Three Kings (Kirov Series)

by John Schettler

  It was a bold plan, even daring considering how badly outnumbered the British were at that moment. Wavell looked at the map for some time, thinking. Though he had grave reservations, and did not yet grasp how an armored force should be fought in these circumstances, he gave his grudging approval for the plan they would come to call “O’Connor’s Raid,” Operation Compass.

  “If you can give them a good beating it will mean the world to us now,” said Wavell. “We’ve got to get back on our feet. I’ll send the order up through Jumbo just to follow protocol.” He was referring to General Maitland ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, the nominal commander of British troops in Egypt at the time. In spite of his caution, he caught the glint of brilliance in O’Connor’s plan. It seemed rash, even foolhardy, yet if it worked… He turned to O’Connor, taking a long breath. “You may have your battle, General, and god go with you.”

  O’Connor was elated. He had planned everything he would need for this operation, right down to the open desert supply depots he would create, the night marches the troops would make, and every other detail of the attack. He had even put his men through a training exercise where towns were mocked up to mimic the Italian positions as photographed from above. The only question now was whether the men and material he had in hand would be enough to do the job. The equipment O’Connor had at his disposal was not entirely suited to the action he had in mind.

  The 7th Armored Division had only recently taken that new name, having been simply called “The Armored Division” before it arrived in Egypt. The divisional commander’s wife took a stroll through the Cairo Zoo one day, and when she returned home she drew a sketch of a Jerboa which soon was adopted as the divisional flash. Even as the Armored Division took its first number, lucky 7, so it also came to be called the “Desert Rats.” It had only 65 tanks when Italy declared war, but Churchill had labored to send considerably more, and now General Creagh had 275 tanks, a mix of A-9 and A-13 cruiser tanks, and an equal number of Matildas, which were well armored tanks for their time, but not given to the lightning quickness O’Connor was now advocating. Where O’Connor saw his armor as a quick foil to slash and jab at his foe, the Matilda was more of a lumbering battle axe.

  The A12 Matilda II could reach a speed of 16MPH. It was a tank designed for the role the British still had in mind for armor—an infantry support tank—a tank Wavell would understand implicitly. Most were gathered in the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, and realizing their limitations for the maneuver he had in mind, O’Connor would have them operate with the infantry as Wavell might expect. They were his heavy cavalry, to be thrown in at the appropriate time when the infantry had forced a key position to break the enemy line.

  With a small 2lb main gun and a single 7.92 Besa machinegun, the Matilda might pose a threat to enemy infantry if properly employed, and its 78mm armor was impervious to any anti-tank weapon then fielded by the Italians. It was not the dashing armored chariot O’Connor had in mind, but the tank would prove a shock to the Italians when they found they could do very little to harm the Matilda’s waltzing through their positions. The tank would soon be christened “The Desert Queen,” and the Matildas were not alone.

  O’Connor also had about 135 cruiser tanks in the 7th and 8th Hussars. The A-9 and A-10 cruiser had the same 2 pounder gun as the Matilda but, with half the armor at 30mm, it was twice as fast. The A-13 cruiser could make 30mph, and this was the lightning fast jab that O’Connor would put to good use. The rest of O’Connor’s “armor” were older Mark VI light tanks, which were really nothing more than fast machine gun carriers with thin 14mm armor. Yet speed was the order of the day in the general’s mind just then, and so he would gallop ahead with his cruiser tanks and an ad hoc brigade of armored cars, lorried riflemen, and anti-tank guns. O’Connor would put his Western Desert Force to good use, and prove his methods on the field, even with equipment ill-suited for the role he envisioned.

  The plan called for speed, surprise, bold flanking maneuvers and night movement so as to assure he would not be spotted by the Italian Air Force, and it was going produce something much more than even O’Connor had expected.

  Chapter 8

  The attack started when the Blenheims came in at 7:00 scattering loads of bombs along the Italian positions, a rude awakening that was made worse when the monitor HMS Terror opened fire on the coastal encampment with her two big 15-inch guns. The ship was basically a small 7200 ton floating gun turret, a spare that had been built for the battlecruiser HMS Furious before it was converted to an aircraft carrier.

  It had been at Malta earlier, helping to fend off the Italian air attacks there with her anti-aircraft guns. Now it was cruising off the coast in the pre-dawn light, blasting away at the Italian positions and living up to its name in every respect. The shock of 15-inch shells tearing up the stony ground was tremendous, and a rude awakening that day for the Italians. Terror was joined by a few other smaller gunboats that were peppering known artillery and AT gun positions with smaller caliber fire, concentrating on the coastal towns of Maktila and Sidi Barani.

  Further inland at Nibeiwa camp, the Italians heard the skirl and drum of Scottish bagpipes, and the growl of tanks. The surprise was that the attack was not coming from the east as expected, but from the west, behind them! The British had come in through the Enba gap as planned, infiltrating at night behind the Italian encampments, and they were taking them from the rear. Stunned by the sudden attack, the Italians burst out of their field tents and leapt for the cover of nearby slit trenches just as the Matilda’s of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment came rumbling into their camp, along with infantry of the 11th Indian Brigade.

  The Italians had a battalion of light tanks in their Maletti Group, consisting of thirty-five M11/39 medium tanks and an equal number of L3/35 light tankettes. Their crews were just settling in to morning breakfast when the attack came in. Twenty-three of the better tanks had been deployed to guard the entrance to the camp, where no mines had been sewn, and this was where the 43 Matildas of the 7th RTR were heading. They caught the Italian armor completely by surprise, their 2 pounder guns brewing up one tank after another in the opening salvoes, some before the shocked tank crews even had time to reach their vehicles.

  General Maletti ran from his dugout field bunker and was cut down before he could utter a single order, so he did not see the systematic destruction of his unit, wiped out in just ten minutes by the heavier British tanks.

  As the alarm was raised, frightened Italian soldiers grabbed any weapon they could find. Some fought, others ran for cover. Frantic artillery crews tried to turn their field pieces on the British tanks, firing at near point blank range, yet they were astonished to see their rounds simply could not penetrate the heavy armor on the Matildas. Faced with an enemy they could not kill, the camps fell one by one, the first easily, the second more stubbornly, but the outcome was the same. The Matildas would breach the enemy perimeter, and the Indian infantry would follow them in, rooting out one fox hole and machine gun nest after another.

  Along the coast, a mixed force of 1800 troops under Brigadier General Selby was coming up from Mersa Matruh. They had been busy earlier building dummy wooden tanks inland in the desert as a good target for the Italian planes if they showed up, all a part of the deception O’Connor had planned.

  By mid day the inland encampments had fallen and the British were mounting up the infantry in lorries to move on the coastal town of Sidi Barani. The thirsty Matildas had refueled and taken on fresh ammunition, and the bulk of all the 7th Armored Division’s artillery was setting up to support this renewed attack. By nightfall the town had fallen and the British column had reached the sea, bagging several Italian divisions that were now cut off from any escape.

  The Italians began to surrender en masse, causing a snarl as groups of 2000 men might be herded off by no more than a platoon of British soldiers to watch them. The fight had simply gone out of them. They were conscripts, sent by Mussolini to conquer Egypt, but had little real stomach for combat once
cut off and with no sign of relief anywhere apparent.

  “O’Connor’s Raid” had been a resounding success, yet it was not over in spite of an unexpected setback when General Wavell radioed to inform O’Connor that the 4th Indian Division must now be withdrawn for duty in the Sudan.

  O’Connor was surprised by the news, as he had not been told about this in advance, and it was most disconcerting. He would get the 6th Australian Division as a replacement, but not for some days, which meant he would have no infantry support. Any other commander would have stopped his offensive there and then, but O’Connor was determined to exploit his initial successes, and decided to press forward with 7th Armored Division alone. He would soon turn the Italian retreat into a rout of historic proportions, a debacle in the desert not replicated again until the 1st Gulf War when half a million Coalition troops routed the armies of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait.

  But O’Connor did not have half a million men. He had begun his offensive with no more than 30,000 against a force of 150,000 Italians. He had destroyed 73 Italian tanks, 237 artillery pieces and bagged over 38,000 prisoners in the first round of fighting. In doing so he had taken only 70 casualties. Now his numbers were cut in half, but rather than consolidating his gains, he did the unexpected and attacked.

  The Italians had retreated up the road toward their bastion at the small port of Bardia. A rocky escarpment angled in towards the town from the desert, stretching some thirty kilometers to the southeast, creating a kind of stone funnel that any force advancing up the coast had to enter. As they moved forward to the west, the attacker would be compressed by this escarpment, which had only one natural opening at a place called Halfaya Pass.

  To cork this bottleneck, Graziani had rallied a small armored force to defend the pass. The British 3rd Hussars were now in the lead, but they were mainly equipped with the light Mark VI machine gun tankettes, and ran into heavy Italian artillery fire when they reached the town of Bug Bug about half way to the pass.

  “We’ll meet fire with fire,” said O’Connor as he sized up the situation. “Bring up the division artillery. And get word to the sea bombardment force that they are to keep as much fire as possible on that road.”

  Terror was still raining down heavy rounds on the retreating columns of Italian infantry and trucks, raising havoc as they hastened to the safety of their fortified ports at Bardia and Tobruk further west up the coast. Using the superior firepower of his 25 pounder artillery, O’Connor was able to blast his way forward, eventually taking Halfaya Pass and pushing on through Sollum, Now, confronted by an anti-tank ditch and miles of wire and bunkers outside Bardia, he was forced to wait for the Australian infantry. If he took Bardia, he knew the psychological shock of that loss would likely send his enemy on a headlong retreat to Benghazi far to the west.

  Lieutenant General Annibale Bergonzoli's XXIII Corps was digging in, occupying the strong defenses of Bardia with all the troops he could gather as they retreated up the coast, still harassed by British naval gunfire. Mussolini knew the man personally, calling him Barba Elettrica, “Old Electric Beard,” because his whiskers and handlebar mustache jutted so wildly from his face. He sent him a message urging him to hold Bardia at all costs. Bergonzoli’s reply was brave and confident: “We are here in Bardia, and here we will stay.” He would soon command a force of 40,000 men there, making ready behind a double line of fortified concrete positions.

  The task of taking the place with such a small force at his disposal seemed impossible, but O’Connor had no hesitation. He knew that it would need a combined assault by infantry, tanks and artillery to do the job, and he gathered all his remaining Matildas in the 7th RTR and planned to use them as an armored battering ram against the enemy line.

  The engineer sappers of the Australian 16th Brigade finally came up in their trucks, inexperienced, but determined, tough men of the Australian bush who were accustomed to harsh desert conditions. They began unloading equipment, only to find that cases of much needed wire cutters were nowhere to be found. Orders were sent back to find them, and the infantry began to dig in to set up positions for their 3-inch mortar teams when it was discovered that none of the mortars had sites!

  “How are we supposed to fire the damn things if we can’t sight and register on the targets?” A gritty Sergeant put a plain enough point on the dilemma, and a young Lieutenant scratched his head, then found the nearest jeep he could get his hands on and started back down the road to look for the missing mortar sights. He would have to go all the way to Cairo to find them, where the crates sat in a warehouse, overlooked in the hasty forward movement of the brigades.

  O’Connor took advantage of the time to finalize his attack plan and call for both air and naval support. That night Bardia would be visited by Wellington bombers of the R.A.F., which put in a strong attack to soften the enemy defenses, dumping all of 20,000 pounds of bombs. As the night wore on, the Royal Navy put in the second act, with the monitor Terror returning to pound the port defenses in the dark hours before the assault. At one point an old British river gunboat, the Aphis, had slipped into the bay off Bardia, right into the harbor itself, and it was firing away at anything that moved on the shore, with an impertinent and daring display of bravery.

  “Look there,” O’Connor pointed. “If the Navy can get inside the enemy’s camp like that, then we’ll scratch our way in too!”

  General Iven Mackay of the Australian 6th Division was already looking over the ground. Selecting points that seemed suitable for an assault. As dawn came the looming shapes of the big engineers moved like grey shadows over the lunar landscape. These were big, muscular men, and their appearance intimidated the defenders when they saw how doggedly they came forward, moving up to prepare the way for the assault even under sporadic machine gun fire from the bunkers. O’Connor countered this by ordering a heavy covering artillery barrage to suppress the enemy guns. Then the shovels and wire cutters went to work, the aim being to fill in a section of the anti-tank ditch for the Matildas. Bangalore torpedoes were pushed under the wire to blow gaps and detonate hidden mines, difficult and grueling work under enemy fire, but the Aussies persisted.

  It was not long before O’Connor could order up his battering ram, the tanks of the 7th RTR that had led his assault many days ago against the Italian encampments. The men were tired, some near exhaustion as they pushed along the narrow road, nerves jangled by the grating clatter of the tank treads. The Australian infantry had punched through the outer defenses, like ghoulish specters, their rifles and bayonets a frightening shock to the inexperienced Blackshirt militias on the front line. The Italians wanted nothing to do with these brawny, hard looking men, and began to surrender in droves.

  Yet it was not all so one sided. In places the Italians fought hard, a stubborn sergeant holding his men together in a concrete bunker and refusing to give in until the Australian infantry had to work their way up and hurl in grenades. As the first prisoners were led to the rear, O’Connor was surprised to learn what he was up against. The Italians quickly told the interrogators that the port was defended by all of 40,000 men with a brigade of tanks in reserve. It was twice the size O’Connor had estimated, and now his 23 Matildas seemed a small force to consider challenging such a weighty garrison.

  “40,000 men sir! Do you think the buggers are giving us a load of crap?” A staff officer had come in with the report, and O’Connor took the information in, thinking.

  “We shall soon see.” O’Connor smiled, his short white hair catching the morning sunlight at the edge of his officer’s cap.

  “You mean to continue the attack?”

  “What else? The enemy line stretches out for twenty kilometers to the east. They may have 40,000 men, but they can’t all be in one place at the same time, can they? We’ll hit them, just as we planned. See to the orders, Lieutenant.”

  “Sir!” The man clicked his heels and was off, and soon the Matildas were pushing forward towards the gap that had been forced by the Australian infantry. Wh
en the tanks pushed through, they made short work of the pill boxes, blasting at them with their 2 pounder guns. When one post fell, the next bunker adjacent to it decided the wiser thing was to surrender, and the infection soon rippled back from the point of the assault.

  The big Australian infantry rushed forward with the Matildas, Bren gun teams having to fire no more than a few hostile bursts before whole trench lines of Italian infantry would emerge, hands in the air, white flags waving. One Bren team came upon a line of L3 machine gun tanks, twelve in all, their motors revving up as though they were making ready to charge into the battle. More on instinct than anything else, the gunner fired at the closest tankettes, and was astonished when the whole line of twelve gave up and surrendered after a single burst.

  Once the British tanks were ‘inside the wire,’ it had the effect of piercing a balloon. The entire defensive position began to collapse. It was not that the British and Australians were that much better at the art of war, but only that they were that much more determined to prevail. They had the will to win forward, and the Italians did not, preferring a quick surrender and a safe walk to the rear areas, and out of this damnable desert war.

  Bardia fell that very same day, and the shock of its sudden capture by a force a third the size of the garrison rippled across Cyrenaica, sending columns of Italian Colonial infantry streaming west towards Benghazi. Old Electric Beard had been given a close shave, and now it was on to Tobruk, the first real prize O’Connor had in mind. It would offer a great natural harbor to supply his forward move from that point, but by the time he got there the 7th RTR was down to only eighteen Matildas.

  Several tanks had broken down, others had simply run out of fuel and ammunition, still others had run over a mine or slipped a metal tread and were stuck in the sand, no more than metal bunkers now. Yet O’Connor would not stop. He was out among the men, urging them on, commandeering any truck that seemed idle and stuffing it full of riflemen before he rapped his riding crop on the hood and pointed out the direction he wanted it to go. His energy seemed boundless, and he moved so quickly that he seemed to be everywhere at once.