Tobruk 1941

by Chester Wilmot

  1. You will take over command of all troops in Cyrenaica. Certain reinforcements have already been notified as being sent you. You will be informed of any others which it is decided to send.

  2. Your main task will be to hold the enemy’s advance at Tobruk, in order to give time for the assembly of reinforcements, especially of armoured troops, for the defence of Egypt.

  3. To gain time for the assembly of the required reinforcements it may be necessary to hold Tobruk for about two months.

  4. Should you consider after reviewing the situation and in the light of the strength deployed by the enemy that it is not possible to maintain your position at Tobruk for this length of time, you will report your views when a decision will be taken by G.H.Q.

  5. You will in any case prepare a plan for withdrawal from Tobruk, by land and by sea, should withdrawal become necessary.

  6. Your defence will be as mobile as possible and you will take any opportunity of hindering the enemy’s concentration by offensive action.

  After lunch Wavell left for Cairo. Next day he was in Greece taking the load of further great decisions on his willing shoulders. During that first year of war in the Middle East he had a tremendous burden to carry. He was short of men, weapons, tanks and aircraft. His command extended from the Indian Ocean to the mid-Mediterranean, from Central Africa to the Central Balkans. Few generals can have had such a vast and varied command. Yet by plane he kept in close personal touch with all fronts. His great strength lay in his capacity for prompt decision, his grasp of broad essentials, his determination and his calm. It is true that he made some miscalculations, and these were chiefly the result of a tendency to underestimate the speed of enemy preparations and moves. Later he frankly admitted this4 – and in admitting it revealed an important element in his greatness.

  When he left Tobruk that afternoon Wavell still hoped the Axis advance might be held along the general line – Tobruk–El Adem – and that landward communication with Egypt would not be cut. Nominally he had left some discretion to Lavarack as to whether Tobruk could be held, in the light of the strength Rommel mustered, but in fact further withdrawal was out of the question, because of the shortage of transport.

  That afternoon Lavarack made a quick reconnaissance of the Italian defences, arranged for Morshead to bring the rest of the 9th Division inside the perimeter the following night, and organized staffs from scattered units to take command of artillery, tanks, and ack-ack defences. There was still no word from Gambier-Parry, but Germans were reported to be coming down the road from Derna and across the desert from Mechili in force and concentrating southwest of Acroma. The holding of Tobruk had now changed from a strategic desirability to a tactical necessity. There was no alternative but to stand and fight.

  None welcomed this more than the troops. For a week they had been retreating almost without a fight, yielding to some unseen, undefined pressure. They did not know why they had withdrawn and they were bewildered and bitter, because reverse had been inflicted on them through no fault of their own.

  What they felt was well summed up in the words of two Diggers. One of them, Corporal G. H. Fearnside of the 2/13th, wrote in his diary: ‘By the time we got to Tobruk our nerves were ragged. All the way back from Regima we’d steeled ourselves to action which never came and every soldier knows that the waiting before the attack is worst.’

  Another Digger – Sergeant F. H. Legg of the 2/48th Battalion – wrote much the same thing: ‘We came to Tobruk in pretty poor shape. For eight days and nights we’d been out in the desert on the move (chiefly in the wrong direction) and always on the verge of action but always denied the opportunity of “having a go”. We’d experienced our first taste of bombing and shelling. We’d had our first casualties, but most of us hadn’t struck a blow.’

  This feeling of bitterness produced among the troops an itching for retaliation; an urgent desire to show that this withdrawal was not typical of the 9th Division, and that the 9th was at least as good as any other Australian division. As one Tobruk officer put it: ‘We couldn’t let it be said that the 9th had lost what the 6th had won.’

  _____________

  1 This officer was later captured at Tobruk and told this story.

  2 Brigadier Ray Tovell, a Melbourne chartered accountant, enlisted as a private in the 1st A.I.F., but rose to be Brigade Major of the 4th Brigade by 1917 and well deserved the D.S.O. he was awarded that year. Orthodox but not rigid in outlook, and affable in manner, he proved a competent and popular commander.

  3 An armoured division’s Support Group then consisted of two motorized infanty battalions, a field regiment, an anti-tank battery an A.A. battery, some engineers, signals and medical personnel, and a group H.Q.

  4 I was able to appreciate the quality of his frankness at an interview he granted me shortly before he left for India, when he spent more than an hour discussing a broadcast script and outlining the background of his Middle East campaigns.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE FORTRESS AND ITS GARRISON

  ON April 8th the Khamsin, that fury which periodically scourges the drifting surface of the desert into blinding duststorms, wreaked its will. All through that day and the next the troops at Tobruk cursed the dust, little knowing that it was a blessing in disguise. In the battle against time the storm caused more delay and dislocation to the enemy’s preparations for attack than to those of the garrison for defence. In Tobruk urgent tasks fully occupied both Lavarack and Morshead. The 9th Division had withdrawn in good order with comparatively few losses – less than 500 killed or captured – but its units had never even trained together, and it had no field artillery of its own. British artillery regiments were now allotted to it, but these and its own units had to be rallied into a co-ordinated fighting formation and established in battle position. This took the full attention of Morshead and his staff.

  Lavarack made Morshead responsible for the defence of the Tobruk perimeter, but kept under his own direct command the 18th Brigade, and Gott’s Support Group at El Adem. Gott was ordered to delay as long as possible any Axis attempt to sweep past Tobruk and cut the Bardia road, but when he could no longer hold the enemy he was to retire to the frontier. There linking up with the 22nd Guards Brigade, he was to harass the Germans and Italians and draw off from Tobruk as much of their force as he could.

  The immediate problem was how to dispose the forces inside Tobruk. Because of the comparatively few infantry available – only four brigades – Wavell had suggested that the Tobruk garrison should take up a shorter line than that of the Italian-built defences on the 30-mile outer perimeter and should hold an inner perimeter, about fifteen miles long, which was shown on some Italian maps. The weakness in the Italian defence had been that so much of their infantry was tied up holding the outer line of posts that all too few were left to provide either defence in depth or an adequate reserve for counterattack. These weaknesses had to be overcome, for Rommel could not be prevented from breaking through the perimeter at any one point. Tobruk could be held only by a defence that had depth and mobility.

  Reconnaissance of the defences with Morshead and the brigade commanders on the morning of April 9th, however, convinced Lavarack that the old Italian perimeter was the only possible line. There was in fact no inner perimeter and, even though the outer defences were not strong, they were continuous and had a series of posts covering a barbed-wire fence and either an anti-tank ditch or minefield. The Italian minefield had been disarmed around most of the perimeter, but it was not a long job to lay new mines or rearm those which were still in position. The posts were well sited for observation and had good fields of fire, though they were too far apart to stop enemy infiltration. Moreover, if any shorter line were held, enemy field guns could shell the harbour and possibly make it unusable.

  To meet these problems, the perimeter was manned by only seven of the garrison’s thirteen infantry battalions,1 and each of these seven had a reserve company in a dug and wired position half a mile behind the concre
te posts. This meant that perimeter companies usually held a front of over a mile, which was considerably more than the average battalion front in France in the Great War.

  The defence system made up of the perimeter posts and the reserve company positions became known as the ‘Red Line’. It was held not by numbers, but by fire-power. Concrete posts, which the Italians had garrisoned with twenty-five – and even as many as fifty – men were now held by ten or fifteen Australians, but their fire was very much increased by the use of captured weapons. One typical post that I saw was held by fourteen men. They had a 47 mm Italian anti-tank gun, three machine-guns (two of them captured), an anti-tank rifle and a tommy gun. There was scope for all these weapons, because of the flatness of the desert, but to make room for them Morshead ordered the preparation of new fire positions in the concrete posts. Where posts were too far apart, new positions were dug between them. In this way the garrison used fewer men and yet could put down heavier fire than the Italians had done.

  About two miles behind the Red Line, the garrison eventually constructed a second defence system, which became known as the ‘Blue Line’. This consisted of a continuous minefield covered by barbed wire and by fire from anti-tank and machine-guns located in a series of dug, wired and mined strongposts, each held by a platoon, roughly every 500 yards. Each of the forward brigades had two battalions in the Red Line and one in the Blue Line.

  The main job of the battalions in the Blue Line was to stop any deep penetration by forces which broke through the perimeter. They provided a counter-attacking reserve within their brigade area and local protection for the field guns behind them. In particular they covered the reserve minefields with fire, so as to prevent enemy sappers clearing a passage for tanks.

  To provide depth in the defence against tanks, minefields were eventually laid in both the main lines, as well as in the area between them, and behind the Blue Line. In the end there were minefields everywhere. Even the engineers could hardly keep track of them all, and the garrison lost a number of trucks on its own mines. The anti-tank guns were similarly distributed through the Red and Blue lines. (The garrison ultimately had 113 anti-tank guns, half of them captured; fourteen disabled tanks were also dug in for anti-tank defence.) Thus these lines comprised a series of inter-dependent posts, each one covering its front and the posts on either side, and designed to deal with frontal attacks and also with those from flank or rear. These defences formed not two thin lines held by men, but a deep belt held by fire. This belt did not end at the Blue Line. Behind it again were the field guns – nearly a hundred of them if we count the captured Italian pieces, but all too few to cover a 30-mile front. They were, however, the core of the anti-tank defence, for most of them were 25-pounders, which are deadly weapons against tanks at close range.

  Still farther back was the mobile reserve for counter-attack. This consisted of a motorized infantry brigade with its three battalions so placed that one was at each of the three main crossroads – the El Adem crossroads, Pilastrino, and Airente (the junction of the Derna and Pilastrino roads); twenty-four anti-tank guns mounted on the backs of 30-cwt. trucks; and last but not least, the tank reserve. On April 10th this was pitifully small; the garrison had only four ‘I’ tanks and twenty-three cruisers, plus twenty obsolete light tanks, which were useless in any armoured battle.

  The other mobile element in the defence was a fast-moving force of armoured cars, light tanks and Bren carriers, organized for action against troops landed by parachute or from the sea. Finally, there were the anti-aircraft batteries – mostly concentrated round the harbour. Their primary role, of course, was to deal with aircraft, but almost every ack-ack gun-position carried some armour-piercing ammunition and had an anti-tank task. Thus, even if some tanks did manage to get through the outer belts of minefields and fire from anti-tank and field guns, they would still have to silence the ack-ack guns before they could reach the harbour and the town. Tobruk’s greatest weakness was in its coastal defences. The garrison had neither the men nor the weapons for adequate protection on the beaches, and the only guns available to deal with a sea-borne attack were two well-worn Italian 149 mm coastal guns and half a dozen pieces of light artillery suitable only for beach defence. The real defence of Tobruk’s twenty miles of coastline was the Royal Navy, but even it could never have stopped small raiding parties sneaking along the coast by night.

  At the outset Morshead called his commanders together and said: ‘There’ll be no Dunkirk here. If we should have to get out, we shall fight our way out. There is to be no surrender and no retreat.’ He impressed on every man that, no matter where he was or what his job might be, he was first and foremost a fighter; that, if the enemy were to break through, no section post, no gun position was to yield a yard. Should the enemy get past the Red Line the men there were to hold their posts and rely on those in the Blue Line and the mobile reserve to deal with any penetration. If odd tanks or stray parties of infantry managed to pierce the Blue Line or evade the mobile reserve, then cooks, clerks, batmen – all who could handle a weapon – were to tackle them. This was Tobruk’s strength when the British and Australians held it. The Italian defence had been a superficially strong outer shell. Once that was pierced, the fortress was cracked wide open. But the Anglo-Australian defence was a nest of cells – cells of minefields and guns manned by men who were ordered to stand and fight and who did. Tobruk was organized as a fortress from the perimeter to the sea.

  This elaborate defensive system took months to complete, but the troops, knowing that at last they were to fight, worked magnificently to repair the Italian defences and make new ones. Nevertheless, it was a motley collection of units that gathered inside Tobruk on April 9th and 10th. Apart from the British gunners and tankmen, few had seen any action, and the garrison contained a large number of miscellaneous units, many of which were completely disorganized after the withdrawal.

  The final count showed more than 40 000 men inside the perimeter. On April 12th there were some 5000 Axis prisoners, and 35 307 British, Australians and Indians, but many of these were not frontline troops. There were far more Ordnance, Army Service Corps and medical personnel than the garrison needed; five British engineer companies, which had been working on roads and installations throughout Cyrenaica; hundreds of Air Force ground staff, and a number of stragglers. Fortunately the fighting units had reached Tobruk in good order, and they were now joined by two urgently-needed regiments of Royal Horse Artillery, which were rushed up from Egypt.

  Before the end of April some 12 000 troops and airmen and more than 7000 prisoners of war were withdrawn from Tobruk by sea and the final streamlined garrison – stripped down to essential personnel – from early May to late August averaged little more than 23 000 and fell as low as 22 026 in July. Of these nearly 15 000 were Australians and about 500 were Indians. The rest came from Great Britain and she has probably never been served by finer troops.

  The main Australian formations2 were the three infantry brigades of the 9th Division, the 20th, 24th and 26th, and the 18th Brigade of the 7th Division. Of these the 18th was at first kept in reserve and the others disposed in the Red and Blue lines as follows: western sector, 26th Brigade; southern or El Adem sector, 20th Brigade; eastern or Bardia road sector, 24th Brigade. In the west near the sea, the 18th Indian Cavalry was soon brought in to provide another front-line battalion, and a similar position in the east was held by three scratch companies raised from surplus Army Service Corps personnel. They were most valuable throughout the defence, but particularly at this stage, for the 24th Brigade had only two battalions. (Its other battalion, the 2/32nd, arrived on May 4th.) The A.S.C. later provided much-needed reinforcements for infantry battalions in the hottest sector of the Tobruk front. As a reward, those who fought as infantry were given the right to keep and carry the bayonets they had won in the field. They value this highly, for bayonets are not issued to the A.S.C.

  In addition to these infantry brigades, the A.I.F. provided all the field co
mpanies (engineers), two-thirds of the anti-tank gunners, an A.A. battery and later a field regiment. The Tobruk hospital, the casualty clearing station and the field ambulances were also Australian. Nearly all the field and ack-ack gunners, a third of the anti-tank gunners, all the tank crews and the Vickers gun battalion, were British. There was thus a convenient division of labour between the Diggers and the Tommies. It is broadly true that while the perimeter was occupied almost exclusively by Australians, the bulk of the supporting weapons were manned by British troops. This was an ideal combination. The dash and daring needed by the front-line troops – particularly in their patrolling – was provided by the Australians. The steadiness and dogged reliability, required especially of the field and ack-ack gunners, came from the British.

  The complete understanding between Digger and Tommy gave an inspiring unity to the garrison. From April until the end of August, Australians comprised two-thirds of the garrison, but in spite of this it is doubtful if they played a more important part than did the British. When the defence began the Australians had seen virtually no action – many were raw troops. But the British – and especially the gunners of the R.H.A. and the 51st Field Regiment, the tankmen and the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, who had fought through the first Libyan campaign in support of the 6th Australian Division – provided a hard-bitten core of experience. What their steadiness meant to the garrison in the early days can hardly be over-stressed.

  The Australians were quick to appreciate this and no other Middle East front saw co-operation so close or understanding so complete. The Diggers and Tommies went through the fire together and learned to know and respect each other’s worth. Australian troops gained the limelight at Tobruk mainly because they had the more spectacular tasks. Theirs were the infantry patrols that carried out the dramatic raids on enemy positions; but just as important as these was the staunch, unobtrusive work done by the British gunners who beat off the German tanks and Stukas.