The Battle of Gazala begins

On 26 May 1942, after almost four months of stalemate on the Gazala Line, Colonel General Erwin Rommel’s German-Italian Panzer Army Africa went over to the attack. In the afternoon Italian infantry assaulted the centre of the British positions frontally, and after dark the columns of the German and Italian mobile divisions set off southwards to outflank the line beyond its last strongpoint, at Bir Hakeim. On the morning of 27 May they emerged in the rear of the British Eighth Army, smashed one brigade, scattered another and captured the commander of an armoured division. The Battle of Gazala had begun; in June it would bring Rommel Tobruk and a field marshal’s baton.

Rommel’s preparations

Rommel was already preparing a new offensive at the beginning of May. The sequence of operations in the Mediterranean had been settled at Hitler and Mussolini’s meeting near Salzburg on 29–30 April: at the end of May Rommel was to defeat the Eighth Army and take Tobruk, then halt on the Egyptian frontier, after which the air force was to turn to an airborne landing on Malta. This plan was pushed by the chief of the Italian Supreme Command, General Ugo Cavallero, and by the commander of the German air forces in the south, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, whose air raids on Malta had allowed more supplies to be shipped to Libya in the spring than in the winter: an average of some 60,000 tonnes a month. At the beginning of May Rommel received permission to attack and began stockpiling fuel, ammunition and water.

The Germans named the operation as a whole Theseus. Rommel knew that time was against him, for American tanks and guns were on their way to Egypt and the British were preparing an offensive of their own, for which Churchill was pressing Auchinleck. He decided to strike first, and not frontally. The Gazala Line was a chain of fortified infantry brigade “boxes”, linked by extensive minefields, running from the coastal settlement of Ain el Gazala some 70 km into the desert. At its southern end, at Bir Hakeim, stood the 1st Free French Brigade under General Marie-Pierre Kœnig. Beyond it lay nothing but open desert.

The plan provided for General Ludwig Crüwell’s group – the Italian X and XXI Corps with a leavening of German units – to attack the centre and north of the line frontally, to convince the British that the main blow was coming there. Meanwhile the mobile forces – the Afrika Korps with the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions, the Italian XX Corps with the Ariete Armoured Division and the Trieste Motorised Division, and the German 90th Light Division – were to go round Bir Hakeim from the south, wheel north and within a single day destroy the British armoured divisions behind the line. The 90th Light Division was to take the widest arc, towards El Adem near Tobruk, to cut the supply route and pin down the garrison. On the second day the boxes on the line were to be attacked from two sides, and then Tobruk was to fall. The southern outflanking variant was code-named Venezia; according to some studies this was also the code word that set the march in motion on the evening of 26 May.

Forces and commanders

Panzer Army Africa numbered about 90,000 men and about 560 tanks: more than 330 German, including only 19 new Panzer IIIs with the long 50 mm gun and about 40 Panzer IVs, and about 230 weaker Italian tanks. The British had numerical superiority. Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie’s Eighth Army numbered some 100,000–110,000 men and about 850 tanks in the front line, with more in reserve. The line from the coast was held by Lieutenant General William Gott’s XIII Corps with the 1st South African Division and the British 50th Division; behind it stood Lieutenant General Willoughby Norrie’s XXX Corps with the 1st and 7th Armoured Divisions. The 2nd South African Division was in Tobruk, and the 5th Indian Division in reserve.

What was new on the British side was the equipment. In the spring 6-pounder anti-tank guns had arrived, together with 167 American M3 medium tanks, known in their British version as the Grant, with a 75 mm gun in the hull and a 37 mm gun in the turret. For the first time the British had a tank that could hit German vehicles at the ranges at which those vehicles were themselves dangerous.

Thanks to decrypted German signals and air reconnaissance the British knew that the attack was imminent. They did not know where the main blow would fall. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, considered an attack on the centre of the line more likely, though he did not rule out an outflanking move; he advised Ritchie to keep his armoured divisions together. Ritchie, however, deployed his armoured brigades widely so that they could respond to either variant, and the extreme south was covered only by the forward motor brigades of the 7th Armoured Division.

26 May: the feint and the night march

On the afternoon of 26 May, after an artillery preparation, at around 2 p.m. Crüwell’s Italian divisions advanced on the positions of the South Africans and the 50th Division. The attack was a feint, but it was carried out so as to look real. During the day the main forces of the Afrika Korps and XX Corps moved in full view of British observers towards the centre of the line, to strengthen that impression.

After dark the columns turned about. Some 10,000 vehicles set off south-eastwards in five groups, with Rommel travelling in the Afrika Korps column. They drove through the night, by the light of a moon approaching the full, on prescribed bearings. English-language writers later called this march “Rommel’s moonlight ride”. During the night British armoured cars reported the movement of large columns in the south, but headquarters read these reports as a feint or failed to draw conclusions from them in time.

27 May: the outflanking move

At dawn on 27 May the Axis mobile forces were already south and east of Bir Hakeim. In their path, a few kilometres south-east of the French box, in the area known as Point 171, Brigadier A. A. E. Filose’s 3rd Indian Motor Brigade had dug in the day before. At 6.30 a.m. Filose reported that he had in front of him “a whole bloody German armoured division”. In fact it was Ariete with part of the 21st Panzer Division. The Indian motorised cavalry regiments, which had not yet received all their anti-tank guns, held out for several hours and destroyed or damaged several dozen tanks, but the position was overrun. According to Italian figures Ariete lost 23 tanks, some of them repairable. The brigade’s losses are estimated at several hundred killed and wounded and about a thousand prisoners. Among those captured was the seventy-year-old Admiral Sir Walter Cowan, who despite his age was fighting as a volunteer with one of the Indian cavalry regiments.

It is often written that Rommel took some six hundred Indians prisoner and then turned them loose into the desert, and that they made their way to Bir Hakeim. And indeed, after about two days the Germans and Italians, who were themselves short of water, released some six hundred prisoners from the brigade, and these reached the French position. About two hundred more were freed by a British column. In this way some eight hundred men returned to the brigade, which was being re-formed in the rear.

That same morning one of Ariete’s tank battalions attacked Bir Hakeim itself straight off the march. It ran into minefields and the fire of the French 75 mm guns and lost, according to French accounts, more than 30 vehicles. Kœnig’s box, which Rommel had expected to take within a few hours, was to hold out until 11 June.

Further east the 15th Panzer Division clashed with the 7th Armoured Division’s 4th Armoured Brigade, sent to help the Indians. Here the Grants went into action for the first time. The German tank crews were surprised by the range and power of their 75 mm guns, but the British brigade fought alone, without support from its neighbours. The 8th Hussars lost almost all their tanks, the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment a dozen or so Grants, and the remnants of the brigade withdrew eastwards towards El Adem. On the far right wing the 90th Light Division drove the 7th Motor Brigade back from Retma and in the morning came upon the 7th Armoured Division’s advanced headquarters at Bir Beuid. The headquarters was scattered and its commander, Major General Frank Messervy, was captured. He removed his badges of rank, passed himself off as a batman and escaped at the first opportunity, returning to his own lines the next day. For two days, however, the division was without effective command. The 90th Light Division reached El Adem and seized the supply dumps there.

Rommel’s first disappointment

On the afternoon of 27 May fortune turned. The panzer divisions of the Afrika Korps, heading north towards the Trigh Capuzzo track and the crossroads known as Knightsbridge, ran into the 1st Armoured Division and the infantry tanks of the 1st Army Tank Brigade. In fighting with the 2nd and 22nd Armoured Brigades, which themselves lost several dozen tanks, the Germans suffered heavy losses. By some estimates Rommel lost as much as a third of his tanks on the first day. By evening his forces were strung out over several dozen kilometres behind the British line, cut off from their own supplies by the minefields and the untaken Bir Hakeim, while the fuel and ammunition columns, which had to follow the same roundabout route, were attacked by British columns and aircraft. Rommel later admitted in his memoirs that the plan to destroy the British armour on the first day had failed.

The British did not exploit the moment. Their armoured brigades went into battle one after another rather than together, and on the evening of 27 May the prevailing conviction at Eighth Army headquarters was that Rommel had walked into a trap. It was the beginning of the fighting that the British soon came to call “the Cauldron”.

Grants, not Shermans

Under 27 May some war chronologies record that the British used American Sherman tanks against Rommel. This is a mistake. Gazala saw the debut of the American M3 – Grants and a few Lees – not the M4 Sherman. In May 1942 there were as yet no Shermans in Africa. Roosevelt promised Churchill several hundred of these tanks in June, when the news of the fall of Tobruk reached Washington, and they first went into action with the Eighth Army at the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942.

The Grant was a stopgap: tall, with its main gun mounted in a hull sponson with a limited field of fire, so that it had to expose itself in order to shoot. Even so, its 75 mm gun, which could also fire high-explosive shells, gave the British what they had lacked during Operation Crusader and Rommel’s second offensive: the ability to take on German tanks and anti-tank guns at long range.

Place in the war

The first two days of the battle showed both faces of Gazala. Rommel had surprised his opponent and smashed the forward brigades and a divisional headquarters, but he had not achieved his main aim: the British armour had not been destroyed, Bir Hakeim was holding out, and his divisions were in the enemy’s rear without a secure supply route. In the following days he had to go over to the defensive in “the Cauldron” and open passages for himself through the British minefields. Because Ritchie failed to concentrate his superior strength, Rommel regained the initiative. On 1 June he destroyed the British 150th Brigade, on 5–6 June he repulsed a British counter-attack, on 11 June he occupied Bir Hakeim, abandoned by the French, and on 12–13 June he smashed the British armoured brigades at Knightsbridge. On 21 June he took Tobruk, captured some 33,000 prisoners and was made a field marshal.

Instead of halting on the frontier, as agreed in April, Rommel drove deep into Egypt, and the landing on Malta was postponed. Auchinleck relieved Ritchie of command and himself halted Panzer Army Africa at El Alamein in July. The attack of 26 May was thus the beginning of the Axis’s last great victory in North Africa and also of a march that carried it to the limit of its capabilities – some 100 km from Alexandria, at the end of a supply line even longer than the one that had halted it at Gazala in the winter.