To-day when the myth of German invincibility has been finally dispelled on the battlefields of Russia and North Africa, we may be inclined to forget that in April 1941 the Germans were still unchecked on land. The German forces that Rommel brought against Tobruk came fresh from triumphs that had already carried the swastika from Poland to the Pyrenees, from Norway to North Africa. Until then the German blitzkrieg tactics had never been countered. No force or fortress had withstood the Nazi assault. During the first eighteen months of the war the Allied armies suffered one severe defeat after another. Then came the siege of Tobruk, and during the next eight months, when the German armies in the Balkans and Russia were still carrying all before them, Tobruk alone held out unconquered.
This book tells – so far as is possible in wartime – the story of the fighting at and around Tobruk during 1941. It is not a personal story, nor is it a full military history. It is an attempt to record what one man was able to learn of what took place. It deals not only with events but with the men responsible for them – how they lived as well as how they fought. Wherever possible it is told in their own words.
The extent of my indebtedness to officers and men of the A.I.F. is evident on almost every page. The skeleton of the book was pieced together from official A.I.F. and enemy documents. My own observations provide some of the flesh but most of it comes from the eye-witness stories of the men themselves. I am most grateful to those who have made available personal papers, given me first-hand accounts of many incidents and actions or have checked portions of the manuscript. They are too numerous for me to list them here but I do thank them all.
Much of this material was gathered while I was a member of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Field Unit in the Middle East with the 6th Australian Division during the original capture of Tobruk, with the 9th Division during three months – August, September, October – of the siege and with the British forces that set out to relieve Tobruk in May and November. Wherever possible documentary sources and eye-witness accounts have been crosschecked, but the full story of Tobruk can only be written when all the documents – British and Axis – are available.
Because of the lack of first-hand material I have not attempted to give an account of what happened when Rommel eventually captured Tobruk in 1942. But it is clear that there is no valid comparison between the situation in 1941 and that in 1942. In the latter year Tobruk was attacked by Axis forces, which had already proved strong enough to rout the entire Eighth Army. The garrison was stormed by far stronger forces than Rommel used in 1941, and, moreover, these were not distracted by any British intervention from the frontier. If the Axis attack of June 1942 could have been delivered in April 1941, it is very doubtful whether General Morshead’s garrison could have withstood it. After the war, no doubt military scientists will find it most profitable to make a comparative study of the attacks of the two years, but this book deals only with the events of 1941.
For the opportunity to see something of these events I am much indebted to the field commanders concerned – General Mackay and General Morshead – and to the Australian Broadcasting Commission, which gave me as well permission to draw on dispatches I sent it from the Middle East. I am most grateful also to the official historian of the 1st A.I.F. (Dr C. E. W. Bean) and to his successor (Gavin Long), both of whom gave me valuable advice and assistance; to Colonel L. E. Vail, who checked the proofs; to Sergeant H. B. Paterson, A.I.F., for permission to publish his verses, which appear in Chapter XII; to Corporal Jim Emery, A.I.F., who drew the special relief map; to Noel O’Connor, who designed the jacket; and above all to H. M. Scales whose unflagging aid in the revision and checking of the manuscript was invaluable.
My thanks are due as well to the Department of Information and to the A.I.F.’s Military History Section for permission to reproduce photographs taken by their official cameramen Frank Hurley, George Silk, Damien Parer and the late Lieutenant Tom Fisher. I appreciate particularly the opportunity of reproducing those taken by Tom Fisher, for in both the Middle East and New Guinea he gathered a fine collection of documentary photographs for the A.I.F. His death as a result of enemy air action near Buna in 1942 was widely mourned.
A few words of explanation may be necessary on the vexed question of the use of the term ‘British’. Where I have spoken at large of our forces as opposed to the enemy’s, ‘British’ embraces all the Imperial, Dominion and Allied troops. But wherever I have spoken of particular forces I have used it – lacking any suitable alternative – to refer only to those of the United Kingdom. This obviously does not imply that Australians regard themselves as any less British than the people of the British Isles.
Because this book is written primarily for Australians and because I was attached to the A.I.F. in the field, I have been mainly concerned with the part it played in the operations described. But every Digger is fully aware of his debt to the Tommies and Scotties who fought beside the A.I.F., and if more first-hand material of their exploits had been available to me it would have been included.
It is as well that we should remember – in these days of our strength and success – what we owe to those who, when we were still weak, checked the run of defeats and gained the first British victories on land in the Second World War. This book has been written as a reminder to us and as a tribute to them.
CHESTER WILMOT
Sydney
October 1943
CHAPTER 1
BEFORE ZERO
‘Ask, and it shall be given unto you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’
These words, first quoted by Saint Matthew, were quoted again by Winston Churchill in his Christmas signal to General Sir Archibald Wavell in December 1940. With his genius for weighing the political significance of military events, Churchill knew that the Army of the Nile, then pausing on the frontier of Libya after its victory at Sidi Barrani, must go on.
It was only six months since Dunkirk. That dark night might have been long drawn-out if the R.A.F. fighter pilots in the Battle for Britain had not scattered the then-unbroken clouds of defeat and let in the dawn. Yet it was a grey dawn of foreboding storm-clouds, from which the Axis lightning might strike any time – at Britain, at Suez.
The first shaft of light came in through the back door. Hunted from the Eastern Mediterranean by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham’s fleet, the Italian Navy took shelter behind Taranto Harbour’s guns. But on the night of November 11th, 1940, the Fleet Air Arm reached out to the Italian lair, sank a battleship and two cruisers, and left two battleships beached. For twenty-four hours Cunningham trailed his coat on Mussolini’s doorstep, but the Italian Navy stayed inside. With Cunningham commanding the sea, Wavell could attack on land with greater hope of victory.
Before Christmas the Middle East sun was beginning to show above the horizon. Two-thirds of Mussolini’s Tenth Army, which had been poised to strike for Suez, had been captured at Sidi Barrani or shut up in Bardia. For the time being the threat to Egypt was scotched. With Bardia taken, Wavell’s immediate military objective would be gained. Mussolini could not strike again with the small Italian forces still at large in Cyrenaica, and Cunningham’s ships would see to it that he was not swiftly reinforced. Wavell had little to gain for the defence on Suez in going beyond Bardia and thus adding to the strain on his over-taxed resources of men and material, already in action on three continents from Malta to Aden, from the Sudan to Albania.
Taking a world view, however, Churchill knew that the Army of the Nile could not stop. The Italians, reeling under the blow of Sidi Barrani, must be driven to the ropes. Part of Mussolini’s Empire must be conquered under his very nose; the destruction of his Army must go on till his humiliation was complete. With the Greeks pursuing the Italians into Albania, the British could not afford to call a halt on the Libyan border.
Nor were the British people in a mood for halting. After the defeats and sufferings of the past year it was not enough to beat off the enemy attack on Suez. Th
ey wanted to see their own troops sweep through Axis territory, as the Germans had swept through Europe. If the British people were to go on ‘taking it’ through 1941, as they had during the latter part of 1940, they needed the stimulus of a striking victory. Men and women working in the bombed factories of Britain looked for a sign that the arms they had endured so much to fashion really were the tools of victory. America, still torn by dissension, must be shown that the cause she was asked to support was far from being lost.
Most important, a strong threat must be established to the Axis in North Africa before spring brought back ‘invasion weather’ to the English Channel. Before then German attention must be turned to the Mediterranean and away from Britain. Knowing all this Churchill might well say to his Middle East Commander-in-Chief – as he did – ‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’
At noon on January 5th, 1941, Italian resistance at Bardia ended. By dawn next morning Wavell’s vanguard was knocking at the door of Tobruk. But whether or not Mussolini’s Libyan Empire would be opened to him depended on what happened at that doorway.
Wavell’s desert commander was Lieutenant-General Richard O’Connor – a wisp of a man, with a bold spirit and a shrewd brain. O’Connor knew – as Rommel found out later – that no force which by-passed Tobruk could advance far beyond it. The ‘Imperial Army of the Nile’, which was really little more than O’Connor’s 13th Corps, had not enough motor transport to maintain its two divisions further than a hundred miles from the nearest port or railhead. Using the Sollum harbour and Bardia’s water supply O’Connor’s forces could attack Tobruk, but they could not advance the next stage to Derna until they had access to the water and harbour of Tobruk. There was certainly not the transport to supply one force containing Tobruk and another continuing westward.
Mussolini’s Libyan Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, still had enough troops to give serious opposition to O’Connor’s advance. At Tobruk and Derna he had two infantry divisions and an armoured force with 120 new medium tanks. He had more medium tanks than O’Connor. He had twice as many guns. In his 13th Corps O’Connor had only the 7th British Armoured Division, the 6th Australian Infantry Division, and a small reserve of British infantry, artillery, machine-guns and heavy ‘I’ tanks.1 He had fewer men, but these had a clear advantage in training, skill and spirit, and in addition the British had command of the sea and superiority in the air.
Nevertheless, O’Connor could not risk the inevitably heavy losses of an immediate assault on Tobruk, for the Italians had prepared it as their main fortress for the defence of Cyrenaica. After Bardia it took a fortnight to gather the necessary forces and supplies for the next attack. Preparations, however, were delayed more by the weather than by the Italians.
Every few days during this fortnight sandstorms clogged the British supply lines. Swirling dust blotted out everything and brought work and traffic almost to a standstill. I was caught in one of these storms on January 15th on the Sidi Barrani–Tobruk road. It was thicker than the worst London fog. You could not see a man ten yards in front of you, and even the sun was browned out.
In Sollum harbour that day, troops unloading supply ships could barely see to work. On the road up the cliff behind them, a captured 10-ton truck missed a sharp turn and plunged into space. Over the beds of the hospital in Bardia, the storm spread an extra blanket. Along the road between Bardia and Tobruk one of the few vehicles which tried to move got off the tarmac and blew up on a thermos bomb. Around Gambut drome thirty-eight miles east of Tobruk, reconnaissance aircraft, which should have been taking photographs or spotting for the artillery, were grounded. In the wadis near Gambut, ordnance engineers had to lash tarpaulins over the precious ‘I’ tanks they had been overhauling, and stop work. On the bare plateau outside Tobruk, Australian and British troops huddled in trucks with anti-gas goggles over their eyes, handkerchiefs across their noses and mouths, or lay in slit-trenches with blankets over their heads while the scourging sand steadily silted in. Preparations for the attack came almost to a halt.
The sandstorm died at dusk. Next morning was bright and clear and the road was packed with traffic making up for lost time. On the shell-torn road between Sollum and Bardia we overtook a long convoy of Italian Diesels driven by dusty, unshaven Diggers. The trucks still bore their Italian markings, but the Australians had given them new numbers – ‘Wop 69’, ‘Wop 73’ – and new names – ‘Dago Dragon’, ‘Spaghetti Sue’, ‘Benito’s Bus’. Without the hundreds of vehicles captured at Sidi Barrani and Bardia, the speed of the advance through Cyrenaica could never have been maintained.
Inside the Bardia defences, a ‘Mobile Bath and Decontamination Unit’ had set up showers at an Italian water-point beside the road. A convoy had stopped to let some grimy gunners have their last shower until Tobruk fell. At the water-point two huge captured water-trucks were filling up. Near by a military policeman was questioning westbound drivers – ‘Got any water? Fill your tins or take two from here. Up there the boys are on half a gallon a day for everything.’
A mile out of Bardia a blue enamel sign said TOBRUCH 119 KM. Underneath it was a warning – KEEP TO THE ROAD: BEWARE THERMOS BOMBS.2 Four or five trucks had been blown up already by these bombs, which Italian aircraft had scattered alongside the road.
For the first fifteen miles the road was either pock-marked by shelling or broken by enemy demolition. From there onwards it was a smooth, black highway, stretching like a liquorice strap across the desert. A motley collection of British and captured vehicles streamed westward. Ten-ton Italian Diesels ground laboriously on under 12- and 15-ton loads; staff cars, light trucks and empty ambulances sped past; dust-laden dispatch riders on Italian motor-bikes wove their way in and out among the traffic fast and slow, overtaking everything. Along a desert track, clear of thermos bombs, a few Matildas and some reconditioned Italian tanks rolled slowly towards Tobruk, husbanding their tracks and engines. The road was an ideal strafing target, but the R.A.F. ruled the skies. From time to time Hurricanes on road patrol roared past just above the telegraph poles.
Nothing checked the westbound traffic until it came to a barricade across the road and a sign –
If you lika da spaghetti – KEEP GOING. Next stop TOBRUK – 27 Kms.
Fifteen miles to the town, but only four to the fortified perimeter. From this road block, however, you could see nothing of the defences. Even a couple of miles closer all that could be picked up was the outline of barbed wire etched against the skyline. On every side the flat and featureless desert swept away to the horizon. Every yard of the level plateau was covered by Italian machine-guns, firing from concrete posts, flush with the ground and invisible even from a few hundred yards. They were hard to get at and hard to see, but nothing restricted their fire, nothing blocked their view except darkness or duststorm. For the attacker there was no cover. He could be seen a mile or more from the defences and could be covered by fire all the way in.
That was Tobruk’s strength. It was not a natural fortress. Its defences had been hewn from the uncompromising desert at tremendous cost. The Italians had fortified this piece of wasteland because here there is a harbour and a few springs of moderately pure water – the only good harbour between Bengazi and Alexandria; the only good water supply between Derna and Mersa Matruh.
The harbour is the heart of the Fortress. The defences built to protect it run in a rough semicircle across the desert from the coast eight miles east of the harbour to the coast again nine miles west of it. This fortified semicircle makes a perimeter thirty miles long, enclosing an area roughly the size of Adelaide and its suburbs. The harbour is not large – only two and a quarter miles long and a mile wide – but it is safe and fairly deep. Its northern shore is protected by a high tongue-shaped promontory, on the slopes of which the Italians built the garrison town of Tobruk – a cluster of little white houses, big concrete barracks and other naval and military installations covering an area about half a mile by a mile.
Between t
he high coastal cliffs and the perimeter the desert plateau rises in three steps – each step leading to a flat shelf a mile or two wide before the next escarpment carries the plateau another fifty to a hundred feet higher. The edge of these escarpments is broken by a series of rough wadis, useful for concealing artillery and headquarters.
The coastal cliffs are also broken by wadis and several of these, with their reliable wells and occasional clump of thirsty palms, might almost pass for oases. These are the least unpleasant places in the Fortress, for in addition they open on to sheltered beaches of white sand. Elsewhere there is a wasteland of rock and bare, brown earth bound together by stubby, thorny camel-bush. It is a hard, cruel and parched land and even the ten inches of rain, which reputedly fall each year, often leave the desert two or three miles inland bone dry. There nothing lays the dust or gives shade from the fierce summer sun or shelter from the winter’s bitter wind.
Around the 30-mile perimeter the Italians by January 1941 had drilled and blasted a fairly strong defensive system. First there was a double wire fence – five feet high. Outside this they had begun to dig an anti-tank ditch. Where it was finished, it was twenty feet wide and twelve feet deep and in most places it had been cut out of solid rock. In the southern sector, however, for four miles east of the El Adem road the ditch was uncompleted and very shallow. In the western sector there was no ditch at all, although a deep wadi running five miles inland was incorporated in the defences and provided a natural tank trap. Where the ditch was unfinished or non-existent, the Italians had laid minefields, but they had made the mistake of laying these as much as 150 yards in front of the wire. To stop engineers coming forward at night and disarming the mines, however, they had put down a belt of ‘booby-traps’ in front of the minefields.
The perimeter was covered by two lines of strongpoints – 128 in all. The forward series were right on the wire, 600 to 800 yards apart. Some 500 yards behind them ran a second series which covered the gaps between the forward posts. All posts were protected by individual barbed-wire fences, and each of the forward ones was surrounded by a circular anti-tank ditch as well.
Tobruk 1941 Page 2