The Battle of Sidi Rezegh

On 22 November 1941, the fifth day of the British offensive in Libya, the German 21st Panzer Division retook the airfield at Sidi Rezegh, a dozen or so kilometres south-east of besieged Tobruk. For three days this empty stretch of desert between two escarpments, with its landing ground and the white tomb of a local holy man, had been the scene of the heaviest armoured fighting yet seen in Africa. The British 7th Armoured Division, which was supposed to break through this way to the Tobruk garrison, had lost most of its tanks. The next day, Sunday 23 November, which Protestant Germans observe as the day of remembrance for the dead (Totensonntag), the tanks of the Afrika Korps and of an Italian armoured division fell upon the 5th South African Brigade, positioned south of the airfield, and destroyed it within a few hours. The British lost the battle for Sidi Rezegh, but the Germans paid so high a price for their victory that in the final reckoning it contributed to the defeat of Erwin Rommel.

Clarifications

The common summary of these two days – that on 22 November Rommel launched a counter-offensive and retook Sidi Rezegh, captured by the Allies a few days earlier, with heavy British tank losses, and that on 23 November his attack continued and Allied losses mounted – is broadly accurate. It needs only to be filled out. The fighting for Sidi Rezegh had begun as early as 19 November, and the bloodiest day, 21 November, came before the airfield was retaken. Nor was 23 November simply a “continuation” of the attack: it was the day of the greatest tank battle of the whole of Operation Crusader, in which the South African brigade was wiped out, but in which the Afrika Korps also lost nearly half its tanks.

The road to Sidi Rezegh

Operation Crusader began on 18 November after several months of preparation. The plan of Lieutenant General Alan Cunningham, commander of the Eighth Army, was for Lieutenant General Willoughby Norrie’s armoured XXX Corps to enter Libya far to the south, provoke the German armoured divisions into battle and destroy them in a single great engagement, and only then advance on Tobruk. Rommel, however, did not come to the designated battlefield, and on 19 November Cunningham sent his three armoured brigades off in three different directions.

In the west the 22nd Armoured Brigade, with new Crusader tanks and men who had never been in action, attacked the Italian Ariete armoured division at Bir el Gubi. The British charged like cavalry, without infantry or artillery, ran into the Italians’ fortified positions and withdrew in the evening, having lost, according to various figures, anything from twenty-odd to more than fifty tanks. The Italians, by their own account, lost 34 tanks destroyed and a dozen or so damaged. In the east the 4th Armoured Brigade, with American Stuart tanks, fought for two days at Gabr Saleh against battle groups of the 21st and 15th Panzer Divisions and suffered mounting losses.

In the centre the 7th Armoured Brigade and the 7th Armoured Division’s Support Group – motorised infantry and artillery under Brigadier John “Jock” Campbell – went straight north. On the afternoon of 19 November the tanks of the 6th Royal Tank Regiment drove onto Sidi Rezegh airfield, surprising the Italian aircraft standing there. According to German and British studies only a few machines managed to take off, and a dozen or so were captured on the ground. The British halted on the escarpment, from which the Tobruk perimeter was already visible. Further on, on the Ed Duda ridge, stood German infantry of the Afrika Division and the Italian Bologna Division, and the commander of the 7th Armoured Division, Major General William Gott, reported that he could break through to the fortress.

21 November

The attack was set for the morning of 21 November. The Tobruk garrison – Major General Ronald Scobie’s British 70th Division with infantry tanks – was to break out of the fortress at dawn towards Ed Duda, while Brigadier General Stanisław Kopański’s Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade made a diversionary attack on the hill of Ras el Medauar in the western sector. The sortie from besieged Tobruk drove several kilometres into the Axis positions, but the armoured brigades from Sidi Rezegh never arrived. Just as the Support Group was setting off northwards, both German panzer divisions, which Rommel had gathered during the night and flung at Sidi Rezegh, came up from the south-east.

The British were caught in a vice: in front of them German and Italian infantry with anti-tank guns, behind them the tanks of the Afrika Korps, and further south, in pursuit of the Germans, their own 4th and 22nd Armoured Brigades. The 7th Hussars, who barred the Germans’ way, were almost entirely destroyed, and the 6th Royal Tank Regiment, which advanced on Ed Duda, drove into the fire of German 88 mm anti-aircraft guns used in the anti-tank role. By the evening, according to British figures, the 7th Armoured Brigade had 28 serviceable tanks out of the roughly 150 with which it had entered Libya.

That day the commander of the Support Group made his name. Campbell drove about the battlefield in an open car with a blue flag in his hand, personally organised into counter-attacks tanks whose commanders had been killed or wounded, and where crews were lacking manned the guns himself. For the fighting of 21 and 22 November he received the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for gallantry. It was also awarded posthumously to two of his men killed on 21 November: Second Lieutenant George Ward Gunn of the Royal Horse Artillery, who single-handedly served an anti-tank gun mounted on a burning vehicle, and Rifleman John Beeley of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, who attacked a German anti-tank position on his own. The Support Group held the airfield, but by now only in a cauldron of fire.

22 November: the airfield retaken

On the morning of 22 November the 7th Armoured Division, according to British figures, had about two hundred serviceable tanks in three battered brigades, but neither Eighth Army headquarters nor divisional headquarters knew exactly how bad things were in the front line. Reports from the battlefield exaggerated German losses, and at Cunningham’s headquarters it was believed that the Afrika Korps had been seriously weakened. Norrie decided to wait for reinforcements. Brigadier Bertram Armstrong’s 5th South African Brigade of the 1st South African Division was coming up to Sidi Rezegh from the south to reinforce the infantry on the airfield.

Rommel, a General der Panzertruppe and since August commander of Panzer Group Africa, had meanwhile divided his forces. The 15th Panzer Division moved off east to the Gambut area, where the commander of the Afrika Korps, General Ludwig Crüwell, wanted to fight a battle of manoeuvre. Generalmajor Johann von Ravenstein’s 21st Panzer Division, together with the infantry of the Afrika Division, stayed at Sidi Rezegh. On the afternoon of 22 November it attacked the airfield. The Germans attacked as they had learned to do in the desert: tanks advanced together with anti-tank guns, artillery and infantry, while the British brigades, thrown into battle one at a time, ran into the fire of the guns before they could reach the tanks. The 22nd Armoured Brigade, which came to help, lost several dozen tanks according to British studies. Towards evening the airfield and the escarpment above it were in German hands, and the remnants of the Support Group and the 7th Armoured Brigade withdrew south. The 7th Armoured Brigade, which before the battle had had about 150 tanks, was down, according to some studies, to four serviceable machines.

That same evening the 15th Panzer Division, returning westwards, stumbled in the dark on the leaguer of the 4th Armoured Brigade. The Germans overran the brigade headquarters and captured a large part of the 8th Hussars together with their tanks; for a whole day the brigade was unable to fight as a formation. According to frequently cited figures, in the first four days of the offensive the Eighth Army lost about five hundred tanks, including damaged tanks later repaired, and the Afrika Korps and the Ariete about a hundred. The 5th South African Brigade, which reached the area south of the airfield on 22 November, also tried to take the ridge above it by assault, but was beaten back and dug in where it stood.

In the east the war took a different course. Lieutenant General Reade Godwin-Austen’s XIII Corps was enveloping the Axis frontier fortifications: on 22 November the 5th New Zealand Brigade took Fort Capuzzo, and the 7th Indian Brigade with Matilda infantry tanks, losing several dozen machines to mines and gunfire, captured most of the positions at Sidi Omar. Cunningham decided to send Major General Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand Division westwards along the Trigh Capuzzo track towards Sidi Rezegh and Tobruk.

23 November: Totensonntag

On Sunday 23 November Rommel intended to destroy what was left of XXX Corps. He ordered the Afrika Korps and the Ariete to attack from two sides and encircle the British forces south of Sidi Rezegh. Crüwell left at dawn to join his divisions – and that decision saved him from capture. A few hours later the 6th New Zealand Brigade, advancing along the Trigh Capuzzo, came upon the Afrika Korps headquarters at Bir el Chleta and captured most of its officers, together with radio sets and documents. The New Zealanders then attacked Point 175, east of the airfield, and took it at heavy cost.

Instead of attacking the South Africans at once, Crüwell led the 15th Panzer Division and a tank regiment of the 21st in a wide arc to the south-west to join the Ariete, so as to strike the enemy from the south, the direction from which no attack was expected. On the way he scattered the 1st South African Brigade, which was coming to the aid of the 5th and veered off before the German tanks. At about 3 p.m. the Germans began their attack: the tanks advanced in a broad line, followed by infantry in lorries. The Ariete was to attack on the left flank, but it was held up by the remnants of the 22nd Armoured Brigade.

The 5th South African Brigade had dug in over an area of several kilometres square, with dozens of field and anti-tank guns, but in the rocky ground many of the slit trenches were barely a few dozen centimetres deep. The gunners of the 3rd Field Regiment (Transvaal Horse Artillery) fired over open sights at the tanks until they were killed or ran out of ammunition; according to South African studies the regiment managed to save only five of its 24 guns. The German tanks drove through the brigade’s positions, with the infantry following behind. By nightfall the 5th Brigade had ceased to exist. According to figures cited by South African historians, 224 of its men were killed, 379 wounded and some 3,000 taken prisoner; of the nearly 6,000 men who had been in the ranks that morning, roughly 2,000 escaped. Brigadier Armstrong was also captured.

The Germans too suffered painful losses. According to the most frequently cited British figures, the Afrika Korps lost that day 72 of the 162 tanks with which it had begun the attack, and among the killed and wounded there was an exceptionally high number of officers and NCOs. A frontal attack on a position bristling with anti-tank guns cost Crüwell’s divisions more than they could bear, because, unlike the British, they had nowhere to obtain new tanks quickly. Many historians believe that Crüwell, who first lost time linking up with the Ariete and then attacked head-on instead of encircling the brigade, threw away the advantage of surprise. On the same day the Italian high command at last agreed to place under Rommel’s command General Gastone Gambara’s Italian motorised corps with the Ariete and the Trieste Division, which until then had been subordinate to General Ettore Bastico.

Crisis in the Eighth Army command

On 23 November XXX Corps reported that it had only a few dozen serviceable tanks against more than a hundred German ones. In five days the armoured corps’ more than five hundred tanks had been reduced to a handful. Cunningham, who only two days earlier had believed he was winning, concluded that continuing the offensive might end in the destruction of the whole army and the loss of Egypt, and that morning asked the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, to fly to army headquarters. Auchinleck arrived the same day and declared that the offensive was to continue regardless of losses. He knew from decrypted German signals that Rommel too was running short of tanks, fuel and ammunition.

A decision was being taken on the other side as well. Rommel judged that XXX Corps had been smashed and decided not to finish it off at Sidi Rezegh but to drive east with all his armour towards the Egyptian frontier, into the rear of the Eighth Army and to the relief of his garrisons at Bardia, Sollum and the Halfaya Pass. The next day he began the most famous and most controversial manoeuvre of the battle.

Place in the war

The two days at Sidi Rezegh were the greatest defeat suffered by British armour in the desert war so far. They showed that tanks thrown into battle by brigades, without infantry and artillery, stood no chance against German battle groups in which tanks, anti-tank guns and artillery worked together, and that neither numerical superiority nor new tanks would change that. The British absorbed this lesson painfully right up to 1942. At the same time Totensonntag proved a Pyrrhic victory for Rommel. That day the Afrika Korps lost as many tanks as the British lost in several battles, and, constantly harried by the British air force and deprived of supplies sunk by ships from Malta, it could not replace them. In the first days of December Rommel had to abandon the siege of Tobruk.

For the Union of South Africa, whose soldiers were volunteers fighting outside their country, Sidi Rezegh became one of the most painful battles of the war, and the regiments that fought there still commemorate its anniversary. Many of the South Africans taken prisoner suffered a further ordeal: according to historians, between 2,000 and 2,500 of them were being shipped to Italy aboard the Sebastiano Veniero, which was torpedoed by a British submarine on 9 December 1941 and, badly damaged, ran aground off the coast of Greece. Half a year later, in June 1942, when Rommel took Tobruk, the entire 2nd South African Division defending it went into captivity. Jock Campbell, promoted to major general and commander of the 7th Armoured Division, was killed in a car accident on 26 February 1942, a few weeks after his Victoria Cross was announced.