The tired Aussies took heart to see this, and they shouldered their rifles and slogged on. They would use the same formula to take Tobruk: engineers, artillery, and those eighteen Matildas. A good bayonet with some guts behind it often resulted in surprising results. They would take another 25,000 Italian prisoners in the valuable port, including Admiral Massmiliano Vietina, the commander of the garrison. 208 guns, numerous enemy tanks and trucks were also taken, and many were used to flesh out the thinning ranks of the British 7th Armored division. In all, the British force had ended up capturing 130,000 Italians, losing only 500 men in the process, with 1373 wounded and 55 missing.
It was a triumph of will, determination, and the skill of all who fought that action. But it would not end with Tobruk. O’Connor radioed back to Wavell that he had both ports, and was given a hearty congratulations.
“Best to stand on that ground now and consolidate,” said Wavell. “Your men will be tired, and it will take days to get food and petrol up to the front.”
Everything he said was true, but O’Connor felt that if he could find a way to press on now, he might drive the Italians from Cyrenaica while he had them on the run. Yet his division was in no shape to move. It was scattered all over the desert, with seventy percent of its tanks and vehicles stalled, broken down, or out of fuel. Yet there was still that thirty percent, and he set out now to find it.
Chapter 9
The Italians were beaten. Graziani made one last call on his gilded, monogrammed telephone, sending a frantic message to Mussolini saying that all of Cyrenaica would soon be lost. Electric Beard Bergonzoli was howling about the need for Germany to attack with its entire air force. He was hastily evacuating the last of his Colonial troops from Derna on the north coast, even as the Australians pushed on up that road. As the Italians left, the Arabs drifted into town in their long desert robes, like phantoms emerging from the desert, and they began to loot the place, dragging away anything of value the Italians left behind.
Cyrenaica was a vast peninsula extending from Bardia in the east, then curving up through Derna, and west to Benghazi before it dipped down again to Agadabia on the Gulf of Sirte. The best road was along that curving edge of the coast, for inland the ground rose in the imposing terrain of the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountains.
O’Connor could see that he had one last chance to turn a solid victory into something truly decisive. If he allowed the remaining Italian troops to escape, he would only end up having to fight them another day. So he stared at the map looking for another way west, but found no roads fingering their way into the deserts beyond Bardia and Tobruk. There were goat trails, thin tracks tracing their way through the wadis, remnants of secondary roads that were really nothing more than the tracks of a vehicle that had wandered there, and they were all shifting with the wind on the sand.
So he decided. He would make his own road. He would simply get a column together and point it west, cutting right straight across the wide base of the peninsula, through the open desert. He Found General Michael O’Moore Creagh, commanding 7th Armored, and urged him to move via the thin trail network through Mechili, Msus and Antelat.
“Get west,” he said. “Any way you can. I don’t care if you have to cannibalize every unit you have, but gather any vehicle that has petrol and get them moving!”
Creagh made the decision to give this job to the intrepid commander of his division reconnaissance unit, Lieutenant Colonel John Combe of the 7th Hussars.
“Look Johnny,” he said. “I’m going to cobble together anything that still has petrol and give you a flying column, about 2000 troops in all. You do the flying. Head southwest and position yourself defensively to block the Italian retreat to Tripoli.”
Combe looked at the map, seeing nothing but blank space along the route Creagh was pointing out. “Along what road?” he asked the obvious question.
“There isn’t one,” said Creagh. “At least not anything we would call a road. You’ll just have to make your own. We’ll follow as best we can with the rest of the division.”
“Very well.” Combe smiled. It was a classic cavalry action for his Hussars. He would dash on ahead through the night, braving the unknown, scouting out the way, and when he got there he would be facing off the remnant of the entire Italian 10th Army, perhaps 30,000 men, and he would hold until relieved.
“Got it,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation, and “Combe Force” was born. He had a squadron of his own 11th Hussars in old Morris and Marmon Herington armored cars, supported by B Squadron of 1st King's Dragoon Guards, with a few Mark VI Light tankettes and another handful of armored cars. C Battery, Royal Horse Artillery, had a few 25 pounders, and he had some truck mounted 37mm anti-tank guns from 106th Regiment RHA. The infantry element was the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, motorized infantry.
And off they went into the night, with the armored cars leading and Combe squinting at his map and compass. Just follow a compass heading southwest, he thought, and it was a fitting end to the operation he had led with his Hussars from the very first. They navigated around wadis, over cold stony ground, the vehicles jolting over the rugged terrain, through occasional thickets of desert scrub. Fuel was always an issue, but he reckoned he had enough to get his force to the west coast. Getting back was another matter, but that never entered his mind.
The sun rose on his force half way through that ordeal, and he pushed on, warily watching the sky for any sign of enemy aircraft. None came. The last Italian air strike had managed to zero in on a cluster of 8000 prisoners well behind British lines, where the Italians suffered the ignominious humiliation of being bombed by their own air force.
By noon the column had come up on a low ridge overlooking the road to Benghazi to the north, a place called Beda Fomm. Combe was elated to see that he had beaten the Italians to this place, and he busily set about arranging his small contingent into a blocking force. His few Bren carriers were out of petrol, so he left them behind and brought up his infantry.
“Get the lads dug in along this line,” he said. “We’ll position the artillery and AA guns behind.” He sent one small group up with a few crates of landmines and had them lay down a makeshift mine field, but that was the defense. He had a few mines, a single battalion of British infantry, and the handful of guns and armored cars against anything the Italians had left.
As it happened, he had beaten the Italians to this place by a bare two hours, for his troops soon saw the dust rising from an approaching column. It was led by the 10th Bersaglieri, which blundered into the shallow minefield and stopped with some shock and surprise. They quickly pulled themselves together, however, and organized a strong attack, determined to open the road again for the long column behind them.
Combe opened up on them with his 25 pounders to break up the attack, his gunners putting down disciplined fire on the enemy as they advanced. The Italians fell back, and Combe looked at his watch. He had received word that O’Connor had put together a supporting force of anything else that could move in Creagh’s 7th Armored division. They had been following the tracks his own column had made to navigate their way west, and by 4pm the lead elements arrived from 4th Armored Brigade, just as the Italians were putting in yet another strong attack.
Nearly out of fuel, the few cruiser tanks and Bren carriers that could still move charged boldly forward against what appeared to be an endless column of Italians. Combe began to open up with his 37mm flak guns, and a 40mm Bofors, setting several Italian trucks on fire and causing a panic on the jammed coastal road. Trucks veered away, plowing into heavy sand and bogging down as they came under fire. There were some 20,000 Italians clogging up the road, with fighting troops mixed in with support services, airfield crews, and civilians from Benghazi.
One British squadron of three cruiser tanks, a Bren carrier and one truck mounted 37mm AA gun took off north, running parallel to the coastal road and blasting away at the Italian column for all of ten miles. They stopped to fetch ammo from the supply
truck and found out just how far afield they were, a handful of men stinging the long python that might turn on them at any moment. So they simply turned around, firing at the enemy all the way south again, until they had returned to Combe’s main lines to report the column seemed endless.
If the Italians had massed their fighting troops and made an all or nothing attempt to break through, they would certainly have prevailed. Had these been German troops, or Japanese, they would have brushed the scanty blocking force aside with no trouble. As it was, the British were determined to stop them, and the Italians were not as determined to break out, even though they tried gallantly in several attacks, the last a formation of nearly 100 light and medium tanks.
On they came, the tracks rattling, guns barking at the thin lines of the 2nd King’s Rifle Battalion blocking the way. The British troopers opened up with their Vickers MGs, but it was the 25 pounder artillery that would have to do the job if they were to hold. The artillery crews leveled the barrels of their field pieces and began to pour well disciplined fire on the advancing tanks. Blasting away at them as they charged bravely forward.
“Where’s our bloody tanks?” an artilleryman shouted over the din of the firing?”
“Back there,” the Gunnery Sergeant thumbed over his shoulder. “Out of bloody gas. Now load and fire, boyo, because that barrel is all that’s between you and those enemy tanks!”
The British had nipped at a part of the flank of the Italian column, capturing about 800 prisoners there, mostly service troops. But, as fate would have it, there were three fuel trucks in the column, and several Tommy’s got them back to Creagh’s 4th Armored where the tanks were hastily filling up with the much needed fuel. That was a fortunate find, for the supply column on its way from Bardia with more fuel had run into a sand storm and was now completely lost.
“Nice of the Italians to make the delivery just when we needed it most,” said a tanker. It was just another barb in the Italian 10th Army’s side, a force that was now in the last desperate throes of the most ignominious defeat in the history of Italian arms.
Twenty Italian tanks had managed to break into the lines of the Kings Rifles, but they soon realized that they had no supporting infantry and that the rest of their brigade had been stopped by the artillery fire, well behind them. One British Sergeant took out his pistol and leapt atop an enemy M11/39 tank, rapping on the turret hatch, which, to his surprise, was immediately opened by an ornery Italian Lieutenant.
“Hello mate,” he said calmly. “You and your lads might want to give it up now before those 25 pounders get you bore sighted.”
There was the Lieutenant, sitting behind 30mm armor, with a 37mm main gun and two 8mm Breda machine guns bristling from his upper turret, and he was facing a single British Sergeant with a revolver. He could have slammed his hatch shut, which he should never have opened in the first place, and gunned his engine to continue his attack, but instead he just climbed out of his tank and surrendered. The Sergeant single handedly captured three of the twenty tanks in the lines with nothing more than his sidearm. Seven others were knocked out by the artillery, and the rest turned and fled.
The incident was symbolic of the entire battle, where this vastly superior Italian force seemed not to have the slightest idea of how it should fight the enemy tormenting them in the desert. When this attack failed, the Italians decided to wait for further orders from behind, where Electric Beard Bergonzoli was furious that his escape to Tripoli should be blocked by such a small British force.
Darkness put a merciful end to the chaos of that day. A few British fuel trucks had finally made it all the way from Bardia, and the rest of the tanks that had joined the action were able to refuel. The Division, if it could still be called that, now could count nineteen tanks in the 2nd RTR, and a division reserve of 10 cruiser tanks. The men passed a sleepless night, cold, with the threat of rain on the crisp desert air.
To the north, Bergonzoli was also busy organizing his last attempt to break through at dawn the following morning. He would execute a small flanking maneuver, turning east off the road, and charge in with the last of his tanks, a force some 60 strong. Once they had tied down the British tanks and guns, his infantry would push on up the road, where he hoped his sheer numbers would overwhelm the 2nd King’s Rifle Battalion, still dug in and huddled over tins of Bully Beef and cold water.
The next morning, Brigadier J.A.L. Caunter would organize the defense, setting out his 19 tanks to receive the enemy when they discovered what Bergonzoli was up to. “Blood” Caunter, as he was called, was a man who never flinched from a tough job. When he went fishing, it was not for carp or herring, but sharks, and he would later write a book about angling for the most dangerous sharks he could find in British waters. Now, however, he was angling to catch Bergonzoli’s armor by surprise, and the last tank battle of the campaign was about to be joined near a small rise, studded with the blanched white sandstone dome of an old Arab mosque.
The British called it “the Pimple,” and it would be a landmark for their well rehearsed battle maneuvers. Blood Caunter had the advantage of experience, grit, and good radios in his tanks to coordinate his movements. Even though the enemy outnumbered him three to one, the Italians had no radios, and had to rely on flag signals from one tank formation to another to coordinate their attack.
But on they came, flags fluttering as the first wave of thirty tanks led the attack. Caunter had a bugler take a quick swig from a canteen and sound “stand to,” and the British crews leapt into their well positioned tanks, waiting for the enemy. They would get in the all important first shot, trying to even the odds before the Italians could rush in at close quarters and overwhelm them with sheer numbers. Eight Italian tanks brewed up in the first wave, whereupon Caunter executed a smart backward withdrawal, placing his tanks below the line of the low ridge he had been on.
Thinking they finally had the enemy on the run, the Italians blundered forward, some units stopping near the mosque to await further orders by flag as to where they should go next. Those that saw the signal to move ahead ended up being sky-lined on the ridge, and Caunter’s tanks savaged them again, sending them reeling back towards the mosque.
At this Caunter sent in his reserve of ten cruiser tanks. “All stations, tanks left and attack the pimple. I repeat, tanks left and attack the pimple!”
The cruisers swept away, the tracks churning up the dust and sand as they wheeled in a well coordinated turn, storming in and taking the last of Bergonzoli’s tanks in the flank, smashing up an already badly disorganized formation. It was the final straw, and the Italians had had enough. They were not going to break through at Beda Fomm, and would soon be herded back to become prisoners for the long duration of the war.
Operation Compass had come to its wheezing end, over nearly 800 kilometers of inhospitable desert, against a force five times its size. The brilliance and determination of General O’Connor, and all the Brigadiers that commanded the dogged troops he led into battle, had given Great Britain the one thing it so desperately needed at that time, a victory.
O’Connor’s face would make the news, the energetic British Terrier that had beaten the Italians senseless in the Libyan Desert, defending Egypt and liberating all of Cyrenaica. He had taken two small ports in Bardia, Tobruk and soon added Benghazi as the Australians continued to press the Italians from behind. The airfields he had secured would be vital to the defense of Malta, for when the Italians moved into Egypt, the only way the British could get more Hurricanes to Malta was by carrier. Now they would have plenty of new airfields to leap frog the fighters forward.
It was a jubilant time, and a much needed relief from the anxiety that the Italian advance into Egypt had caused. Secretary of War Anthony Eden took a leaf from Churchill’s book and characterized the victory in a single phrase: “Never has so much been surrendered by so many to so few.”
Churchill himself was a bit more direct: “It looks as if these people were corn ripe for the sickle,” he said
in a congratulatory message to Wavell. The stalwart General placed the praise on O’Connor’s handling of the battle, getting the utmost from the slim resources he had, with imagination, skill and considerable daring. Yet O’Connor never sought the limelight and considered his actions as nothing more than the simple performance of his duty. His face did make the news, however, and more than an admiring population in Great Britain would see the magazine covers. Dark eyes would soon take interest in what was happening there in the Western Desert. A conjunction of minds and forces was soon about to change everything again, as Germany decided how it would now deal with the sudden and complete defeat of the Italians in North Africa.
* * *
Aboard Kirov, Anton Fedorov had been following all these developments closely from any reports Nikolin could fish from the wire traffic. He knew what lay ahead, at least in one telling of these events, and he had been amazed at the integrity of the history concerning O’Connor’s Raid and Operation Compass. He turned to Admiral Volsky, explaining that all this was about to be reversed, and wondering what they could do about it.
“You mean to say that after such a resounding victory this British General will be defeated by the Italians now?” Volsky did not understand.
“No sir, not the Italians, though they will reinforce their position in Tripolitania and continue to fight. If the history continues to hold this course, the British will soon be sent reeling across the desert in retreat by the Germans, and principally by one man, General Erwin Rommel, the man who will come to be called the Desert Fox. He’s out there somewhere even as we speak, waiting in the wings, and he is about to take center stage if things hold together. In fact, O’Connor may soon be captured, along with many other Brigadiers who just fought this victorious battle against the Italians. Britain will lose one of its most daring generals just as a foe of equal skill comes on the scene for the other side. This reversal sets back British plans for half a year, and in this history it could be even more significant, possibly fatal.”
Three Kings (Kirov Series) Page 8