‘I dunno, I was fed up with my job;’ or perhaps, ‘Well, all my cobbers were joining up and so I went along too.’ Not much more than that. These would not be the real answers. Men may join up for fun or for a change, but if these were the only reasons, they would not go into action and fight through with bayonet and grenade when machine-gun bullets kick the dust around their feet and they see the man next to them go down. If you could get the ordinary Australian to say what he really feels, it might be something like this:

  ‘Well, I came away because I believe in a fair go and I wanted to be with my mates; because I like to be able to say to a copper, ‘That’s all right, copper, you got nothin’ on me;’ because I want to say what I like when we’re having a beer at the pub; because I want to do what I like with the few quid I’ve got in the bank; and because women and kids are being bombed in London and shot in Prague, and someday this might happen at home if we don’t do something about it.’ It was because they felt that the battle was being fought for things like these, which mattered directly to them, that the Mallee farmer and the Kalgoorlie miner, the Bendigo bank-clerk and the Sydney solicitor made the soldiers of Tobruk just as they had made those of Gallipoli.

  At Tobruk, as at Bardia, the 2nd A.I.F. showed that it had inherited the traditions and qualities of the original Anzacs. But the battle that was just over was a small test of the new A.I.F’s spirit and soldierly worth by comparison with those that were to be fought later on this same battlefield.

  In the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele on the morning after Tobruk fell, I was talking with Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Godfrey, C.O., 2/6th Battalion. As a bunch of Italian prisoners were marched away, he said, ‘That’s about the last of the 25 000. If we’d had 25 000 Australians inside these defences not even the Germans would have got us out in six months.’ He little knew that within a few weeks he would be with the 9th Division inside Tobruk commanding one of the brigades whose job it was to make these words good.

  CHAPTER 6

  TOBRUK DERBY

  ON December 6th, 1940, when the men of the British 7th Armoured Division stocked their tanks with food and ammunition, and strapped bed-rolls outside, they thought they were going on a four-day raid behind the Italian positions at Sidi Barrani. Two months later they finished their ‘four-day raid’ 500 miles farther west at El Agheila on the border of Tripolitania.

  By the time Wavell’s forces reached the end of their pursuit, 175 miles south of Bengazi, they were at the end of their tether. They were tired; over-worked transport was on its last wheels; tanks were on their last tracks. They had advanced as far as this only by impressing hundreds of captured Italian lorries. A regiment of armoured cars, two battalions of infantry, three batteries of artillery and one squadron of tanks were all that reached El Agheila in mid-February. Even a month later the forward troops were little stronger. With a supply line stretching 900 miles back to the Nile Valley, no larger force could be maintained. The supply problem would have been much easier if more use could have been made of Bengazi harbour, but by now the Luftwaffe was operating from Tripolitania in strength and the R.A.F. had insufficient aircraft to keep that port open. Even if the forces near El Agheila had been twice as strong they could not have broken through the narrow bottleneck between the salt marshes and the sea. In any case, it would have been a grave mistake to have attempted a further push westwards to Tripoli when it was known that Hitler was about to attack in the Balkans.

  It is widely believed, however, that if there had been no expedition to Greece, Wavell could have held Cyrenaica, and could also have gone on to Tripoli and swept the Axis from North Africa two years before the Allies eventually did. This view springs from either wishful thinking or ignorance. I believe that even if Wavell had had available all the troops and equipment which went to Greece, the Axis could still
have retaken most of Cyrenaica before the middle of 1941.

  Two main considerations governed warfare in the Libyan-Egyptian Desert: supply, and the balance of ‘mobile striking power’ – a term which may be used to cover the combined power of tanks, anti-tank guns and field artillery working together as a common force. The chief geographical factor influencing tactics in this desert is that, except at El Alamein near Alexandria and at El Agheila on the border of Tripolitania, there are no defensive positions that cannot be outflanked. At both these places secure flanks are provided by narrow bottlenecks – between the Mediterranean and the Qattara Depression in one case, and the Great Sand Sea in the other. Everywhere else there is an open desert flank, the cause of constant anxiety to the commander who has not superiority in mobile striking power. Even the most gallant infantry cannot hold fixed positions in this desert when once enemy armoured forces have outflanked them. Then, if they are not to be cut off, they must withdraw and keep on withdrawing until wear and tear or supply difficulties reduce the enemy’s superiority in armoured and mobile forces to such an extent that he loses control of the open desert flank. Their only alternative is to establish themselves behind a fortified perimeter covering a water-point and harbour like that at Tobruk.

  In view of all this, the two Australian and New Zealand divisions that were the backbone of the force in Greece could hardly have stopped, though they might have delayed, Rommel’s drive through Cyrenaica. The only place west of Tobruk where infantry lacking in tank support could have held Rommel was in the El Agheila bottleneck. But it would have taken more than a division to stop him here, and the Middle East could not have maintained a force of this size at El Agheila before the end of April. Rommel attacked at the end of March.