Tobruk 1941

by Chester Wilmot

  The measure of their success is shown in this: on the first fifty-four days of the siege, the harbour and town area was raided in daylight by 807 dive-bombers; in the last fifty-four days that I was there, there was one daylight dive-bombing attack on this area by one Stuka.

  The first fifty-four days in Tobruk were certainly the worst. This initial phase, which lasted from April 10th to June 2nd, was one of intensive dive-bombing, directed first at the ships in the harbour and then at the ack-ack guns. By June 2nd the ack-ack gunners had engaged more than 1550 aircraft and all but 106 of these had come over in daylight.

  In the last three weeks of April, there was at least one Stuka raid every day and in spite of the anti-aircraft barrage the harbour became virtually unusable in daylight. When no ships were there, the Stukas bombed jetties on the north shore, general port installations and the town – frequently going for the ack-ack guns simultaneously. To defeat this attack, the guns around the harbour at first put up an umbrella barrage at about 3000 feet.

  This was not enough. The German pilots dived through the barrage, or round and under it. They came down as low as 600 feet before dropping their bombs. They were game and, though a few paid, most got away with it. Their main worry at this time was the Hurricanes of No. 73 Squadron, but these were seldom warned early enough to intercept any bomber before it dropped its load.

  The harbour area could be protected only by more effective ack-ack fire. This was provided by ‘thickening the barrage’ with more guns, as they became available, and by spreading their fire over the area between 3000 and 6000 feet, instead of concentrating it at one level. Thus Stuka pilots had to face a belt of fire for 3000 feet of their dive. To counter their trick of coming down along the edge of the barrage and then diving under it, this was made to swing backwards and forwards across the harbour, so that a pilot never knew where its edge would be. He might start his dive clear of the barrage and suddenly find that it had swung right into his line of flight. Similarly gunners used to vary the height of the barrage. Some days its ceiling was 5000 feet; on others 7000, and pilots were frequently tricked. These two improvements made the barrage much more effective and any Stukas that did brave their way through it came under direct fire of two or more of the twelve Bofors placed around the harbour. After the end of April these ‘killed the bird’ more often than not, if a Stuka came really low.

  Stung by the force and accuracy of this fire, the Germans turned their dive-bombers against the ack-ack guns themselves. In a fierce attack on April 27th, they went for the four heavy gun-positions, each of which had four 3.7-inch guns. The attack began with a number of medium bombers and fighters (JU88s and ME 109s) coming in very high to draw the fire from the heavy guns. While the 3.7s were blazing away at 20 000 feet, fifty JU87s stole in well below them in four formations, each of which went for one heavy-gun position.

  From two of these positions, the JU87s were spotted and engaged on their run in. As the guns swung on to them, each formation split into four groups of three or four and down they came – attacking each of these two gun-positions from four points of the compass. With the concentration of fire broken up, each gun had to deal with three or four Stukas diving directly for it.

  It took nerve to stand up to the attack but every gun kept firing as the bombs came down. From the moment the fire bombs exploded, the crews were smothered with dust and smoke, but they fired on without faltering even though they could see nothing. In spite of this, the Stukas went through with their dives, but not one bomb landed on either position. Even the near-misses – fifty and a hundred yards away – did no damage, for the guns were well dug-in and had strong parapets. Not one man on these eight guns was killed or wounded.

  On the other two heavy-gun positions it was a different story. The JU87s that attacked one site were spotted as they came in, but the gunners did not engage them very effectively. On the other site the gunners were still busy dealing with the high-level attack when the first of the Stukas’ bombs burst in the middle of the circle of four gun-pits, which were only about fifteen yards apart. The Stukas had all dived straight out of the sun and the gunners, disconcerted by this and the surprise, took cover as soon as the first bombs landed. The pilots had an open go. Practically every bomb was placed right on the positions. To make matters worse, the guns were not well dug-in and their parapets were not substantial. Five men were killed and forty-one wounded. Two guns on each site were put out of action for two days, and other ack-ack equipment was damaged.

  The comparison between the fate of these and the other two gun-positions taught a grim but encouraging lesson. If the guns fought the dive-bombers all the way down their crews were reasonably safe. If they did not, both guns and crews would be lucky to escape.

  Slater immediately instructed every battery that in the face of dive-bombing no one who had a weapon to fire was to go to ground. Every gun must keep in action and all those who were not manning an ack-ack gun must engage the diving planes with rifles or light automatics. Every gun was to be dug in as deep as possible and protected by a parapet capable of withstanding a 1000-pounder, landing ten yards away.

  These measures helped the gunners to look after themselves fairly well and with each attack they gained more confidence and skill. Guns were damaged from time to time, but, from April to the end of October at least, not one was completely knocked out, and none was put out of action for more than a day or two. On only three other occasions did the dive-bombers silence a position during an attack and by the end of May the gunners had the upper hand.

  The anti-aircraft guns, however, had to do more than defend themselves. Rommel had so many planes that he could afford to launch one attack strong enough to keep all the heavy guns occupied while he sent another against the harbour. Naturally if all the heavy guns were to be engaged in beating off direct attacks on their own positions, they could not keep up the harbour barrage. This danger was averted primarily by deception. A number of dummy gun-sites were established near the main heavy ack-ack positions. These were remarkably well constructed – so well that you could drive within a hundred yards of a dummy site without realizing that it was not genuine. They had dummy guns, dummy men, trucks, and ammunition dumps. Moreover, the dummies were fitted with a special mechanism that produced ‘gun-flashes’ and dust-clouds when the nearby guns were fired. By having real guns in a position one day and dummy guns there the next, the deception was completed.

  The result was that the Stukas, diving at dust-clouds from which flashes came, attacked dummy sites as often as real ones. As the danger of direct attack on the guns was thus virtually halved, the gunners could concentrate on their primary task of maintaining the harbour barrage. To make sure of this, Slater ordered that no gun-site was to use more than one gun for its own defence except in very unusual circumstances, but it took considerable courage on the gunners’ part to keep three of their four guns firing the barrage when they knew that Stukas were diving straight for them. To give better protection from low-diving attacks, however, one light ack-ack gun was placed near each position.

  This system worked magnificently. The barrage was maintained, the guns were defended, and the Germans wasted a lot of their bombs on the dummy sites. On one occasion thirty-five JU87s and eight JU88s attacked the harbour and seven heavy-gun sites. Three of the sites attacked were dummies and each of the other four defended itself with only one of its two guns. (As part of the deception policy, some sites at times had two real guns, and two dummies.) The harbour barrage suffered very little and the enemy had three planes shot down and six hard hit.

  Frustrated in his attempts to silence the guns and close the harbour in the first month, Rommel turned his bombers against Tobruk’s water resources, in the hope of ‘thirsting’ the garrison out. Tobruk’s main supply came from two distilleries on the south side of the harbour, which purified sea-water, and from two pumping stations in the Wadi Auda (two miles west of the town), which raised sub-artesian water that was more than a little brackish. Th
ese were all operated by the 2/4th Field Park Company, even though its only trained engineer was a staff-sergeant, E. D. Wakeham. An additional supply was provided by a pumping station in the Wadi es Sehel, which formed part of the western boundary of the defences. This plant, housed in an underground room with blue-painted walls and a red-tiled floor, was actually in no-man’s-land. Nevertheless, troops regularly went out there for a shower. This was never bombed – apparently because the enemy hoped to capture it intact and not, as the Diggers believed, because the enemy himself pumped water from this source. The other plants, however, were subjected to heavy and repeated attacks during May and early June. Luckily none was hit.

  Finally the enemy was induced to abandon his attacks by further clever deception. After one attack on the distilleries a camouflage section poured dirty oil over the buildings to make it appear that they had been hit. They finished the job in half an hour and the reconnaissance plane that came over later evidently saw black shadows that looked like gaping holes in the roofs of the buildings. They were not directly attacked again.

  The attacks on the water supply were part of Rommel’s attempt to bomb Tobruk into submission after his tank attacks failed. He was able to keep all shipping – except very small caiques and other minor craft – out of the harbour in daylight during the rest of May, but the ack-ack guns still defied him. All through that month the battle between dive-bombers and gunners went on, and frequently the German Radio claimed that the Tobruk ack-ack had been silenced.

  In the Berlin Nationblatt on May 12th a German war correspondent, named Billhardt, gave a glowing and optimistic account of the air attacks on the harbour. He wrote:

  Over Tobruk the sky is seldom silent. The sound of our motors continually terrifies the Tommies, chases them to their guns and forces them to hang the sky with steel curtains and black anti-aircraft clouds, until dive attacks by our Stukas with bombs and machine-gun fire destroy them or force them to take cover. The anti-aircraft artillery of Tobruk enjoyed our highest respect – once. Then the Stukas dropped their bombs, and since then the anti-aircraft shelling from Tobruk has become very much weaker. After each attack the younger pilots are twice as eager next day to fly still more madly into the middle of the anti-aircraft barrage – to get on to their objectives still more exactly. To batter Tobruk till it is ready for storming will be a nice piece of work.

  Herr Billhardt’s pilots had ample chance to prove these words good when Rommel made an all-out attempt to silence the ack-ack guns in the week ending June 2nd, but they found that the Tobruk defences were stronger than ever. There were now twenty-eight heavy guns in action compared with sixteen in April and the harbour was ringed with twelve Bofors guns instead of six. The gunners even manned the 3-inch dual-purpose gun on the deck of the gunboat H.M.S. Ladybird, which lay half-sunken in the harbour. She was the victim of a dive-bomber raid, but a tattered White Ensign still flew proudly from her mast.

  That week’s blitz began on May 26th with an attack by six JU87s on a new heavy-gun position on North Point – the headland north of the harbour. The crews of these four guns had never been in action before, but they braved the Stukas, blew one to bits with a direct hit, and watched a nearby Bofors bring down another.

  On the 29th the dive-bombers switched their main attack to the harbour, but the gunners scored their biggest victory to date. Out of thirty dive-bombers, four crashed, another probably crashed, and four more limped home, unlikely to fly again. But their bombs sank two lighters and one small ship.

  Undeterred by their losses, the Stukas came back on June 1st for another defeat. Twenty-four out of forty JU87s went for the heavy guns while the rest attacked the harbour. Twelve dived on the North Point guns, but in the face of their fire, few came below 3000 feet, and one that did was destroyed in mid-air. Not one bomb fell within 150 yards of the guns and some pilots sheered off and dropped their bombs in the sea. Altogether four were shot down for certain, and at least six more were badly damaged.

  The final round was fought next day, when the Germans sent in sixty Stukas – thirty of them against the impudent North Point guns. To see whether the planes really went through with the attack, they sent three Henschels to observe the results of the bombing from a safe height above the barrage. But, Henschels or no Henschels, the pilots would not face the anti-aircraft fire.

  In the first two raids of this week they had come down one after the other in steep dives at an angle of about 70 degrees. On June 1st they had dived steeply but had been forced to release their bombs above the barrage – too high for accuracy. On June 2nd they changed their tactics and tried shallow diving from different directions, but this made no difference to the gunners. Once again the North Point guns blew a plane out of the sky and the bombs fell even farther from the mark than before. The Germans did not press home their attack, but this raid was just as costly as that of the previous day. Four JU87s were shot down, four were probably destroyed and four more damaged.

  June 2nd saw the end of the first phase of the battle between the gunners and dive-bombers and the scoreboard then showed:

  The enemy’s most serious losses had been in dive-bombers and their crews, since 80 per cent of the planes shot down were single-engined JU87s. For a few weeks the Germans used twin-engined JU88s for dive-bombing as well, but these were sitting shots for the gunners. On April 20th, when eleven of them dive-bombed the town, the R.A.F. shot down four, the ack-ack got three and probably destroyed two more.1

  Unfortunately for Rommel, his most courageous pilots – those who dived lowest – were the ones generally brought down, and almost invariably they crashed to death. Thus by June 2nd he had lost the pick of his German dive-bomber crews, and thereafter had to make increasing use of Italians, who were neither as skilful nor as courageous. With the Russian campaign soon absorbing nearly all the aircraft and pilots Hitler could spare, Rommel could no longer incur losses as severe as those his airmen had suffered at the end of May.

  For all these losses Rommel had little to show. His aircraft had sunk in Tobruk harbour only two small naval vessels, two troop-transports and one small cargo ship. In addition a larger number of vessels was sunk outside the harbour approaching or leaving Tobruk. Some of these sinkings would have been avoided if G.H.Q., Cairo, had given earlier heed to Tobruk’s request that no ships, other than very minor craft, should be sent in during daylight.

  In defying the dive-bombers, the Tobruk anti-aircraft gunners did more than keep the harbour open and destroy enemy aircraft. They gained a moral triumph and set an example for Allied gunners and enemy pilots everywhere. For the first time in this war, ack-ack gunners showed that Stukas could be beaten by men who stood to their guns.

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  1 See Chapter 19. The Tobruk A.A. Command’s estimate of the number of planes shot down was very conservative, and the actual enemy plane losses were probably 50 per cent greater than those claimed. Hence this estimate of personnel killed.

  CHAPTER 19

  KEEPING THE HARBOUR OPEN

  ALTHOUGH the German dive-bombers were defeated as decisively as their tanks in April and May, the air assault against the Fortress had to go on. If Rommel could not capture Tobruk, at least he had to stop the garrison becoming strong enough to break out and harass his flank and lines of communication. If he could not silence the ack-ack defences and close the harbour, he must restrict its use as much as possible.

  As Stuka raids had become too expensive, Rommel was forced to rely on high-level bombing to impose his air blockade. The percentage of attacks delivered by dive-bombers dropped from 68 per cent in the first phase to 18 per cent in the second, which lasted from June 3rd to August 3rd. During this period his losses were cut down by more than 80 per cent, only eleven planes being shot down for certain, compared with eighty-seven in the previous eight weeks. The effectiveness of the bombing, however, was reduced almost as much. In the absence of the dive-bombers in June, the small ships’ traffic increased. In attempts to stop this, the Stuka
s came back in force on July 1st and 4th, but their pilots – many of them now Italians – were reluctant to dive below 6000 feet.

  In the first attack only one plane was shot down, but all the forty-six Stukas dropped their bombs above the barrage and not one ship was hit. Thirty dive-bombers were sent back three days later accompanied by ‘Gestapo’ Henschels and apparently ordered to go in below the barrage. They did so, but the Bofors shot down five and the ‘heavies’ got another. Two more were probably destroyed and six hit. Again they missed the ships. This was their costliest defeat and except for two other fleeting appearances, the Stukas left the skies to the high-level bombers from then until August.

  Axis daylight attacks were mostly delivered by single planes or small formations of three or four, which sneaked in at anything from 18 000 to 25 000 feet. The ack-ack fire kept them high and more often than not threw them off their targets. The result was that normal high-level bombing had merely a nuisance value and, if the enemy hit any worthwhile target, it was largely by good luck. Being frequently thwarted by the barrage if they made a regular run in, some German pilots tried various tricks and certain planes became so well known by their tactics that the ack-ack gunners gave them pet-names. At one stage for about a month there were three JU88s that specialized in bombing the supply dumps every morning just about the time the ration trucks were drawing stocks. They were nick-named ‘Pip’, ‘Squeak’ and ‘Wilfrid’ after three saucy British comic-strip characters. One by one the barrage got them.