This decision was already out of his hands, as the fires and explosions in the west indicated. There had been similar evidence from the town in the late afternoon. By 4 p.m. the leading companies of the 2/11th had reached the last escarpment overlooking the town without much fighting. They had run into some enemy machine-gun fire, but when the Italians saw they could not stop the advance, they began waving white flags, while the Diggers were still several hundred yards away.
The Australians at Tobruk and Bardia were bitter about this. They had seen their mates hit and they wanted to get their own back. I heard one of them spit out this comment: ‘They keep firin’ till they see they can’t stop you. Then they toss in the towel. Every Itie I’ve seen had a white hankie all ready to wave when we made it too hot. That’s O.K. for them, but when your mates’ve copped it, you want to get stuck into the bastards.’
The mere sight of the 2/11th coming over the last escarpment above the harbour was quite enough for some of the troops in the town. As we drove down the road behind the infantry, two 10-ton lorries came out slowly from Tobruk, packed with Italians driving to surrender with white flags fluttering. They were ‘bailed up’ by Major Gordon Hayman, a 6th Division ordnance officer, who had brought a couple of men forward in search of captured transport. He brandished a Bardia souvenir which he called a ‘repeating shot-gun’, and the leading truck disgorged twenty smiling Italians, each equipped with white handkerchief, water-bottle, blanket and a small bundle of belongings. It was a friendly party. Hayman’s men had trouble in starting one truck; the Italian driver hopped up and started it for them. But when the Diggers drove the trucks off empty, the Italians’ faces fell as they saw they were being left to walk.
From the escarpment we looked down on the harbour and town. On the south shore two beached victims of the R.A.F. were blazing – the 15 000-ton liner Marco Polo, and a smaller freighter, Liguria. A thick plume of black smoke rose from a tanker at a jetty near the town. Farther along the northern shore lay the Italian cruiser San Giorgio. She had been there since the third day of the war, when the R.A.F. damaged her so badly that she had to be beached. Since then she had been patched up to serve as an anti-aircraft ship.
Earlier in the day she had turned her guns inland and shelled our troops and these shells had particularly worried a squadron of the cavalry, under Lieutenant Tom Mills, which had reached the edge of the last escarpment before 11 a.m. His carriers had been driven back by fire from San Giorgio and from ack-ack and coastal guns. The cruiser was now silent, but a coastal battery on the hill behind the town was still very active. Our guns were searching for it, but couldn’t get the range, and the Italians were making the most of their last chance.
In the town itself every few minutes a new explosion and trail of smoke told of more sabotage. But at the water’s edge half a mile from us the two invaluable water distilling plants were intact. One platoon of the 2/11th had been ordered to fight its way through and save the plants at all costs. They had surprised the enemy in the middle of a meal and, having captured 250 prisoners, had polished off the steak and green peas the Italians had prepared for themselves. This was a very minor incident in the day’s fighting, but the capture of these plants undamaged had a significance that no one fully appreciated until Tobruk became besieged.
During the night Italian guns in the west kept up spasmodic fire, while demolition parties continued their work. The Australian and British troops for the most part rested after their day’s fighting and marching. But patrols from the 2/8th and 2/3rd gained some small successes. The 2/8th brought in the remaining Italian general – Della Mura, the western sector commander. The 2/3rd captured two more posts.
Next to the 2/8th, the 2/3rd had the hardest fighting at Tobruk. As we saw earlier, their westward drive along the perimeter was held up about 9 a.m. when they were still half a mile short of the El Adem road. There they were stopped for four and a half hours, until at last another troop of ‘I’ tanks came up, commanded by Captain Philip Gardner, of the 7th R.T.R., who later won a V.C. in the second Libyan campaign.
With these tanks, and thirty-six British 25-pounders, plus some Vickers guns of the Northumberland Fusiliers to support them, the 2/3rd attacked at 1.30 p.m. ‘D’ Company on the left quickly over-ran the three posts east of the El Adem road which had held them up all the morning. Leap-frogging through, ‘A’ Company – now commanded by its sergeant-major, Warrant-Officer Bruce MacDougal – went on to capture two posts west of the road. The tanks then withdrew to refuel, but the infantry continued on, and by 3 p.m. four more posts were in their hands.
From the next two posts, however, and from several battery positions behind them, came such heavy fire that Colonel England decided not to push on, especially as he did not know what was the position on his right flank. The 2/8th Battalion was still fighting hard on the ridge leading to Pilastrino and the 2/1st and 2/2nd Battalions were not yet in position to cover the gap between the 2/8th and the 2/3rd in force.
The 2/3rd soon found that they could not stay undisturbed where they were. Several Italian machine-gun posts kept firing and Sergeant L. L. Stone’s platoon was sent to deal with them. On the way it came under heavy but inaccurate fire from a number of field pieces and machine-guns in a strongpoint behind the forward posts. But when the Italians saw the Diggers steadily coming on they put up white flags. More than five hundred trooped out leaving eighteen field guns and many machine-guns as booty for Stone and his twenty-five men. The Australians then dealt with the machine-guns that had been worrying the forward troops and collected another thousand prisoners – most of them, however, lines of communication personnel, who were being used as infantry. After dark another patrol, led by Sergeant L. M. Long, captured two perimeter posts (34 and 35) which had been resisting strongly at dusk.
The 2/3rd had a quiet night. They deserved it. They had had some hard fighting making the bridgehead, and the Italians in the perimeter posts had generally fought better than at Bardia. In spite of this, the battalion had remarkably light casualties – seven killed and forty-six (including five officers) wounded. These losses would have been much heavier but for the excellent co-operation between the Australian infantry and the British tanks and artillery.
By chance Ward and I found ourselves near the 2/3rd’s positions not long after dark. As we drove back along the road from the town to the El Adem crossroads we overtook a column of prisoners, straggling along the tarmac. An Australian sergeant hopped on the running-board and said, ‘Would you drive us along a bit? I want to head these bloody weaners off down the road to Bardia.’
We drove blindly on for several miles. The prisoners had taken the wrong turn and we ended up at the point where the El Adem road crossed the perimeter. The sergeant had a nice job ahead of him – turning the Italians back to the other road – for the column was nearly four miles long. The leading prisoners were bunched up against the road-block and the weight of the moving column was behind them. They were starting a clamour, calling out ‘Acqua’ and chattering excitedly among themselves. They were scared, for the Australian front was only about a mile west of the road and from that direction came occasional bursts of machine-gun and artillery fire. Burning dumps made the western sky an angry red and every now and then the desert was lit by brilliant flashes as more petrol or ammunition went up.
By this time our truck was wedged tightly against the barricade with prisoners milling round, many of them clamouring for a lift. One of them bobbed up beside me with a roll of notes as ‘passage money’ but we hunted him away. If they had wanted to, these prisoners could have made plenty of trouble. Scattered beside the road were hundreds of rifles and stacks of ammunition and hand grenades. Guarding the Italians, there were no more than a dozen Diggers.
‘B––––d if I know ’ow we can shift ’em,’ said the sergeant, ‘but I’ve got to get ’em back somehow.’
‘We’ll be here all night,’ said Ward, ‘unless one of their own officers can get them moving. I’ll see what I c
an do.’ He found an officer, who could speak French. In a few minutes the Italian was standing on a petrol drum yelling at the mob. With much excited bleating the Italians passed the word along the line and soon they were moving back the way they had come.
As we were about to drive off, an Italian pushed through the crowd to our truck, shouting excitedly – ‘Wounded soldiers. Please take Red Cross – Strada Bardia.’ We followed him to a dug-out where three badly wounded Italians lay. With shouts from the bearers and groans from the wounded, these were eventually settled in the truck and we turned back towards the crossroads where Australians and Italians were carrying on a joint dressing station in a little white stone building. We unloaded our patients there and turned east down the Bardia road. We had to find our camp outside the perimeter, write our dispatches and record them before the second day’s fighting began.
Long before dawn on Wednesday, January 22nd, it was obvious the battle was over. But there were still enough guns and men in the town itself to make its capture expensive if they cared to fight, and especially if San Giorgio were to make a last gesture. During the Tuesday night, however, the crew had set her alight and taken refuge ashore; most of the ack-ack and coastal guns had been blown up as well; oil and ammunition dumps had been fired. By dawn a heavy pall of smoke hung over the town and harbour.
For the day’s mopping up Mackay told the 17th Brigade to clear the wadis between the Bardia road and the sea near the eastern perimeter. The 19th Brigade was sent to occupy the town and the headland behind it, and the 16th to clean up the western sector.
While the 2/4th Battalion was getting ready to advance north and then east into the town, Brigadier Robertson sent two troops of carriers under Lieutenant E. C. Hennessy and Sergeant G. Mills on reconnaissance along the bitumen road that ran round the western end of the harbour and into the town. They had no trouble until Mills’s carrier came to a road-block made of sandbags on the outskirts of the town. With the help of two Italians whom he found sheltering under a nearby culvert, Mills and his crew pulled down the sandbags, while the other carriers covered them. From one carrier a Digger spotted an Italian farther up the street about to open fire on Mills, and with a burst from a Bren made him change his mind. Mills had no Vickers gun on his carrier and so let Hennessy go first.
‘As we drove through,’ said Hennessy later, ‘a truck loaded with Italians was moving back into the town. A couple of bursts from my Vickers stopped it and the occupants were taken prisoner. As the carriers moved towards the centre of the town an immaculately clad Italian officer came to meet us and eventually made me understand that he had been sent to lead us to the naval H.Q., where the admiral was waiting to surrender. There the admiral handed me his sword, but I told him to keep it and sent a carrier back for Brigadier Robertson. Pending his arrival our blokes consumed a goodly quantity of excellent champagne.’
Robertson had anticipated some such collapse, and he and Macarthur Onslow were on the road overlooking the harbour when the carrier came back to report. At once a procession of four or five vehicles, including the Brigadier’s car, filed into the town. One of these carried three Australian correspondents, Gavin Long, John Hetherington and Reg Glennie.4 With Robertson was Brigadier L. J. Morshead, who little knew then how closely his fate in the next eight months would be bound up with that of Tobruk. Morshead’s brigade had been diverted to Britain in the middle of 1940 and it had only recently arrived in Egypt. Keen as ever to be up with the fighting, he had joined Mackay’s forces as an observer. It was fortunate that he did, for he gained direct knowledge of the ground and defences, which was invaluable when he was called upon to command the Tobruk Fortress three months later.
At the door of the naval H.Q. a nervous Italian officer was waiting to take Robertson to a room where Admiral Massimiliano Vietina, commander of the naval garrison, was standing surrounded by a group of senior officers. The building was filled with smoke from documents smouldering in rooms and offices. An Italian naval officer, who acted as interpreter, told Robertson that the Admiral and 1500 officers and men were ready to surrender. In reply Robertson demanded to be told if there were any mines or booby-traps in the town. With his penetrating eye fixed on the Admiral himself, Robertson warned him that if one Australian should be killed, an Italian would pay for it. The Admiral replied that all mines and traps had been ‘sprung’ and added – what was evident from the loud explosions outside – that his men were still ‘springing’ the ammunition dumps.
As soon as Robertson’s interview with the flustered Admiral was over, Macarthur Onslow went into the courtyard and fired half a dozen Very lights into the sky as a signal that the town was in our hands. But the real token of the fall of Tobruk was the hoisting to the head of the flag-pole outside the Admiral’s headquarters of a Digger’s slouch hat.
_____________
1 Where the ground was too hard for digging, the Italians built up stone breastworks or sangars, which they used as fire positions. These were usually six feet by four with an all-round wall two to three feet high.
2 The M13 was the latest medium tank Italy had produced.
3 3 Four officers and 19 other ranks were killed, 5 officers and 76 other ranks wounded.
4 Unfortunately at this important time, Edward Ward of the B.B.C. and I were many miles away trying to find a plane to take our recorded descriptions of the first day’s fighting to Cairo. For the account of what happened in Tobruk on this morning, I am indebted to Gavin Long and Macarthur Onslow.
CHAPTER 4
THE ROUND-UP
TWENTY-NINE hours after the first Australian troops broke through the Italian perimeter Tobruk town fell. But the speed with which the Anglo-Australian forces overwhelmed the garrison and the comparatively few men lost1 in doing so might suggest that the Italians put up merely a token resistance. Any such suggestion would be unjust to commanders and troops alike. The Italians collapsed because they were out-generalled and out-fought. They were crushed mainly by the speed and boldness of the plan and action. The blows struck were so directed and co-ordinated that at most of the Italian positions the battle was lost before they realized it had begun. But where they did gain enough respite to gather strength they fought stubbornly, as the 2/3rd and 2/8th Battalions know. Bold, resolute commanders and determined, well-trained troops win their battles cheaply. There is a dangerous heresy from the last war that small casualties mean poor opposition; they may just as well mean first-class soldiering, as they did in the capture of Tobruk.
The blow delivered by Mackay’s forces on the first day was so severe that enemy resistance on the second collapsed. While Robertson was accepting the admiral’s surrender in the town, the battle was still being nominally fought in the eastern and western sectors of the perimeter, but in these it was only a matter of rounding up the already well-beaten Italians.
In the west the 16th Brigade had a long march collecting prisoners. Barely a shot was fired and the only problem was to move fast enough to forestall further destruction of guns and stores. The Italians had done their sabotage as well as they could. Nearly all petrol dumps and vehicles had been set alight, but there was so much ammunition that they could not destroy more than a fraction of it. About half the field and ack-ack guns had been either blown up or put out of action by the removal of breech-blocks and other vital parts. In many cases, however, these were found buried in the sand near by and the guns were salvaged.
For the most part the surrender was ‘well organized’ and in more than one instance a full battalion marched in waving white flags or handkerchiefs with its colonel in the lead. At many perimeter posts the 2/3rd found the garrisons packed ready to leave. Near the Derna road the Diggers discovered that Free French marines, attached to the 7th Armoured Division, had made a diversionary attack the day before and had now captured the remaining perimeter posts. The battle in the western sector was over.
In the east, the 17th Brigade had rougher country to scour but met no greater opposition. It was expected that
a nest of coast defence guns at Fort Cheteita would show fight, but when Captain J. G. Rowan with ‘C’ Company of the 2/6th Battalion advanced to attack it the Italians ran up the white flag. To the Australians’ amazement, forty officers and four hundred men (about a third of them naval personnel) streamed out. Their fort had been armed with four 6-inch and six 3-inch naval guns and two A.A. guns, but most of them had been destroyed before the Australians got there.
On the eastern perimeter one company of the 2/7th, under Captain J. R. Savige, had a wearying job clambering over rough wadis to collect their prisoners. Finally only two posts remained, but they were situated on a high point on the far side of a wadi 350 feet deep, and the Diggers were in no mood for further foot-slogging. In halting French, aided by a few signs, Savige told the Italian sector commander to get in touch with the two posts and order their garrisons to come in. These orders were conveyed by telephone and soon the last Italians were in the bag – a literal example of ‘having your enemy’s number’.
The 17th Brigade, commanded by Brigadier S. G. Savige,2 after its hard fighting and quite considerable casualties at Bardia, had not been called upon to do anything spectacular at Tobruk. For the most part its battalions had the thankless task of following in the wake of other brigades, mopping up and collecting prisoners. However, it had played a valuable part in the early daylight hours of the first day by providing a spirited diversion and drawing much of the enemy’s fire on to the 2/5th and 2/7th Battalions, which were in positions astride and south of the Bardia road. After this, its battalions had a walking war. The 2/6th, for example, marched sixteen miles on the first day and fifteen on the second, and barely fired a shot.
Tobruk 1941 Page 7