Tobruk 1941

by Chester Wilmot

  At that time, even with the tanks which went to Greece, it is doubtful if Wavell could have gained the armoured superiority necessary to hold any position with an open desert flank west of Tobruk. In March he had only two armoured divisions in the Middle East. Of these the 7th, after eight months’ action in the desert, was back in the Nile Valley resting and refitting. Three-quarters of its tanks were worn out and new ones had not yet arrived. The 2nd Armoured Division had just come from Britain with new tanks, but most of these and one of its two armoured brigades went to Greece.

  Even if these tanks could have been sent to the desert, the Germans would still have had a two to one advantage in armour. Moreover, the British cruiser tank was hardly a match for the Mark III (medium) and the Mark IV (heavy) German tanks, which Rommel brought with him; the inferiority of British anti-tank weapons was an even greater weakness. The strong armoured force Wavell could have put in the field in Western Cyrenaica in March or April would have been one weak and inexperienced division.

  The basic fact is that Wavell was called upon to do too much with too little. If there had been no Greek expedition, he would still have needed to take some steps to meet the German threat on his northern flank. He would have had to reinforce both Crete and Cyprus and he would probably have needed also to crush growing Axis power in Iraq and Syria several months earlier than he eventually did. In March he could not have put into Western Cyrenaica a sufficient proportion of the troops who went to Greece to match the strength Rommel had amassed.

  By early March Rommel already had in Tripoli his highly trained, hand-picked Afrika Korps, consisting of the 15th Armoured Division and the 5th Light Motorized Division (which was virtually a light armoured division then and was soon turned into the 21st Armoured Division). He had nearly 300 German tanks, half of them Mark Ills and Mark IVs, plus considerable supporting field and anti-tank artillery, and motorized infantry. Moreover, the Luftwaffe had in Libya alone a far greater number of aircraft than the R.A.F. could have mustered in all the Middle East. In addition, Rommel had brought the six best divisions that he could pick from Mussolini’s Army. One of these, the 132nd Ariete, was armoured. In the face of this strength the British and Australian forces in Cyrenaica could never have gone on; actually they soon had to come back.

  The new Axis commander, Lieutenant-General Erwin Rommel, was a Nazi product – a self-made general upon whom the professional soldiers of the Reichswehr looked askance. Born in 1891, the son of a Bavarian schoolmaster, he had proved a tough soldier in the Great War. In 1915 he won the highest Prussian decoration when a small detachment of mountain troops, led by him, forced a French battalion to retire. He joined the Nazi party in 1923 and became the leader of one of Hitler’s S.S. basher-gangs. Later he rose to be the head of the Führer’s personal bodyguard. When Hitler began to expand the Reichswehr in 1934, Rommel returned to the Army and at once became interested in tanks. A colonel at the time of the invasion of Poland, he was soon promoted major-general and commanded the 7th Armoured Division in the attack on Belgium and France. There he played an important part in the break-through to the Channel, and this led to his being given the task of commanding and training the Afrika Korps.

  At G.H.Q., Cairo, in March neither Rommel’s intentions nor strength were properly appreciated. Wavell later stated publicly that he had made a miscalculation about Rommel’s Libyan offensive. He said that he did not think that the enemy could counter-attack before May at the earliest and by then he had hoped to have tanks enough to put another armoured division in the field.

  It is strange, however, that both General Wavell’s G.H.Q. and Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Neame’s Cyrenaica Command H.Q. (‘Cyrcom’ for short) should have taken so long to appreciate the rising German menace in Cyrenaica. From mid-February dozens of German planes were operating daily over Bengazi and El Agheila. Before the end of that month the most advanced Australian brigade (Brigadier S. G. Savige’s 17th) reported the presence of German armoured cars and troops near El Agheila, and R.A.F. reconnaissance discovered unusually large convoys heading east along the road from Tripoli.

  Nevertheless the ‘Cairo Military Spokesman’ on March 1st scouted the idea that the Germans had anything but small patrols in the El Agheila area, adding that ‘their main force undoubtedly lies in Western Libya’. The general opinion at G.H.Q. and at ‘Cyrcom’ was that, even if large German forces had reached Tripoli, they could not be ready to attack seriously before summer heat ‘ended the campaigning season’ in May. It would surely take them several months to gather their equipment and to become acclimatized and trained for desert warfare.

  It was not then known that Rommel had given his Afrika Korps special desert training in Germany. On a sandy peninsula in the Baltic, he had found terrain which approximated that in Libya and there had worked out tactical and maintenance problems. The troops had lived and worked in over-heated barracks and artificial sandstorms, and on strictly rationed water and limited food. After this ‘hot-house’ training they were ready for desert action when they stepped off the ships at Tripoli.

  That was evident from the speed with which the Germans appeared at El Agheila. From Intelligence sources in Tripoli and Tunisia came warnings of the size and intention of the Axis forces, but G.H.Q. and ‘Cyrcom’ were still reluctant to believe that dangerously large forces could have slipped through without the Navy knowing.

  The Royal Navy, however, had been too busy elsewhere in February and March to maintain the close patrol that had restricted reinforcements to Tripoli in the last months of 1940. Since January the Luftwaffe, operating in force and almost unopposed from Sicily and Tripoli, had greatly increased the difficulty of intercepting Axis convoys, primarily because the British could not maintain the same air reconnaissance. Moreover, Admiral Cunningham’s ships and crews were strained dangerously close to their limit. They were fetching and carrying as well as fighting and patrolling. From mid-February to mid-March they were fully occupied ferrying and escorting troops and equipment to Greece. The ships were seldom in port longer than it took to refuel, re-victual and re-ammunition. They barely had time to carry out minimum maintenance. It was certainly no reflection on the Navy that Rommel shipped his force to Africa.

  Much of the shipping sneaked through with the connivance of Vichy France. Axis ships, flying the tricolour, sailed from the South of France to French North Africa and then hugged the coast to Tripoli inside the 3-mile limit. The importance of this route was not realized until too late. In April, however, Cunningham was able to deliver two severe blows at Axis shipping in ‘mid-Med’ and Tripoli harbour.

  On April 16th the Admiralty announced that British naval forces had sunk every one of a convoy of five supply ships and three destroyers bound for Tripoli. On April 21st a battlefleet stood off Tripoli and rained 553 tons of shells into shipping in the harbour and into vital targets ashore. Simultaneously the R.A.F. and the Fleet Air Arm bombed the harbour. Three supply ships were sunk; three others and a destroyer were left burning fiercely after fifty minutes of the fiercest bombardment of the war. These blows seriously disrupted Rommel’s supply system, but by this time he was already striking at Tobruk and on the Egyptian frontier.

  The British withdrawal, which preceded these attacks, was known to the troops either as the ‘Tobruk Derby’ or the ‘Bengazi-Tobruk Handicap’. Rommel actually launched his offensive at the end of March, but for a month his Air Force had been preparing the way. By mid-February JU87s (Stukas) and JU88s (medium bombers) had made Bengazi harbour almost too hot to use. ME110s were strafing the Bengazi-El Agheila road so severely that it became known as ‘Messerschmitt Alley’. It was nothing to see a swarm of twenty Messerschmitts machine-gunning the road from a hundred feet, and soon supply columns could move freely only at night.

  Operating from Benina aerodrome near Bengazi and from Agedabia, seventy-five miles east of El Agheila, Hurricanes of the R.A.A.F.’s No. 3 Squadron did their best to check the German air attacks. But this lone squadron could not g
ive adequate cover to the forward troops and supply lines as well as to Bengazi harbour, and the R.A.F. could spare no others to help it. The Luftwaffe had fighter superiority of at least five to one, but it usually made its attack at times when the Hurricanes had come down to refuel. The result was that in four weeks, though the squadron broke up many German attacks, it shot down only fifteen planes for certain.

  On March 8th, the 6th Australian Division was relieved in Libya by the newly-formed 9th Division under Major-General L. J. Morshead. The 9th Division had been originally formed from the troops who were diverted to Britain when Italy came into the war. It consisted then of the 18th Brigade, and a new brigade (the 25th) formed in Britain. When these brigades reached Egypt in January 1941, the 24th was added to them to complete the 9th Division. Before the 1st Australian Corps left for Greece, however, the 18th and 25th Brigades were transferred to the 7th Division, and two of its brigades – the 20th and 26th – became part of the 9th.

  G.H.Q. thought so little of the possibility of an Axis counter-offensive that Morshead was told that his division would merely act as garrison troops and would have time to complete its training and equipping before going into action. At this time its units had hardly passed the stage of elementary training and they were very short of essential equipment such as Bren guns, mortars and anti-tank weapons. The division had very little signal equipment and less than half of its transport. Its field regiments had no guns, its cavalry no carriers, and so only the three infantry brigades and some divisional troops were moved to Cyrenaica.

  Consequently only one brigade, the 20th, was sent forward to support the British 3rd Armoured Brigade, which was covering the eastern end of the El Agheila bottleneck. The 20th was commanded by Brigadier John Murray, a big, genial Irishman who loves a fight. He is personally easy-going but brooks no slackness among his troops and even before Tobruk his brigade was marked out as one of the best-trained in the 2nd A.I.F. His dogged temperament made him well suited for the defensive tasks that lay ahead. He had shown himself a strong leader in the Great War when he won the D.S.O. and M.C. and rose to be second-in-command of the 53rd Battalion.

  The 3rd Armoured Brigade that Murray’s 20th was to support was pitifully weak in tanks, and Morshead and his ‘G.1’. (Colonel C. E. M. Lloyd) realized at once that the El Agheila position could not be held against the attack which the Germans were obviously mounting. They said so in a report to ‘Cyrcom’, suggesting further that the Germans would attack with an armoured division supported by Italians, and would cut across the desert to Mechili and outflank the Anglo-Australian forces in Western Cyrenaica.

  Morshead consequently urged Neame to withdraw the 20th Brigade from the El Agheila area, arguing that, with little transport and limited weapons and supporting artillery, it would only be an embarrassment to the British armoured forces when the attack came. Neame disagreed, but on March 17th the Chief of the British General Staff (General Sir John Dill) and General Wavell met Morshead at Beda Fomm. Wavell did not share the Australian concern, but he and Dill agreed that it was wise to withdraw the 20th Brigade. The only people not pleased with this move were the Diggers themselves. As one of their officers wrote later: ‘All that night we travelled by truck back along the black road which we had thought was to lead us to Tripoli. . . We had not come to Libya to run away. We wanted to stay and fight. We did not know where we were going nor why, but running made us afraid.’

  On March 23rd the 20th Brigade took up positions east and northeast of Bengazi. The 9th Division was to defend the escarpment that runs from Er Regima – thirty miles east of Bengazi – northwards through Tocra to the coast. To hold this 62-mile front Morshead had only the three battalions of the 20th Brigade and one of the 26th, with another on the way up. The remaining brigade, the 24th, was training in the Tobruk–Gazala area. In support he had only one British field regiment (the 51st) with sixteen guns. This front, so thinly held, could have withstood no serious German attack. It had a dangerously open flank, for there was only the one weak armoured brigade to stop the Germans cutting across the desert south of Er Regima and heading for Mechili. This was the natural route for them to take, since it had been pioneered by the British tanks early in February when they had crossed the desert to Beda Fomm and cut off the last of Graziani’s forces fleeing from Bengazi.

  This danger was fully appreciated by Morshead. The El Agheila front was now being held by the 2nd Armoured Division, commanded by Major-General M. D. Gambier-Parry. It contained only a Support Group and the three armoured regiments of the 3rd Brigade equipped with worn-out or captured tanks. The 3rd Hussars had obsolete light tanks, suitable only for reconnaissance; the 6th R.T.R. had Italian M13s salvaged from the Beda Fomm battlefield; the 5th R.T.R. had once had fifty aged cruisers but already had lost thirty of them through mechanical trouble which developed on the way forward.

  In these circumstances it is not surprising that the advanced British elements were driven from El Agheila on March 24th, and that a week later the 3rd Armoured Brigade was badly mauled by German tanks at Mersa Brega. On April 2nd it was attacked again at Agedabia, 100 miles south of Bengazi, and lost most of its remaining tanks in an unequal battle. Rommel gained unmistakable armoured superiority and there was little chance of holding him in the open desert. Nevertheless, Morshead’s fears were not shared by Neame, who still hoped that the Germans would be satisfied with the recapture of Bengazi and would not go for Mechili. It was decided that the remainder of the 3rd Armoured Brigade would cover the open desert flank while the Australians attempted to check any advance beyond Bengazi by holding their positions along the Er Regima-Tocra escarpment.

  The Australians dug in and waited for the Germans to come. Below them on the plain lay white-walled Bengazi with its avenues of gums and wattles, now blanked with black smoke as engineers blew up everything the enemy might value. The last of the R.A.A.F.’s Hurricanes rose from Benina and headed eastwards, but on this escarpment the Diggers hoped that they would stand and fight.

  Meantime ‘Cyrcom’, on April 3rd, did not know what was happening on the crucial desert flank. Communications with the 3rd Armoured Brigade, which was shadowing the German advance guard, had broken down. Nazi aircraft, concentrating their attacks on its wireless trucks, had knocked most of them out. Air reconnaissance reported an armoured column at Msus – a third of the way to Mechili. At first it was said to be German; then British; no one could be sure. What few orders reached the 2nd Armoured Division were conflicting. It was told to move along the coast to Bengazi; then it was ordered to Msus. Result: the 3rd Armoured Brigade reached Msus on the night of the 3rd–4th but the Support Group withdrew through Bengazi.

  It needed a cool head and a firm hand to prevent the withdrawal becoming a rout. This was provided by the arrival of Lieutenant-General Sir Richard O’Connor, the successful commander of the first Libyan offensive. He was sent by Wavell to ‘Cyrcom’, but did not take command; he acted only in an advisory capacity. At ‘Cyrcom’ that morning there was still considerable support for the theory that Rommel was only interested in Bengazi. This was particularly the view of Gambier-Parry, who said that he was in no way alarmed at the situation and that Bengazi was the enemy’s final objective for the present at least. On O’Connor’s advice, however, it was decided to withdraw the 3rd Armoured Brigade across the desert to Mechili and the 9th Division through the Gebel Akdar – the ‘Green Mountains’ – to Derna. Meantime the 20th Brigade was to hold at Er Regima and cover the withdrawal.

  By midday on April 4th the only Australians barring the German path on the Er Regima escarpment were the 2/13th Battalion (commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel F. A. Burrows). They were told that they must hold the pass until seven that evening because no transport could be sent before then. The Australian positions were not strong. The escarpment rose sharply for about 400 feet above the Bengazi plain, but there were several passes leading to the plateau above. Through the easiest of these ran the road and narrow-gauge railway to Barce – forty-
five miles north. The face of the escarpment and the wadis was bare, shaly rock. Unable to dig trenches, the troops built themselves sangars which would withstand machine-gun fire, but could be easily blown in by a tank shell. The Italians had dug an anti-tank ditch, but it was on the top of the plateau, designed to stop any tank advance from the east.

  Burrows had only three rifle companies of the 2/13th (the fourth was at Barce doing guard duty), four 4.5-inch howitzers and two captured Italian anti-tank guns with which to hold this escarpment, and these were spread out on a 9-mile front. His ‘D’ Company was astride the main pass; four miles away on its left was ‘B’ Company guarding a flanking wadi; ‘A’ Company was in reserve. Burrows was advised that more field, anti-tank and Vickers guns would be sent to him, but by early afternoon on the 4th there was no sign of these. There was, however, sign of the enemy. About 2 p.m. vehicles were seen near Benina airfield, six miles west of the pass, and in their exposed and extended positions along the escarpment the 2/13th got ready for the first clash between the A.I.F. and the Germans in this war.

  By 3.30 there were several hundred vehicles round Benina and Captain E. A. Handley, O.C. of ‘D’ Company, reported that about 2000 lorried infantry and a dozen tanks were moving slowly towards the escarpment. There, Royal Engineers had laid a minefield and had also mined a section of the road, but when the road was now blown most of the mines also exploded by sympathetic detonation.

  About 4.30 the German advance guard of armoured cars and light tanks came within range of the howitzers and two Italian long-range mortars that the 2/13th were using, having none of their own. The mortar crews scored an early success, landing a bomb on the turret of a light tank and putting it out of action. As the mortar and artillery fire became hotter, the tanks and armoured cars withdrew.