The Battle of Mersa Matruh

At the end of June 1942 the army of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, following up its success after the capture of Tobruk, reached Mersa Matruh – a small, fortified port on the Egyptian coast, some 190 km east of the Libyan frontier and less than 300 km by road from Alexandria. In the fighting of 26–29 June the British Eighth Army, much stronger but organisationally in disarray, lost yet another battle: its two corps acted without co-ordination, X Corps allowed itself to be cut off in the fortress and had to fight its way out by night across the desert, and several thousand soldiers went into captivity. The fall of Mersa Matruh is usually recorded under 28 June. By that day the port was already cut off and its garrison was preparing to break out of the encirclement, but the Germans and Italians did not occupy the town itself until the morning of 29 June.

The pursuit into Egypt

After the surrender of Tobruk on 21 June, Rommel, promoted to field marshal the next day, obtained the consent of Hitler and Mussolini to pursue into Egypt instead of halting on the frontier and making a landing on Malta. His army was utterly exhausted. According to German reports from the end of June, the Afrika Korps had only some 50–60 serviceable tanks, and the 90th Light Division numbered fewer than 2,000 men. It moved largely in captured British lorries and on fuel from Tobruk. Rommel was counting on speed: he wanted to catch the Eighth Army before it could rally behind a new defensive line.

On the British side the plan to defend the frontier at Sollum collapsed before it could take effect. Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie concluded that without tanks he could not hold a position open to the south, and decided to fall back another 190 km to Mersa Matruh, where fortifications had stood since 1940. The Axis forces crossed the frontier on 23 June and pressed on almost without a fight, harried only by the British air force, which was now operating close to its bases. On 25 June an air attack on a column of the Italian XX Corps killed its commander, General Ettore Baldassarre, and his artillery commander.

On the same day General Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, who as early as 22 June had offered his resignation to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, without effect, relieved Ritchie and took command of the Eighth Army himself. He also changed its task. He judged that in view of the enemy’s superiority in tanks and experience he could not fight a decisive battle at Mersa Matruh, because Rommel would once again either break through in the centre or go round the open southern flank. The most important thing was to preserve the army. At Matruh and further east it was to fight a delaying action without letting itself be surrounded, and ultimately to make its stand on the position being prepared at El Alamein, between the sea and the Qattara Depression, impassable to tanks.

Two corps

The orders arrived in the middle of a regrouping and brought chaos. The fortress itself was held by the 10th Indian Division, and to the east of it, along the coast, stood the 50th Division – both in Lieutenant General William Holmes’s X Corps, whose headquarters had only just arrived from Syria. To the south, beyond two escarpments running parallel to the coast, stood Lieutenant General William Gott’s XIII Corps: the remnants of the 5th Indian Division (in practice only the 29th Brigade); the 2nd New Zealand Division of General Bernard Freyberg, freshly brought over from Syria, which took up positions on the escarpment at Minqar Qaim; and further out in the desert the 1st Armoured Division with about 160 tanks, including some 60 Grants. The gap between the corps was covered only by a thin minefield and two small columns from the 29th Indian Brigade.

On paper the Eighth Army was considerably stronger than the attackers. Auchinleck ordered that when one corps was attacked, the other should strike the enemy in the flank. At the same time both were to avoid encirclement at all costs. The commanders therefore did not know whether they were meant to fight or to withdraw, and communications between and within the corps were poor.

26–27 June: a wedge between the corps

Rommel knew the British dispositions only approximately – his reconnaissance could not keep pace with the rapid pursuit. He believed that four infantry divisions stood at Mersa Matruh and the remnants of the tanks to the south. He decided to push the tanks away and cut off the infantry in the fortress. The attack, delayed by a lack of fuel, began on the afternoon of 26 June. The 21st Panzer Division and the 90th Light Division passed through the weak minefield in the centre and scattered the columns covering it. On the upper plateau the 15th Panzer Division was held up by British tanks.

On 27 June the 90th Light Division overran a battalion of the 50th Division south of Matruh, but then stalled under the fire of that division’s artillery. Rommel personally led the 21st Panzer Division eastwards along the New Zealanders’ front and came out in the rear of their position at Minqar Qaim, scattering the division’s transport columns. The New Zealanders beat off frontal attacks without difficulty, but their line of retreat had been cut. That day Freyberg was wounded in the neck by a shell splinter and handed over command to Brigadier Lindsay Inglis. In the evening Rommel pushed the 90th Light Division further north, and after dark it cut the coast road east of Mersa Matruh. X Corps was cut off.

In reality it was Rommel who was in a dangerous position. The 90th Light Division stood in a narrow, isolated wedge by the road; the 21st Panzer Division was several dozen kilometres away, tied down fighting the New Zealanders; and the 15th Panzer Division and the Italians were held up by British tanks in the south. A determined blow by both British corps could have destroyed him. Gott, preoccupied with saving his own units, did not see this chance. He concluded that XIII Corps was in danger of encirclement and reported his intention to withdraw. At 9.20 p.m. on 27 June Auchinleck ordered the whole army to fall back to the next delaying position at Fuka, some 50 km to the east.

The night at Minqar Qaim

The best-known episode of the battle was the New Zealanders’ break-out. Inglis decided to break through to the east without an artillery preparation, in order to surprise the enemy. At about 2 a.m. on the night of 27–28 June three battalions of the 4th New Zealand Brigade, including the Māori Battalion, charged with the bayonet the positions of a panzergrenadier battalion of the 21st Panzer Division. The Germans spotted them only at close range. The fighting was fierce and confused, at times hand to hand; the Germans later accused the New Zealanders of bayoneting the wounded and lodged a formal protest on the matter. The brigade got through and made off eastwards. Inglis, anxious about the approaching dawn, led the rest of the division – the headquarters, the reserves and the 5th Brigade – by a different route, southwards, in lorries packed with men. They ran into the positions of a German tank battalion; in the confusion several lorries and ambulances went up in flames, but most of the column broke free. In three days of fighting the division lost about 800 men, but nearly 10,000 soldiers escaped and made it all the way to El Alamein.

28–29 June: X Corps cut off

The withdrawal order of 27 June did not reach X Corps until the early morning of 28 June, because Holmes’s headquarters had been out of contact with army headquarters all night. During the night X Corps had even attacked southwards to relieve Gott, not knowing that XIII Corps had already gone. Holmes considered defending the fortress to the end or breaking out eastwards along the road, through the 90th Light Division. Auchinleck ruled out both options and ordered him to split the corps into brigade-sized columns and break out southwards into the desert by night, then turn east.

Meanwhile the battle had moved east. On the afternoon of 28 June the 21st Panzer Division caught the 29th Indian Brigade at Fuka before it could get away, and destroyed it. In the evening the 90th Light Division and the Italian divisions, including the Littorio Armoured Division, surrounded the fortress. At 9 p.m. the columns of X Corps set off southwards. In the darkness they ran into German and Italian units bivouacking for the night; one of them stumbled upon Rommel’s headquarters, whose staff had to defend themselves weapons in hand before the field marshal moved further south. Some units of the 10th Indian Division failed to break through. On the morning of 29 June the 90th Light Division and Italian Bersaglieri entered Mersa Matruh and took the surrender of the soldiers who had remained in the fortress.

Losses

According to the British official history, some 6,000 soldiers were captured in Mersa Matruh itself, and the British also lost about 40 tanks there and large supply dumps. Around 1,600 more prisoners were taken at Fuka and during the pursuit, which is why some studies give a figure of about 8,000 for the battle as a whole. Holmes estimated that only about 60 per cent of his corps reached El Alamein, and in disarray at that – X Corps had to be sent to the rear for reorganisation. General Henry Maitland Wilson summed it up bluntly after the war: XIII Corps had simply vanished and left X Corps in the lurch. Rommel’s intelligence officer, Friedrich von Mellenthin, regarded Mersa Matruh as a splendid German victory, but also as a battle in which Auchinleck’s hesitation had robbed the British of a great chance to destroy a weaker armoured army. For the Italians, whose divisions played a large part in the final phase, it was one of their more important victories in Africa.

Place in the war

Despite the losses, Auchinleck achieved what he considered most important: the bulk of the Eighth Army escaped and took up position at El Alamein, only about 110 km from Alexandria. The fall of Matruh, however, set off a panic in Egypt, later known as “the Flap”. Axis aircraft from the airfields near Matruh could reach Alexandria, so in the last days of June Admiral Henry Harwood dispersed the Mediterranean Fleet among the ports of Palestine, Lebanon and the Suez Canal. On 1 July, a day dubbed “Ash Wednesday”, secret documents were burned at General Headquarters in Cairo and at the British embassy, and smoke hung over the city. The British prepared to defend Alexandria and the Suez Canal and flooded parts of the Nile Delta. On 29 June Benito Mussolini flew to Libya to prepare his triumphal entry into Cairo.

The entry never took place. In July, in the First Battle of El Alamein, Auchinleck halted Rommel, whose exhausted divisions stood at the end of a supply line more than a thousand kilometres long, while the British had their bases right behind them. Mersa Matruh proved to be Rommel’s last great victory in Egypt. The Battle of Gazala and the retreat to El Alamein nevertheless cost Auchinleck his post: in August Churchill replaced him with General Harold Alexander, and Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery took command of the Eighth Army. In November 1942, after the Second Battle of El Alamein, the British retook Mersa Matruh in pursuit of Rommel’s retreating army.