Tobruk 1941

by Chester Wilmot

  The posts were not linked by any connecting trenches, but could support each other with fire which was linked to cover the barbed wire and the anti-tank trench or minefields and to sweep the plateau for hundreds of yards into no-man’s-land. The front was also covered by field and medium guns emplaced several miles behind the perimeter.

  Each strongpoint had two or three machine-guns and an anti-tank or light field gun. Some had a mortar as well and certain key posts had twice this fire power. The weapons were emplaced in circular pits, each roughly four feet deep and six feet wide, about twenty yards apart and connected by deep trenches. Opening off these were bomb- and shell-proof ammunition chambers, command posts and cramped sleeping quarters for about twenty men.

  Although the posts were concreted, they were not pillboxes. Concrete, which should have been used to roof the fire positions, had been put into the floors and sides of the pits and trenches. The posts, like those at Bardia, were more funk-holes than fighting trenches. They had insufficient fire positions, and those that there were, had no overhead cover for the troops who manned them. But there was full protection for those who stayed below.

  The defence of Tobruk was organized in part by the elusive General Bergonzoli, nicknamed ‘Electric Beard’ by his troops when they were ‘non-intervening’ in Spain. Already he had escaped the Australian clutches once at Bardia, where he had been in command until the last night. Then, realizing the position was hopeless, he and a few of his staff had walked out through the British lines and after five days had reached Tobruk.

  There he found 72-year-old General Petasso Manella in command of a garrison of 25 000,3 strong in artillery but weak in infantry. His main force was the 61st Division under General Della Mura, but its six battalions (plus two odd battalions from other divisions) were barely sufficient to man the 30-mile perimeter. At Bardia Bergonzoli had found that even with twenty-two battalions he could not hold a 17-mile line. Maybe this explains why he put himself and his celebrated beard on the last plane to leave Tobruk before the attack.4

  Because of weakness in infantry, Manella was relying on artillery to check any break-through. He had plenty of guns for this purpose – 140 field and 68 medium and heavy pieces. In addition there were 36 heavy A.A. and a dozen coast defence guns (including a 12-inch naval monster) which could be turned against attacking ground troops. However, he did not have men enough to establish defence in depth to protect these guns if a break-through should be made. Behind the shell formed by the outer perimeter he had only a few strongpoints covering the main gun positions and road junctions. To strengthen the defence of these areas, a number of light and medium tanks had been dug in as pillboxes and in front of them were booby-traps and minefields. Lacking defence in depth, the enemy needed a strong mobile reserve of tanks and infantry to counter-attack. But for this task he had only twenty-three medium tanks and one infantry battalion. With all these weaknesses, the Tobruk Fortress was still strong enough to make its capture costly, unless the attacks were thoroughly prepared.

  The Italian garrison in Tobruk would have been in a reasonably strong position if Mussolini’s forces farther west had done anything to help it beyond dropping leaflets exhorting it to hold out. The Italian Navy made no attempt to bring relief or even to interfere with the British warships, which supported O’Connor’s preparations with naval bombardment. After Bardia the Italian Air Force yielded the skies to the R.A.F. which bombed Tobruk as it wished. The attackers thus had unrestricted aerial observation; the defenders had none.

  Even the remaining ground forces in Cyrenaica – the 60th Infantry Division and General Babini’s 120 medium tanks – remained inactive between Derna and Mechili.5 They made no effort to keep open the garrison’s landward way of escape to Derna or to draw off any of O’Connor’s forces. The Tobruk garrison was left to its fate. Against it Wavell was free to concentrate all the land, sea and air power he had available in Libya and off its coasts.

  As at Bardia, O’Connor delegated the task of planning and carrying out the attack to Major-General Iven Mackay and his 6th Australian Division, plus supporting British troops. As at Bardia, O’Connor decided that the British should keep the ring with the 7th Armoured Division and the Navy, and provide a powerful left lead with tanks, bombers and artillery, while Australian infantry was to be the strong right, which would break through the enemy defence and deliver the knock-out.

  For the Tobruk attack, Mackay’s forces were weaker in ‘I’ tanks, but stronger in other supporting arms than they had been at Bardia. There they had twenty-six ‘I’ tanks of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment; but ten of these were now out of action through mechanical trouble. Private enterprise, however, on the part of ‘A’ Squadron of the 6th Divisional Cavalry Regiment added to the tank strength. (The rest of the regiment was besieging the Italians at Giarabub.) It salvaged fifteen Italian mediums from Sidi Barrani and Bardia. It also doubled its normal establishment of carriers so that its O.C. (Major Denzil Macarthur Onslow) had one ‘squadron’ of tanks and two of carriers. Even with these captures, there were insufficient tanks to give the infantry as much support as at Bardia, and there were only enough ‘I’ tanks to assist one infantry brigade in the opening phase of the attack.

  Mackay had the following force available:

  Australian:

  16th Infantry Brigade – 2/1st, 2/2nd, 2/3rd Battalions.

  17th Infantry Brigade – 2/5th, 2/6th, 2/7th Battalions.

  19th Infantry Brigade – 2/4th, 2/8th, 2/11th Battalions.

  2/1st, 2/2nd and one battery of the 2/3rd Field Regiments.

  16th and one troop of the 17th Anti-tank Companies.

  2/1st, 2/2nd and 2/8th Field Companies.

  ‘A’ squadron plus two scratch ‘squadrons’ of 6th Divisional Cavalry.

  British:

  7th Royal Tank Regiment, 1st Royal Northumberland Fusiliers (M.Gs).

  1st Battalion, Cheshire Regiment (M.Gs).

  104th Royal Horse Artillery Regiment; one battery of 4th R.H.A.;

  51st Field Regiment; 7th Medium Regiment; one battery of 64th Medium Regiment; two batteries of 3rd R.H.A. (anti-tank). The other battery of 4th R.H.A. and most of the guns of 1st R.H.A. were also available to support the Armoured Division’s demonstration.

  The general plan was for the armoured division in the west and south-west, and the 17th Australian Brigade in the east, to make a demonstration, while the main attack was launched from the south. To soften up the garrison and support these diversions, the Navy and the R.A.F. were to bombard vital areas inside the perimeter during the night immediately preceding the direct assault. Then before dawn, under cover of a heavy barrage, the 126th Australian Brigade was to seize a small bridgehead on the perimeter about three miles east of the El Adem road. With ‘I’ tank and artillery support, this brigade was then to roll up the perimeter and over-run the field guns immediately behind it on either side of the bridgehead towards the El Adem road on the left and the Bardia road on the right. At the end of this phase, with eight miles of the perimeter captured, the way would be open for a deep thrust to the junction of the El Adem and Bardia roads (hereafter to be called the ‘El Adem crossroads’) and onwards into the heart of the defences. This deep thrust was to be made by the 19th Australian Brigade, supported by Macarthur Onslow’s carriers and captured tanks, and by strong artillery concentrations.

  It was expected that at the end of these two phases the 17th Brigade would have swung in from the east and established itself along the Bardia road ready to drive north to the sea; the 19th Brigade would be beyond the El Adem crossroads, command-ing the high ground of the main escarpment and in a position to attack generally west-north-west, while the 16th Brigade – now holding the line of the El Adem road – could roll up the western perimeter.

  These were the planned objectives for the first day, but individual Brigadiers were given freedom to exploit their success and it was hoped that by nightfall the most advanced troops would hold the last escarpment overlooking the town
and harbour. Mackay’s problem was not whether he could take Tobruk, but how cheaply and how quickly. Speed in overcoming resistance, once the perimeter had been breached, was most necessary to scotch any counter-attack and to prevent the enemy demolishing the port installations and water pumping and distilling plants, which were the main prizes of the battle.

  In broad outline the plan was simple, but the most detailed and complex organization was needed to carry out the closely timed programme smoothly and swiftly. Important preliminary problems had to be solved. First, patrols had to test the enemy defences and plot the minefields, booby-traps, anti-tank ditch and barbed wire in the sector where the bridgehead was to be established. Bright moonlight made this patrolling hazardous, for the enemy was very jumpy. He did not patrol far out beyond his wire, but covered the front with heavy fire on the slightest provocation. One particularly sensitive area became known as ‘Jittery Corner’ and the Diggers pictured Italians sitting beside a heap of machine-gun belts with orders to reel them off before dawn.

  The point for the actual break-through was selected only after prolonged reconnaissance. Infantry and engineer patrols early located the shallow section of the anti-tank ditch east of the El Adem road, but the various patrol reports were so conflicting that Mackay eventually sent two lieutenants from his Engineer H.Q. – G. Beckingsale and P. R. Gilmour – to survey the area between Posts 55 and 57, which seemed most suitable. On the night of January 15th–16th these two sapper officers spent more than seven hours with compass and tape, checking bearings and measuring distances until they had accurately plotted the positions of the ditch, minefields and booby-traps. As a result of their work the point of penetration was finally chosen.

  Engineers of the 2/1st Field Company – commanded by Major Alec Torr – continued this good work by finding the way through the enemy’s defensive screen. Two of them, Lieutenant B. Dawson and Sergeant E. J. Johnston, located parts of the ditch that were only two feet deep and had sides so soft that they could be dug in to make ramps for vehicles and tanks. The fields of mines and booby-traps were thoroughly explored by Lieutenant S. B. Cann and Sergeant V. E. Nash. They found that the traps were mounted on small posts eighteen inches above the ground and consisted of canisters filled with explosive and fragments of metal. From the trigger on each booby-trap a trip-line of tough twine ran ankle-high to the post of the next trap, fifteen yards away. Cann and Nash found, however, that by slipping a nail into the slot, from which the Italians had removed the ‘safety pin’, they could neutralize the trap. They taught their men to find these by walking slowly forward with a thin stick held out before them pointing groundwards until the stick touched the trip-line. Then they could follow this along, ‘delouse’ the trap and cut the twine.

  In the minefield they discovered a double row of mines laid as close as stepping stones, but just as easy to delouse as the booby-traps. There was nothing to prevent them lifting the lids of the long green boxes, which housed the mines, and removing percussion caps and detonators. With the same thoroughness the enemy barbed wire was explored by Lieutenant W. A. Davey and Sergeant R. Williams. Back in the field company’s lines sappers then built models of the defences, and test demolitions were carried out on the wire with ‘home-made’ Bangalore torpedoes, consisting of high explosive packed into 12-foot lengths of 3-inch water-pipe. (At Bardia two Bangalores placed side by side had blown 25-foot gaps in the Italian wire despite its great strength.) Meanwhile, the rank and file practised delousing specimen mines and booby-traps brought back by Cann and Nash.

  The second problem was to keep the enemy artillery quiet – especially during the second phase, when the ‘I’ tanks would not be available to help the 19th Brigade. Fortunately the 6th Division’s artillery commander, Brigadier E. F. Herring, had 140 field and 26 medium guns to support the attack.6 The gunners’ main task during the first phase was to silence all enemy weapons in the area where the bridgehead was to be established, and then to put down concentrations in front of the battalions as they pushed east and west along, and inside, the perimeter. Roughly half the guns were allotted to these tasks. The remainder were to silence enemy batteries, especially those which could shell the bridgehead area.

  In the second phase the path of the 19th Brigade’s advance was to be covered by a creeping barrage, and more than a hundred guns were simultaneously to blast the enemy batteries, so that the infantry would not run into point-blank artillery fire as the 17th Brigade had done at Bardia. If the 19th Brigade’s deep thrust was going to succeed the enemy guns must be silenced.

  The barrages on the perimeter posts and the known infantry positions provided no great problem. At Bardia the Australian infantry had followed in as close as 150 yards behind the barrage and overwhelmed the posts before the Italians had recovered from the shelling.

  The counter-battery tasks were not so simple. The enemy battery positions had first to be found and precisely plotted. Captured maps and the R.A.F.’s command of the air made this possible, for excellent maps of the Tobruk defences and details of the garrison were found at Bardia. Even at Sidi Barrani the Italians had with them maps of Tobruk that showed minefields, anti-tank obstacles and battery positions. These positions, as marked on the captured maps, were confirmed by air photographs, and by reconnaissance planes which observed the batteries in action. Once the pilots had ‘fixed’ a battery position they kept close watch to make sure that it was not moved without their knowledge or that it was not a dummy. These reconnaissances were carried out in slow, vulnerable Lysanders, which regularly ‘stooged around’ spotting for half an hour or so at 4000 to 6000 feet in the face of strong ack-ack fire; and yet on only two out of forty-six reconnaissances was a plane hit.

  Having located the enemy barriers, Herring needed to find out what area each was given to shell, and especially what guns could fire on the proposed break-through area, so that all his counter-battery effort could be concentrated on these at the start. Some of this information came from the pilots but most from ‘flash-spotting’. (For flash-spotting, men were posted at a number of positions near the perimeter to watch for the flashes of enemy guns. When they saw a flash each took a compass bearing on the point from which the flash came and noted the time. Simultaneously other observers noted where the shells fell. When all the observers compared their readings they could locate the batteries and thus tell which were most active, and what were their individual areas of fire.) The next phase was to check the accuracy of our fire by ranging on the enemy batteries. This too called for aerial spotting because only one enemy gun position could be seen from the ground. The Italians had much better observation because they had erected many pole and tower O.P.s.

  The gunners had one final problem. They were mostly in positions near the Bardia road, but in order to support the proposed attack they had to move their guns to an area south of the break-through point. To avoid revealing the direction of the attack, however, they could not fire from their new positions until zero hour. This meant that the gunners had to lay their guns on the initial targets by survey and mathematical calculation without any check by ranging.

  The organizing brains behind the artillery plan were Brigadier Herring, a really great commander, and his very able staff officer, Major George O’Brien, a regular gunner. Herring served with the British Army in the Great War, at the outbreak of which he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. As an artillery officer in France and Macedonia he won a D.S.O. and an M.C. Between the two wars he rose to be one of Australia’s leading King’s Counsel. This background helped him considerably in Libya. More than half his gunners were British and at first some regular British artillery commanders were reluctant to serve under an Australian ‘civilian soldier’. But Herring has a quiet, easy manner and his last war service had given him an understanding of the British to which they were quick to respond. After Bardia and Tobruk those officers who had been most sceptical were his strongest champions. In building up the artillery plan Herring brought to bear the same thorough, relentles
s logic and attention to detail with which he had so often built up a legal argument.

  The artillery support that his gunners could give left little doubt that the 16th Brigade would establish the bridgehead and clean up its share of the perimeter, just as it had done at Bardia. Its success there had been the result of thorough training during the previous eleven months in Palestine and Egypt under the command of Brigadier Arthur Allen.

  A Sydney accountant in private life, Allen began his career of active service in 1914 as a platoon commander in the 13th Battalion, but typhoid fever stopped him getting to Gallipoli. Within three years, however, he was commanding the 48th Battalion in France at the age of twenty-four. He gained then a reputation, which his men in this war strongly endorse, of being fair and fearless. He is now one of the most experienced soldiers in Australia. In the Syrian campaign, when he gained command of the 7th Division, he, like Mackay before him, achieved the distinction of having commanded in battle everything from a platoon to a division.

  Although at forty-seven his last-war nickname, ‘Tubby’, was even more appropriate, he was still hard and active. He proved this later in New Guinea by marching with his troops for five days through the back-breaking Owen Stanley Range. His strength in training or in planning an operation was his thoroughness and his capacity for inspiring men to great efforts. Allen was fortunate in having as his right-hand man Major Ian Campbell – probably the most brilliant of all the younger staff officers in the A.I.F. and a commanding personality. He, as his Brigadier was the first to insist, played a very big part in the splendid planning of the assaults at Bardia and Tobruk.7