Before Operation Crusader

In the second half of October 1941 the final preparations were under way in the desert of western Egypt for the largest British offensive in North Africa since Operation Compass. The newly formed Eighth Army of Lieutenant General Alan Cunningham was stockpiling tanks, guns, fuel and water, while its divisions practised desert marches and attacks. The aim was to destroy the German and Italian armoured forces in Cyrenaica and to break the siege of Tobruk, which had lasted since April. One of the divisions that were to take part was the New Zealand Division of Major General Bernard Freyberg, rebuilt after the defeats in Greece and Crete. In Tobruk itself, ships of the Mediterranean Fleet were completing the relief of the garrison, and on 21 October warships arrived at Malta whose task was to strike at the convoys supplying Erwin Rommel.

The New Zealanders in Egypt and Fort Capuzzo

Some war chronologies record under 21 October 1941 that New Zealand troops landed in Egypt and captured Fort Capuzzo. Both statements are inaccurate. The New Zealanders had long been in Egypt: the first echelon of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force arrived there in February 1940 and the third in September 1940, while the second, diverted to Britain during the fall of France, joined them in March 1941. Only then did the division assemble at full strength, and it sailed at once for Greece. After the Battle of Crete its shattered battalions returned to Egypt in June. Fort Capuzzo, an old Italian fort on the Libyan–Egyptian border, was in Axis hands in October 1941 and formed part of their frontier defences. The New Zealanders did not take it until 22 November 1941, on the fifth day of Operation Crusader. Such an entry most probably conflates the autumn preparations with the later fighting. What was happening in October was something else: the Eighth Army and the New Zealanders were preparing for the offensive, and both sides of the front were getting ready for the winter fighting.

Freyberg’s division

In the summer of 1941 the New Zealand Division was quartered in camps at Maadi near Cairo, at Helwan and along the Suez Canal. In Greece and Crete it had lost several thousand men killed, wounded and captured, and almost all its equipment. Reinforcements arrived from New Zealand, and the battalions retrained from scratch. After the experience of Greece and Crete, the government of Prime Minister Peter Fraser wanted to be sure that the division would not again be thrown into battle without proper equipment and air cover; as commander of the expeditionary force, Freyberg had the right to appeal directly to Wellington on the matter.

In mid-September the division moved to the Western Desert, to the area of the fortified Baggush camp on the coast between Mersa Matruh and El Alamein, and some of its battalions did garrison duty and built defences in neighbouring “boxes”. In October, when the supposed “landing” was to have taken place, the New Zealanders were holding large-scale exercises around Baggush. They learnt to move in formation across trackless country at night, to navigate by compass and the stars, to disperse vehicles against air attack and to take fortified positions with the help of infantry tanks. The division had three infantry brigades: the 4th Brigade under Brigadier Lindsay Inglis, the 5th under Brigadier James Hargest and the 6th under Brigadier Harold Barrowclough. In the exercises the battalions were led by officers already known from Crete, such as Lieutenant Colonel Howard Kippenberger of the 20th Battalion, who, according to the battalion history, believed that in October 1941 his men’s morale was the highest it had been since the start of the war. On 11 November the division set out westwards from Baggush to an assembly area on the road from Mersa Matruh to the Siwa oasis. According to New Zealand accounts it numbered about 20,000 men, and for the first time the whole division was gathered in one place.

The Eighth Army

After the failure of Operation Battleaxe, Winston Churchill replaced Wavell with General Claude Auchinleck, who from his first days resisted the Prime Minister’s pressure to resume the desert offensive as soon as possible. He believed that he must first secure Syria and Iraq, and that to retake Cyrenaica he needed at least two, and preferably three, armoured divisions. At the end of July he persuaded the cabinet in London that the attack could not begin before the autumn. Over the following months convoys carried British Crusader and Matilda tanks, American Stuarts and lorries to Egypt, and divisions were brought in from other fronts: the 1st South African Division arrived from East Africa after the end of the East African campaign, and in the autumn the 22nd Armoured Brigade came from Britain with new Crusader tanks. The 4th Indian Division, which had fought in Eritrea in the spring and in Battleaxe in June, also returned to the force.

The troops in Egypt were now too numerous for a single corps. On 10 September a new army headquarters was created, first called the Western Army and renamed the Eighth Army on 26 September. Command went to Alan Cunningham, the victor of East Africa, who had no experience of desert warfare and had never before commanded large armoured formations. The army consisted of two corps. XIII Corps under Lieutenant General Reade Godwin-Austen, renamed from the former Western Desert Force, comprised the infantry: the New Zealand Division, the 4th Indian Division and the 1st Army Tank Brigade with infantry tanks. The new XXX Corps was to be the armoured fist: the 7th Armoured Division of Major General William Gott, the independent 4th Armoured Brigade and the 1st South African Division. Its first commander, Lieutenant General Vyvyan Pope, one of Britain’s leading experts on armour, was killed on 5 October together with several of his staff officers when their aircraft crashed just after taking off near Cairo as they flew to their first conference with Cunningham. The corps was taken over by Lieutenant General Willoughby Norrie, commander of the 1st Armoured Division, which had yet to arrive from Britain, and he had little more than a month to prepare.

Supply demanded the most work. The offensive was to start several hundred kilometres from the bases in the Nile Delta, across a desert without roads or water. Engineers extended the railway and the water pipeline west of Mersa Matruh, and near the frontier, in secret from the enemy, forward supply bases were built in which ammunition, fuel, food and water were stockpiled for tens of thousands of soldiers. From October the aircraft of Air Marshal Arthur Tedder bombed Axis airfields, ports and supply routes in Cyrenaica. The command also prepared a deception plan: the Germans and Italians were to believe that the British would not be ready before December and that the main blow would come far to the south, through the oasis of Jarabub. According to various tallies, by mid-November the Eighth Army had about 118,000 men and more than 700 tanks, and British air power in the Western Desert and on Malta clearly outnumbered that of the Axis.

Cunningham’s plan was for XXX Corps to outflank the frontier defences between Sollum and Sidi Omar from the south, seek out and destroy the German armoured divisions, and then advance on Tobruk, whose garrison would strike out to meet it. Meanwhile XIII Corps, with the New Zealanders, was to surround and cut off the Axis frontier positions – Halfaya, Sollum, Fort Capuzzo and Bardia. Auchinleck initially spoke of a date at the beginning of November. In the end the attack was postponed to 18 November, partly because the South Africans needed more time for training and vehicles, which irritated Churchill in London.

Tobruk’s new garrison

Throughout the autumn the fortress that was to join hands with the Eighth Army was changing its defenders. Major General Leslie Morshead’s Australians had held it since April, and in July the commander of the Australian expeditionary force, General Thomas Blamey, backed by the government in Canberra, demanded their withdrawal. The relief was carried out by the destroyers and fast minelayers of Admiral Andrew Cunningham, only on moonless nights, in three phases known in British literature by the code names Treacle, Supercharge and Cultivate. In the second half of August the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade of Brigadier General Stanisław Kopański arrived, and in September the first units of the British 70th Infantry Division of Major General Ronald Scobie and the tanks of the 32nd Army Tank Brigade.

The third phase, Cultivate, lasted from 12 to 25 October and thus also covered 21 October, the day of the New Zealanders’ supposed landing. The rest of the 70th Division and the Czechoslovak 11th Infantry Battalion of Lieutenant Colonel Karel Klapálek were brought into Tobruk, and most of the remaining Australians were taken out. On 22 October Morshead handed over command of the fortress to Scobie. The last runs could not be made: on 25 October German aircraft sank the fast minelayer HMS Latona, and several hundred Australians of the 2/13th Battalion and part of the 2/15th Battalion remained in Tobruk until the end of the siege. At the beginning of October the Poles moved to the most difficult, western sector of the perimeter, facing the hill of Ras el Medauar. The new garrison prepared for a sortie from the fortress to support the approaching Eighth Army: engineers prepared gaps through their own minefields and the anti-tank ditch, and the 70th Division practised attacking with tanks.

Force K on Malta

It was on 21 October that two light cruisers, Aurora and Penelope, and two destroyers, Lance and Lively, arrived at Malta from Gibraltar. They formed the re-established Force K, whose task was to cut the Axis supply lines from Italy to Libya. Ships and aircraft from Malta had already been sinking a large proportion of the Italian ships bound for Tripoli and Benghazi during the summer. According to tallies based on Italian data, in September roughly a quarter of the ships sent to Africa went to the bottom. On top of this came bottlenecks on land: every litre of fuel and every case of ammunition had to be carried hundreds of kilometres by lorry from Tripoli and Benghazi, because Tobruk remained in British hands. The appearance of fast cruisers on Malta meant that in November, when the offensive began, Rommel would be fighting with ever emptier depots.

Rommel prepares to storm Tobruk

On the other side of the front Rommel, commander from 15 August of the newly formed Panzer Group Africa, was thinking not of defence but of taking Tobruk. His Afrika Korps, commanded from September by General Ludwig Crüwell, had two panzer divisions, the 15th and the 21st, the latter renamed from the 5th Light Division in the summer, as well as the new Afrika Division for special purposes, an infantry division made up of units sent from Europe. Before Tobruk stood the Italian XXI Corps with four infantry divisions, and south of the fortress the Italian motorised corps of General Gastone Gambara with the Ariete Armoured Division and the Trieste Motorised Division, subordinate not to Rommel but to the Italian commander-in-chief in Libya, General Ettore Bastico. The Egyptian frontier was held by strongpoints manned by the Italian Savona Division and German units, among them Fort Capuzzo, Bardia, Sollum and the Halfaya Pass.

Rommel was convinced that the British would not attack early. In mid-September he sent the 21st Panzer Division on a reconnaissance raid deep into Egypt. The German tanks found no sign of preparations for an offensive, but suffered losses from air attack and used up precious fuel, and Rommel, as historians write, was confirmed in his belief that he had time. Throughout October he gathered supplies, siege artillery and assault units for a general attack on Tobruk, planned for the second half of November. The date was postponed several times because of supply difficulties. The Italian high command and Bastico feared that the British would strike during the assault, but Rommel played down their warnings. In the first half of November he was in Rome, seeking approval for the assault, and the start of the British offensive took him completely by surprise.

Meanwhile Berlin’s attention was focused on the east. On 2 October the Germans began their advance on Moscow, and the Luftwaffe and ground reinforcements went first to the Eastern Front rather than to Africa. For the British this was an argument for a quick offensive: every week in which the Germans were tied down in Russia was a week in which Rommel received no new divisions.

Significance

October 1941 was a month of building up strength for the Eighth Army. On the night of 8–9 November Force K from Malta destroyed the entire Italian Duisburg convoy, and on 18 November Operation Crusader began, regarded as the first great British land victory over the Germans, though won at a very high price. The dispersed armoured brigades of XXX Corps were shattered at Sidi Rezegh, and on 26 November Auchinleck replaced Cunningham with General Neil Ritchie. The New Zealand Division entered Libya; on 22 November its 5th Brigade took Fort Capuzzo, while the rest moved west along the Trigh Capuzzo track, retook Sidi Rezegh and on 27 November joined hands with the Tobruk garrison at Ed Duda. In the days that followed the New Zealanders suffered some of their heaviest losses of the entire war: according to New Zealand accounts more than 4,500 men, including nearly 900 killed, and Brigadier Hargest was taken prisoner. Cut off from fuel and ammunition, Rommel abandoned the siege of Tobruk in the first days of December and fell back all the way to El Agheila, from where he counter-attacked in January 1942.

The preparations of autumn 1941 revealed both the strength and the weakness of the British army in the desert. The Empire was able to assemble in Egypt an army of Britons, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians, Poles and Czechoslovaks, give it more tanks and aircraft than the enemy had, and build in the desert a logistical base such as Rommel lacked. What it could not do in a few months was teach new commanders and new divisions the cooperation of tanks, infantry and artillery at which the Germans were masters. For the New Zealanders, November 1941 was the first of the great desert battles, after which Freyberg’s division became one of the most highly regarded in the Eighth Army.