Tobruk 1941

by Chester Wilmot

  Rommel tried one other means of closing the harbour – shelling. This would have been most serious but for the excellent work of the counter-battery staff and the British and Australian gunners. We have seen already how they dealt with ‘Bardia Bill’ and the other ‘harbour guns’, but these could never be completely silenced and they frequently landed shells in the harbour at night before our gunners could chase the crews into their dug-outs.

  Because the ack-ack dealt with ‘Mickey’ and ‘Minnie’ and their fellow bombers, and the artillery kept ‘Bardia Bill’ fairly quiet, the harbour was kept open month after month and the enemy paid heavily for his attempts to close it. Nevertheless, in the last part of October Rommel was to make one more serious bid to stop the destroyer-ferry at a time when the prize at stake was bigger than ever.

  Before then, however, Brigadier Slater’s H.Q. produced a balance sheet covering the six months from the first German attack on April 10th to October 9th. This showed that during these months more than 3000 aircraft had been engaged by the guns over the harbour area in some 750 raids. Of these aircraft 83 planes were certainly shot down, 77 were probably destroyed and 186 more were damaged. In addition 30 at least were shot down by No. 73 Squadron R.A.F. in the first fortnight of the siege, and another half-dozen at least were brought down by small arms fire outside the main anti-aircraft defence area.

  No doubt the figure of eighty-three certainties is a conservative one. The Tobruk A.A. Command never claimed any plane as a certainty unless it was seen to crash either on land or in the water and unless this was confirmed by an independent report. Slater was able to check the results of three typical raids with one captured German airman. This showed:2

  Tobruk Claim

  German Admission

  Raid 1

  1 shot down

  1 shot down

  3 hard hit

  5 damaged

  Raid 2

  2 shot down2

  2 shot down

  2 hard hit

  ‘all 21 surviving Stukas hit; several badly damaged’

  Raid 3

  5 hit

  5 shot down

  Since absolute accuracy was impossible, however, it was better to err on the side of under-estimation, and to apply the R.A.F.’s strict tests of ‘certainty’ and ‘confirmation’. This was all the more desirable, because troops in Tobruk would have been quick to spot exaggerations. Nothing strikes at the soldier’s faith in his cause and his leaders more than exaggerated claims or misrepresentation in communiqués or correspondents’ despatches. He wants the truth told about the battle he is fighting, even though it may not be so good for somebody’s reputation (including his own) and will not make such a good story in the home town newspapers.

  Now, however, we are better able to assess the Tobruk ack-ack gunners’ real achievement, for we have fresh evidence from prisoners and captured documents. On the basis of this, it is fair to assume that the enemy lost about half the seventy-seven ‘probables’ that Tobruk claimed. If this is so, Rommel’s air attacks on the garrison in these six months must have cost him 150 planes shot down by ack-ack fire or the R.A.F., and twice as many damaged.

  As suggested earlier, the loss of aircraft was less serious than the loss of personnel, for the pick of Rommel’s pilots were killed over Tobruk. Again and again the leading dive-bomber was shot down and it was often one of the yellow-nosed Stukas of Marshal Goering’s own squadron. In the end, to make sure that the Italians actually carried out their dive-bombing tasks, sheep-dog Messerschmitts chased them into action. Evidently some Italian pilots resented this so strongly that one day in September fifteen of them force-landed their JU87s in British territory in the Western Desert. They alleged that they had run out of petrol, but they were so close to their own bases that any petrol shortage could hardly have been accidental.

  At the end of six months Rommel had little to show for all his expenditure of aircraft, bombs and personnel. In more than 750 raids enemy bombers sank only seven ships and a few auxiliary lighters in the harbour, and five of these ships were sunk in the first six weeks before the ack-ack defences reached their full strength.

  The men who appreciated the gunners’ work most were the crews of the little ships that supplemented the destroyer-ferry. Trawlers, schooners, luggers and lighters made the perilous run from Mersa Matruh to Tobruk month after month with scant means of self-protection. These usually took a wide sweep to the north soon after leaving Matruh, so as to avoid enemy air patrols. By doing this and arriving at Tobruk just before dawn, unloading during the day and leaving again at dark, they generally managed to get in and out unscathed.

  Their most dangerous time was the daylight unloading. To minimize the risks of this they lay up alongside one or another of the many wrecks in the harbour, shielded by huge camouflage nets, which made it hard for enemy reconnaissance planes to spot them. The most useful wrecks were two bombed ships, Marco Polo and Liguria, which the Italians had beached on the south shore. Their hulks, towering above the little craft, made them difficult to see and gave some protection from raiders’ bombs and ‘Bardia Bill’s’ shells, while working parties unloaded the cargoes into small lighters and on to the charred decks of the wrecks themselves.

  The most famous of all the small ship commanders was an Australian of the R.N.R., Lieutenant Alfred Palmer, known to everyone as ‘Pedlar’. Before the war he had been a merchant seaman, but had finished up in Shanghai, where he commanded a company of Chinese Lancers in the Shanghai Volunteer Reserve. Soon after the outbreak of the war he joined the Royal Navy and began running small supply ships along the Mediterranean coast. From May till October he skippered a 400-ton schooner – the Maria Giovanna, which had been captured from the Italians off the Libyan coast – and ran a ‘regular weekly service’ from Matruh to Tobruk. He was frequently attacked from the air but his strange assortment of scrounged anti-aircraft guns had three enemy planes to its credit.

  ‘Pedlar’ used to find his way into Tobruk harbour more by instinct than by instruments. The entrance was not easy to find and most ships at night used the Tobruk anti-aircraft fire to guide them in. One dark night when the ack-ack put up no guiding beacon, ‘Pedlar’ complained, ‘How do they expect me to get in here, when there’s no moon and no bloody air raid?’

  Finally the Italians trapped him by a ruse. They found there were two shielded lights marking the entrance to the harbour, and set two similar lights about fifteen miles further east along the coast. One night with no air raid to guide her, Maria Giovanna and her gallant skipper were lured on to the rocks. The same night the enemy almost got the destroyers as well, but with better instruments they were warned in time. ‘Pedlar’ Palmer is now a prisoner in Italy and his schooner is a wreck, but the men of Tobruk will never forget him. He brought the little things that made all the difference. For his gallantry he was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, and no Tobruk decoration was more fully earned.

  Of the ‘little ships’, the auxiliary lighters, which ferried tanks and guns, were militarily the most important. Their greatest service was in bringing in more than fifty ‘I’ tanks and many new guns in the two months before the relief. When the garrison eventually broke out these gave it a striking power that the enemy did not expect it would have.

  The men who suffered most from the bombing were the gunners, who had to stand-to every time a ‘Red Warning’ indicated enemy aircraft in the vicinity of the Fortress. As there were more than 1600 warnings in the first 200 days of the siege, they were on the job most of the time. Their only real rest came when a duststorm or the absence of the moon made the visibility too bad for bombing. But some days the gunners stood-to more than twenty-five times and were in action a dozen. And yet they defended themselves so strongly that in the first 750 raids only 40 ack-ack gunners were killed and 129 wounded.

  Macfarlane and I spent a fortnight in September living at a Bofors gun-pit beside the harbour, waiting to make recordings of a dive-bomber raid, which never came. B
ut we did learn how one typical gun-crew lived. They were all Scotsmen except their sergeant and a lone fellow from Yorkshire, who had been living with the Scotties so long that his own rich brogue had become polluted. He even said ‘bonnie’ instead of ‘champion’.

  They had made themselves quite comfortable. A shanty built of odd scraps of wood, tin and canvas was their mess. They had a cookhouse made with timber from a bombed building, a stove from an Italian house, and tables topped with tiles from the floor of an Italian bathroom. Their gun, bedded in concrete and stone, was protected by a solid wall of 40-gallon oil drums filled with rocks and sand. Gaps between these were packed with sandbags and Italian cement. On top of the drums was a parapet of bags filled with inedible Italian flour. Mixed with sea-water it became almost as hard as cement. This pit was so substantial that it withstood the blast of a 2000-pound bomb that landed less than twenty-five yards away and yet hurt no one. One 1000-pounder actually scored a direct hit on the parapet – but did not explode. Inside it the bomb-disposal squad found this note: ‘Keep it up, Tommy. This is the best we can do for you now.’ It bore the trade-mark of a factory in Occupied Europe.

  Some of the gunners slept on the wooden floor of the pit but others had old Italian bedsteads set up outside under the camouflage net that was stretched from the top of the parapet to the ground. They had very little uninterrupted rest, however, except on their days off, when they took their bed-rolls into an old tunnel near by and slept soundly.

  Like most other Tobruk gunners, they had had no previous action experience, but soon took the Stukas’ measure. Their big day was May 7th. Then, according to Bill Reilly, the sergeant in charge of this gun: ‘The Jerries came over about midday and dive-bombed the harbour. We had our gun down cleaning it and we couldn’t engage them. But they came back in the afternoon and we got our revenge. We shot down two and hit two more. The Brigadier sent us a letter of congratulation, the C.O. produced a bottle of whisky and two bottles of beer and the Q.M. gave us a buckshee issue of rum. We weren’t in such good form when the Stukas came back next day.’

  In spite of the bombing and lack of sleep, these gunners lived fairly well. They supplemented their normal rations by ‘salvage’. The crews of the small supply ships knew how much they owed to the ack-ack gunners, and somehow or other accidents happened during the unloading. A case of milk or tinned peaches would fall overboard – and by good luck there would be some gunners near by to rescue it from the water.

  One of the most colourful and successful ack-ack gunners was a lone amateur, the Chief Movement Control Officer, red-faced, grey-haired, Irish; C. J. O’Shaughnessy was the name. He entered Tobruk a few days after it was captured, a lieutenant with a Military Medal from the last war. By the end of the siege he was a major and had won the George Medal and the Military Cross.

  O’Shaughnessy claimed to be Tobruk’s oldest inhabitant. He had certainly identified himself with the port, which he ran with gusto and ability. His office was a little white house on the waterfront in the most-bombed, most-shelled part of the town. In a sand-bagged pit outside it, he had twin Lewis guns with which he engaged every aircraft that came anywhere near. Nothing ever drove him from those guns. He claimed to have brought down half a dozen planes, but few of his fellow gunners gave him credit for them – until the Honours List came out. He had an unenviable job; bombs or no bombs, shells or no shells, he was on the waterfront or harbour day and night organizing and speeding up unloading; getting the ships away; or rescuing cargo from vessels that had been bombed. One day an ammunition ship was hit and set alight; thanks to O’Shaughnessy’s courage and quick action the fire was put out and ship and ammunition were saved.

  He was good at saving. As one of the first officers to establish himself in Tobruk, O’Shaughnessy acquired a useful stock of that excellent Italian mineral water, Recoaro, and some doubtful Italian brandy. Right until the end he always had ‘just a little left’.

  The first time I had a drink with him, he dived into a safe and emerged with a bottle of Recoaro and a bottle of brandy.

  ‘These,’ he said confidentially, ‘are the last of their kind in Tobruk. All the Recoaro has gone to the hospital; all the brandy – gallons of it – had to be poured into the sea by the General’s own order. Your Australian boys couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand it myself. So I managed to save just a couple of bottles. This is the last of them.’

  A few months later I had my farewell drink with him. The same ritual – the last bottle of Recoaro – the last bottle of brandy – for a special occasion. Were we not leaving on the destroyer that night?

  We raised our glasses and drank to those men who had kept the harbour open – to O’Shaughnessy and his men; to the ack-ack; to ‘Pedlar’ and the little ships; and above all to the Navy. Even O’Shaughnessy’s inexhaustible ‘last’ bottle hadn’t enough in it to do justice to them all – for without them there could have been no Tobruk.

  _____________

  1 Excluding the mass daylight raid of September 1st, after which the Axis bombing policy changed.

  2 On this occasion the Australian 8th Light Battery claimed hits on more than a dozen planes, inclding two shot down. The A.A. Command granted it only the two certainties.

  CHAPTER 20

  SO LONG TOBRUK

  THREE officers in freshly ironed shirts and shorts and pith helmets got out at the control post and headed up the road towards 9th Div. H.Q. The traffic op turned to the driver of their car and said:

  ‘’Struth, who’re the blokes with the flash lids on?’

  ‘Dontcha know?’ said the driver. ‘They’re Poles. We’re all goin’ ter be relieved. The boss was talkin’ about it yes’dy. Won’t be long now.’

  ‘Garn,’ said the M.P., ‘we ain’t never goin’ ter be relieved, we’re ’ere for the duration. Jest another push more likely.’

  The traffic cop looked up the road at the receding Poles. ‘You’ll be sorry,’ he said as he waved the next car through.

  The M.P. outside Div. H.Q. was a man who always knew more than most. Did he not usher the General’s car in and out, and talk with those who drove the Divisional staff around, and those who brought in visitors from the various units? He knew all the furphies from the H.Q. tunnels and the perimeter posts.

  For the rest of this August day he was very busy dispensing the best story for months. The news that the Poles were coming was bush-telegraphed to the farthest outpost not later than that evening’s rations. Round the perimeter there ran a buzz of speculation. After months of boredom and disappointment this was something.

  Since the failure of the June offensive, the troops had become more or less resigned to waiting and the thought that they might be relieved by any means other than the land route had never entered their heads. Life was tedious and often difficult, but their soldierly pride made them want to see the siege through to the final break-out. They were convinced that Rommel could never take Tobruk from them, but they wanted to show that they could beat the Germans in attack as well as defence. They also had old scores to settle.

  When the Poles arrived in mid-August, the troops swung from resignation to optimism and back again overnight according to the prevailing rumours. No one was sure whether they had come as reinforcements or relief. Then the 18th Brigade began to move out and hopes ran high. The local bookies laid ten to one against September 30th and five to one against October 31st for the relief of the 9th Division. But when the last of the 18th Brigade had gone and the withdrawal stopped hopes fell again. The 18th had been relieved, the troops thought, merely because they belonged to the 7th Division.

  The M.P. outside Div. H.Q. covered his disappointment with a little philosophic pride. ‘They’ve pulled the 18th out,’ he said to me one day, ‘but us 9th Divvy blokes is goin’ ter be left ’ere till the end. They couldn’t ’old Tobruk without us. We’ll stay till we goes out by road – an’ that’s dinkum.’

  He soon forgot this prediction when a group of British staff officers arri
ved in mid-September – the advance party of the 70th Division, which was to take over from the Australians. There could be no mistake this time. The ‘books’ began to take bets about particular days, and the men added up the balances in their paybooks. There were no thoughts now of waiting to go out by road.

  This relief came about only after strong and persistent urging by the G.O.C., A.I.F. (General Sir Thomas Blamey), who supported his plea to Middle East G.H.Q. with two strong arguments.

  In the last war the A.I.F. divisions in France had not fought together as an Australian Corps until the end of 1917. When they were then brought together under a single command they gained fresh strength from this unity and were even more successful than before. When the 2nd A.I.F. went to the Middle East the Menzies Government requested that the divisions of the Australian Corps should be kept together.

  This request was to have been granted when Blamey took the 1st Australian Corps to Greece in April 1941. The 6th Division and Corps H.Q. went first, the 7th Division was to follow almost immediately, and the 9th was to be sent over as soon as it had completed its training and equipping in Cyrenaica. Operational developments disrupted this plan, and by the time Blamey’s forces returned from Greece, nearly all the 9th Division and one brigade of the 7th were shut up in Tobruk.

  Keen to have his Corps together as a single fighting force, Blamey – now Deputy C.-in-C., Middle East – at once asked Wavell to relieve the A.I.F. in Tobruk. He reiterated this request with greater force after the failure of the attempt to raise the siege in June. By the end of July the rest of the A.I.F. was concentrated in Syria and Palestine, and the Australian Corps, with Lavarack now administering command, was the main strength of the newly-formed Ninth Army, which was made responsible for holding the northern flank of Suez in case the Germans should attack through Turkey or Cyprus. For this task Lavarack’s Corps needed its full strength.