Tobruk 1941

by Chester Wilmot

  _____________

  1 There were, of course, many patrols and raids besides those described in this chapter. The ones I have dealt with are chosen as typical examples and are therefore not referred to in strict chronological order. Most of these took place while I was in Tobruk, and the details were checked by personal interview at the time.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘WE NEVER SAY “NO”’

  SOME of the British gunners in Tobruk sang very well, as I discovered when I sat with them round their gun-pit in the long evenings. Their favourite song was about gunners: and its chorus ran:

  Merry, oh merry, oh merry, are we,

  We are the boys of the artillery.

  Sing high, sing low, wherever we go

  Artillery gunners we never say ‘No’.

  The last line was certainly the motto of every Tobruk gunner. British artillery was the rock on which the two main German assaults in April and May finally broke. In the months of virtual stalemate which followed, it had an equally important role, and life in the garrison would have been much more hazardous if the enemy had been able to shell without fear of prompt reprisal. While Australian patrols held the enemy infantry well back from the perimeter in all sectors, except the Salient, the British and Australian artillery kept the Axis guns subdued. The Tobruk artillery was commanded by Brigadier L. E. Thompson, a British regular soldier. Under him were some of the finest artillery regiments in an Army renowned for its gunners: the 1st, 104th and 107th Regiments of the R.H.A., and the 51st Army Field Regiment. The only Australian field gunners were those of the 2/12th Field Regiment – and the Bush Artillery.

  The enemy’s artillery had several important advantages. The first was in observation. Because of the flatness of the desert, the duststorms and the heat haze, which restricted visibility from about eleven until four o’clock almost every day, it was extremely difficult to gain good observation from ground-level. When the enemy took Hill 209, he captured the garrison’s best observation post, and gained a sweeping view of the area inside the perimeter as far east as the El Adem road. From 209 he overlooked the important gun-positions in the Pilastrino area, and made it dangerous for any but isolated vehicles to move in the area south and west of Pilastrino during daylight.

  In addition, he had the advantage of unrestricted aerial observation, which was doubly important because the Tobruk gunners had no planes to spot for them, and few aerial photographs. Enemy reconnaissance planes came over at will to photograph, pick targets and direct shoots, but the ack-ack gunners kept them above 20 000 feet. After one JU88 had been shot down at 23 000 feet, the Germans used ME110s and Henschels, which had a higher ceiling. Their effectiveness as ‘spotting planes’, however, was largely frustrated by ‘jamming’ their radio sets. The Tobruk counter-battery staff discovered that the Germans used four frequencies – two for speech and two for Morse. Australian signalmen had a grand time tapping out the V for Victory call-sign on the Morse frequencies and interjecting with a few uncensored items on the speech wavelengths.

  Enemy aerial observation was also hampered by effective camouflage. It is extremely difficult to conceal guns in the desert, but they can be camouflaged so that the enemy is unable to tell which positions are dummies and which are real. By holding their fire when reconnaissance planes came over and by frequently changing position, Tobruk gunners kept the enemy guessing. One troop of the 1st R.H.A. for a while had wooden guns covered by net screens half a mile from its real guns which were camouflaged to look like trucks.

  Mere camouflage was not enough, for there were not many alternative battery positions. The artillery relied for protection primarily on the 25-pounder’s capacity to shell Axis field guns from positions which these could not reach. The enemy, however, could move his guns to new positions almost every day. The Tobruk gunners adopted all kinds of subterfuge to hide their guns. Sometimes they fired through a dust-screen raised by trucks driven up and down in front of their gun-pits. At other times they fired artillery of varying calibre simultaneously from different positions. This stopped the enemy from identifying what guns were in action and which positions were being used.

  To mislead him further the garrison destroyed landmarks, which he used for ranging – the fort at Pilastrino, buildings at the El Adem road junction, roadside telegraph poles and the funnels of ships in the harbour. To draw his fire on to worthless targets they made a number of dummy tanks out of metal piping, wood and hessian. One morning in July the Germans woke up to find a dozen new ‘tanks’ near the Derna road. They shelled these spasmodically for a couple of days before realizing their mistake. Beside the Bardia road in the eastern sector there was a small white house which the enemy frequently shelled. To encourage him the 2/43rd Battalion sent men every morning and evening for some weeks to light a fire inside it. As the smoke rose, down came enemy shells.

  Tobruk gunners took considerable risks in their efforts to gain observation. They often directed fire from outposts several miles beyond the perimeter; from tanks and carriers on patrol in no-man’s-land; from tall pole O.Ps inside, and even outside, the wire. Many of these had been put up by the Italians and the enemy, knowing their exact positions, regularly shelled them with shrapnel. To trick the Axis gunners some poles were permanently ‘manned’ by dummies, so that they could never tell whether these were really occupied. The 2/23rd Battalion raised a pole O.P. even in the Salient. It took the enemy 20 shells to knock it down. They put up a second. It went down after 32 rounds. A third stood; after 98 misses the enemy gave up the contest and the Diggers were soon able to occupy it with safety. To some extent these ruses countered the enemy’s advantage in observation, but nothing compensated for the lack of spotting planes.

  The enemy was also better supplied with ammunition – at least for his Italian guns. At both Bardia and Derna there were vast dumps that we had not had time to destroy. The garrison, on the other hand, was forced to husband its limited resources. Tobruk had ammunition for three or four months when the siege began, but in the first six weeks the artillery fired fifty tons on many days and on some as much as a hundred. This was considerably more than had been anticipated. To make matters worse, enemy bombers in June blew up one of Tobruk’s largest ammunition dumps and for some weeks the guns were limited to ten rounds per gun per day. They exceeded this only when the garrison made a raid.

  When the ammunition situation was at its worst Captain E. Baillieu and thirty men of the 2/24th Battalion brought in 110 rounds of 25-pounder ammunition, which the 6th Division had left outside the perimeter. This was no easy task. The shells in boxes of four had to be carried from a dump close to enemy positions two miles back to a waiting truck. As every shell cost £5 to manufacture and transport to Tobruk, Baillieu’s men reckoned that on that night at least they had earned their pay. In later months the position improved, but ammunition was still rationed because the garrison had to build up reserves for the coming British offensive.

  The Axis artillery was kept reasonably quiet only because of excellent work by the garrison’s gunners and the British counter-battery staff, under Lieutenant-Colonel B. E. Klein.1 In the absence of our aircraft, the counter-battery staff had to rely on flash-spotting and sound-ranging in fixing enemy battery positions. This was carried out by the 4th Durham Survey Regiment, but these methods did not work well by day, when the enemy did most of his shelling. At night he used various tricks to upset the counter-battery calculations. He fired mortars and guns simultaneously, hoping their flashes would be confused. The flash-spotters might have been misled, but the sound-rangers soon revealed the deception.

  He also tried moving his guns frequently and firing them from many positions. Gradually, however, the garrison learned where most of these were and, as soon as an enemy battery opened up, Klein’s staff knew it would probably be in one of several well-plotted sites. As a quick rough-and-ready check, they used the ‘flash-to-bang’ method. In this, observers would clock the time from the moment they saw the flash until they heard t
he ‘bang’ of the gun. After allowing for wind and temperature they could quickly calculate the approximate range. Knowing this, they could then pick out which of several known positions the guns were using.

  This method worked particularly well in dealing with the big guns, which shelled the harbour from the Bardia road sector from mid-June onwards. The first of these was christened ‘Bardia Bill’; and when a second gun began shelling from this area, the title was applied to both. These guns were apparently 155 mm siege or naval guns. Firing from the Wadi Belgassem, they could just reach the town eight and a half miles away. At first it was difficult to silence them because they changed position almost every night. Eventually the counter-battery staff ‘fixed’ eleven positions so accurately that ‘Bardia Bill’ seldom got off more than half a dozen rounds before its location was pin-pointed and shells were falling round it.

  The guns that deal with ‘Bardia Bill’ were four 60-pounders, manned by the 2/12th Field Regiment, four 25-pounders of the 104th R.H.A., and two 149 mm coast defence guns on the headland east of the town. Whenever there was shipping in the harbour, the crews of all these guns stood ready for action, and their reply was so prompt and accurate that the shelling of the harbour did remarkably little damage. One day in September, there were seven small vessels in port and, anticipating a Stuka raid, Bill Macfarlane2 and I had set up our recording gear on the waterfront. No Stukas came but ‘Bardia Bill’ searched the harbour in the late afternoon with twenty-six shells. Not one landed within a hundred yards of a tanker, which was the main target, and only three exploded.

  Towards the end of July Rommel brought up more heavy artillery. On the escarpment near El Adem, he had a 210 mm gun, which the counter-battery artillery could not effectively shell. He also established behind Hill 209 a couple of big guns, which became jointly known as ‘Salient Sue’. ‘Sue’ could barely reach the harbour but one of Tobruk’s main pumping stations in the Wadi Auda was just about her length. The soft earth of the wadi bed was cratered all around the stone building that housed the plant, before she eventually hit it twice. Fortunately the pump was below ground and was not even scratched.

  The counter-battery work was so accurate that eventually Klein’s staff had pin-pointed more than a hundred alternative battery positions, as well as those of twenty long-range mortars and forty pole O.Ps. The value of this achievement was tested in the attack on the Salient early in August. Then twenty-four guns were devoted to silencing enemy artillery and for the most part they were successful, as captured documents show; but Rommel had too many guns for the garrison to deal with them all.

  Later that month, a daring attempt was made by the 2/13th Battalion to silence some troublesome artillery by direct attack. The enemy had several batteries on high ground west of the El Adem road and about half a mile behind his forward infantry positions. The guns were located, and the raid made possible, mainly through bold reconnaissance by Lieutenant J. B. Martin. He began by finding and plotting the enemy minefield two miles south of the perimeter. When he had located gaps between the enemy’s forward posts, he led deep patrols in behind them on the next three nights. On the third night he went with eleven men 1000 yards inside the minefield until they reached a road used by enemy supply trucks. They moved westward for half a mile looking for the guns. After waiting and searching for over an hour, they saw the guns fire 300 yards west of them. Martin took a bearing on their flashes, while another patrol took a bearing on them from a different direction. Simultaneously the guns were flash-spotted from inside the perimeter.

  Following this discovery, on the night of August 17th–18th three officers and fifty men set out to blow up the guns. In spite of its size, the patrol moved through the minefield and up to the gun-positions without being detected, only to find that the guns had gone. For nearly two hours the assault parties prowled behind the enemy lines looking for the guns or for any worthwhile target on which to use their explosives. All they could do was to disrupt enemy communications by cutting telephone lines. When the time came to withdraw, one of the officers, Lieutenant E. R. Bucknell,3 found his party was two men short. Sending the rest home, he went back and eventually discovered them searching for their boots. Because of the shortage of sand-shoes some men had removed their boots so that they would not be heard, but these two had mislaid theirs in the dark. One man’s feet were badly cut, so Bucknell gave him his own boots and walked back in his stockings.

  This raid failed, but several others brought back booty, which was invaluable to the Bush Artillery. When the Australian battalions first used captured guns, few of them had sights or instruments. In many cases the range could be varied only by putting another chock under the wheels, or taking one away. Consequently when raiding parties brought in vital parts from guns that they could not tow home, the Bush Artillerymen were delighted. The unlimited ammunition left in Tobruk by the Italians made these guns most valuable – they could continue firing when rationing restricted others. Moreover, the Italian 149 mm guns out-ranged the 25-pounders and helped to make up for the garrison’s shortage of medium artillery.

  The regular gunners of the R.H.A. regarded with some amusement the initial efforts of the Australian infantry who had turned gunners. But before long the Bush Artillery was directed from the regular observation posts and the gunners were honoured by requests from the R.H.A. to fire on targets that it could not reach. From an infantryman’s plaything the Bush Artillery became an important part of Tobruk’s artillery defences. Some of these guns were manned by spare crews from the anti-tank companies; others by odd personnel of the battalions – batmen, cooks, clerks and drivers. They soon found it was no soft job. Several guns were blown up when shells exploded in the barrel; and after this many pieces of Bush Artillery were fired with the aid of a length of rope by remote control from the comparative safety of a sangar. These guns, being more active than the regular ones, had the added disadvantage of ‘drawing the crabs’; so much so that the normal routine was ‘a dozen rounds and dash for cover’.

  Because of this, units stationed near any Bush Artillery regarded its support with some misgiving. One gun was particularly unpopular with neighbouring troops. Located in a wadi beside the Pilastrino road, its crew charged passers-by ‘two piastres a pop’ for the doubtful privilege of firing the gun. The crew’s position was financially strategic, but they were not on the best of terms with a reserve battalion that had its H.Q. in the same wadi. Whenever business was brisk for the gunners, enemy reprisals made life uncomfortable for their neighbours. The battalion had its Signals and Intelligence offices in a dug-out thirty yards from the gun. Every time it fired sandbags deposited a little more of their contents on the maps, documents and telephone exchange. The blast even threatened to bring down the whole structure. Finally, the colonel appealed to Brigadier Thompson and the gun was removed, much to the indignation of the crew who swore they would sue for ‘loss of business’.

  An additional danger to all guns was the enemy’s bombing. Next to the harbour and the ack-ack positions, field guns were the favourite dive-bomber targets. But thanks to the excellent defence by British and Australian light ack-ack batteries not one was knocked out in the first six months. The 8th Australian Light A.A. Battery, commanded by Major P. W. Stokes, bore the brunt of these air attacks, for it covered the guns in the important Pilastrino sector. Using 18 captured 20 mm Bredas, this battery had to defend more than 50 field pieces, and several of the main supply dumps. It was difficult in Tobruk to allot particular ‘kills’ to particular batteries, but these gunners are probably entitled to claim 15 ‘certainties’, 19 ‘probables’ and 46 planes damaged in six months.

  They fought their guns so well that even though they were directly attacked by Stukas several times not a man was ever hit while engaging the enemy. Most of their casualties came from shell-fire, for they were in one of the favourite enemy target areas. The men stood to their guns right through air raids, but there was a quick scatter for dug-outs and gun-pits whenever any shelling
began. One day as the shells came down, two Diggers raced for a gun-pit. As they dived in, the leading man said – ‘We beat the bastards that time.’ ‘What do you mean – beat ’em?’ said his cobber. ‘One bit’s run a dead heat with me flamin’ tail.’

  The enemy shelling was seldom as accurate as this and it caused remarkably few casualties. How many casualties the garrison’s shells inflicted not even the gunners knew, but G.H.Q. in its airy fastness in Cairo evidently considered that it should be given a detailed tally. During October Brigadier Thompson received a delightful memorandum from G.H.Q. asking him to forward a return in triplicate showing how many (a) Germans and (b) Italians had been (a) killed and (b) wounded by shell-fire in the previous three months. The request drew an appropriate reply from the colonel of one R.H.A. regiment but I doubt if it reached G.H.Q. He wrote:

  As any honest sportsman knows, the matter of the infliction of casualties is, in most cases, unless one can pick up one’s bird, purely a matter of conjecture. As I wish to be thought honest, I am resorting to pure mathematics and to history. In the Great War the ratio given was one ton of ammunition for one casualty. Of the total rounds then fired under 5% were observed. In Tobruk, I estimate that 25% of the rounds fired were observed. Consequently we may claim five casualties per ton.

  As for certain casualties – on one occasion in the Salient after a shoot an officer reported having seen a priest descend from a vehicle, so it is reasonable to assume that he can claim at least one German. Some months ago a wounded Italian was seized upon and medically examined as to the cause of his trouble. So short of ammunition were the infantry at the time, that the machine-gunners began searching for their bullet. However, the doctor awarded the honours to the R.H.A.