Black Saturday at Gazala

Saturday 13 June 1942 went down in the history of the British Eighth Army as “Black Saturday”. In two days, 12 and 13 June, Colonel General Erwin Rommel’s panzer divisions smashed, between the Knightsbridge box and El Adem, the British armoured brigades, which still had more tanks than their opponent. By the evening of 13 June only about seventy of several hundred battleworthy British tanks remained, and the Afrika Korps was master of the battlefield. On the night of 13–14 June the Guards abandoned Knightsbridge. The two divisions that for two weeks had held the Gazala Line from the sea into the desert – the 1st South African Division and the British 50th Division – were in danger of being cut off.

After the fall of Bir Hakeim

On the night of 10–11 June General Marie-Pierre Koenig’s Free French broke out of Bir Hakeim. Rommel, who for two weeks had had to supply his troops by a roundabout route and fight in the rear of the enemy line, now had a free hand. Earlier he had destroyed the 150th Brigade and opened a short route for himself through the minefields, and on 5–6 June he had beaten off the British counter-attack on the Cauldron, Operation Aberdeen, in which the British lost headquarters, infantry, four artillery regiments and many tanks.

Even so, on 11 June the British defensive system was still standing. From the sea to Alem Hamza the positions of Major General Dan Pienaar’s 1st South African Division and Major General William Ramsden’s 50th (Northumbrian) Division were intact. East of them, as far as Acroma, stretched a chain of new strongpoints, each with an infantry battalion and a battery. The junction of the Trigh Capuzzo and the track from Bir Hakeim to Acroma, named Knightsbridge by the British after the London district, was held by Brigadier John Marriott’s 201st Guards (Motor) Brigade, with the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards pushed forward onto the Rigel ridge (Maabus er Rigel). The box at El Adem, south of Tobruk, was defended by the 29th Indian Brigade.

The trouble lay with the armour. The commander of the Eighth Army, Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie, estimated on 10 June that he had some 250 cruiser tanks and 80 infantry tanks. The British official history, written after the war on the basis of unit war diaries, established that the three armoured brigades actually had 77 American Grants, 52 Crusaders and 56 light Stuarts, and the 32nd Army Tank Brigade 63 infantry tanks. The brigades had been made up in haste, by combining squadrons from different regiments and shifting individual tanks from unit to unit; each of them had changed division at least twice since the battle began. According to the same history, the Afrika Korps had 124 medium tanks, including 33 new ones with long guns, and 25 light Panzer IIs, while the Italian XX Corps had about 60 tanks. The British therefore still had numerical superiority. The Germans had better tanks, better anti-tank weapons and a single command.

12 June: a trap between two divisions

On the morning of 11 June Rommel moved north-east towards El Adem with the 15th Panzer Division, the 90th Light Division and the Italian Trieste Division, while Major General Georg von Bismarck’s 21st Panzer Division feinted northwards from the Sidra ridge. The commander of XXX Corps, Lieutenant General Willoughby Norrie, concluded that the enemy had dispersed his forces on a broad front and that an opportunity had arisen to destroy him. On the morning of 12 June he intended to throw the 2nd and 4th Armoured Brigades southwards and then eastwards against the 15th Panzer Division.

Nothing came of this intention. The commander of the 7th Armoured Division, Major General Frank Messervy, who feared his brigades being separated, drove off to confer with Norrie, ran into Germans near El Adem and for several hours was out of contact with everyone. The brigades stood still, waiting for orders. Rommel, meanwhile, learned from an intercepted British radio message that the 4th Armoured Brigade was to attack, and ordered the 15th Panzer Division to stay on the defensive so that the British would bleed themselves white attacking. When nothing had happened by noon, he went over to the attack himself: the 15th Panzer Division struck the 2nd and 4th Brigades from the front, and the 21st Panzer Division from the rear, from the west.

Norrie, unable to find Messervy, placed all three armoured brigades under Major General Herbert Lumsden’s 1st Armoured Division. Lumsden brought the remains of the 22nd Armoured Brigade up to Knightsbridge and managed to halt a battle group of the 21st Panzer Division. In the afternoon, however, the 15th Division outflanked the 2nd Brigade from the east and pushed the 4th Brigade north, behind the escarpment. The British official history notes that the scanty and contradictory records make it impossible to reconstruct the details of this fighting. Its outcome is clear: German gunners, taking advantage of haze and dust, boldly pushed forward anti-tank guns, including 8.8 cm anti-aircraft guns, and knocked out the British tanks that tried to counter-attack. By midday on 13 June the British counted 105 tanks lost in the three armoured brigades and 33 in the 32nd Army Tank Brigade.

In the air, too, it was a day of heavy fighting. British fighters flew 583 sorties, and the Desert Air Force bombed the 90th Light Division near El Adem some twenty times. In the evening the largest air battle of the entire Gazala battle took place over El Adem. Rommel recalled that his car lay under fire in open ground for several hours, and that in the evening it was bombed by his own Stukas fleeing from British fighters.

In the evening Ritchie realised that the weakness of his armour allowed Rommel to go north to the sea and cut off the divisions on the Gazala Line. He had two options: to fight on, or to withdraw the whole army to the Egyptian frontier, which meant a difficult retreat under pressure and the awkward question of what to do with Tobruk. He decided to fight. General Claude Auchinleck, who happened to be at his headquarters, agreed with him. When the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, learned of this, he cabled that their decision to fight it out had his most cordial endorsement and that they would be supported whatever the outcome; “Retreat would be fatal,” he added, and it was a matter not only of armour but of will power.

13 June: Black Saturday

Rommel’s plan for 13 June was simple: the 15th Panzer Division was to advance west along the Hagiag er Raml heights, and the 21st Panzer Division east along the Rigel ridge, so as to cut off Knightsbridge. Ritchie had meanwhile placed the 1st Armoured Division under the commander of XIII Corps, Lieutenant General William Gott, but Lumsden, out of contact with his new superior, received orders only in the morning. He was to hold the Acroma–Knightsbridge–Rigel area and attack the enemy at every opportunity.

In the morning the 2nd and 22nd Armoured Brigades and a few infantry tanks held on with difficulty east of Knightsbridge. In the afternoon the 21st Panzer Division attacked the western end of the Rigel ridge, held by the 2nd Scots Guards with a battery of the 11th Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery, and the 6th South African Field Battery. At about 3 p.m. the situation was so dangerous that the 2nd and 4th Armoured Brigades were called in to help. The last fight of the day took place in the tail of a sandstorm that at times reduced visibility almost to nothing, and it went on until dark. The South African gunners fired over open sights at the German tanks until all eight of their guns had been destroyed; about half the gun crews were killed or wounded, and the rest were taken prisoner. The western part of the Guards’ position passed into German hands. For his conduct on this and earlier days, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Foote of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, who led tanks forward and covered the Guards’ withdrawal, was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Rommel described the day as a continuous “slaughter of British tanks”: the compact British groups came under fire from several sides, and their counter-attacks grew weaker by the hour. Sandstorms, meanwhile, grounded most of both sides’ aircraft; the airfield at Gambut was out of action for most of the day.

By the evening the balance was crushing. According to the British official history, the Eighth Army’s armour was down to some 50 cruiser tanks and 20 infantry tanks. The frequently quoted figure that in these days the number of British tanks fell from about 300 to about 70 refers to all battleworthy tanks, not just cruisers. An editorial note to Rommel’s papers, published by Basil Liddell Hart, states that the Germans now had more than a two-to-one superiority in battleworthy tanks. Something else mattered more, however: whoever held the battlefield recovered the damaged tanks from it. Up to 13 June British recovery teams had hauled more than 400 damaged armoured vehicles off the field and repaired them. From then on they could no longer do so, and the Germans could.

The abandonment of Knightsbridge

On the evening of 13 June the Knightsbridge box was almost surrounded, and Gott ordered it to be abandoned. The 201st Guards Brigade withdrew on the night of 13–14 June. The expulsion of the British from Knightsbridge is usually dated to 12 June, though some sources give 13 June. The decisive fighting for the box went on on 12 and 13 June, and the withdrawal itself took place on the night after Black Saturday, so both dates have their justification. Rommel wrote that the Guards had been under fire all morning from every gun he could bring to bear on them, and called the brigade “a living embodiment of the virtues and defects of the British soldier – tremendous courage and tenacity combined with a rigid lack of mobility”. Most of the tanks supporting it were destroyed that day or during the night withdrawal.

After the Guards had gone, the line from Gazala to Tobruk still had a few isolated strongpoints: the South African positions at Eluet et Tamar, Point 187 with a battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment, and small garrisons at Acroma. The remnants of the armour gathered south and west of Acroma. Between the divisions on the Gazala Line and their line of retreat to the east there was no longer any force that could stop the German tanks.

How Rommel won the tank battle

Rommel fought just as he had in the Cauldron: tanks and anti-tank guns acted together, while the British brigades went into action one at a time and drove straight into the gun screen. The German divisional commanders knew what their army commander wanted and acted quickly. On the British side command was split between two corps and three divisional commanders, orders arrived late, and the corps commander changed the brigades’ subordination in the middle of the fighting. The light Stuarts were by now regarded as no more than reconnaissance vehicles, and the 2-pounder guns of the Crusaders and infantry tanks could not penetrate the frontal armour of German tanks from a safe distance. The Grant proved itself, but its 75 mm gun, mounted in the hull, had a limited arc of fire, and there were too few Grants.

Rommel also benefited from good intelligence. The German radio intercept company at army headquarters was reading careless British tactical communications, and according to intelligence historians the Germans went on reading, until the end of June, the reports of the American military attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner Fellers, which were sent to Washington in a broken State Department cipher. These reports contained detailed information on the Eighth Army’s condition and intentions. The British, for their part, despite access to some German Enigma-enciphered messages, failed to turn this knowledge into rapid decisions on the battlefield.

Its place in the war

Black Saturday decided the Battle of Gazala. Up to 12 June the Eighth Army, though beaten in the Cauldron, still had the strength to fight for the battlefield. After 13 June it no longer did. That evening Ritchie concluded that the divisions on the Gazala Line had to be withdrawn before they were cut off, and he issued orders on the morning of 14 June. The 1st South African Division withdrew along the coast road, while the 50th Division broke out westwards through the Italian lines and reached the Egyptian frontier by a roundabout route through the desert. Tobruk, which in February the British commanders in Cairo had decided not to defend in a second siege, became a bone of contention between Auchinleck and Churchill. It was surrounded on 17 June and on 21 June surrendered with a garrison of some 33,000 men. Rommel was made a field marshal and drove into Egypt, Ritchie lost his command on 25 June, and the Eighth Army was halted only in July at El Alamein.

For the British army the defeat at Knightsbridge was one of the hardest lessons of the war. It showed that numerical superiority in tanks counts for nothing when armoured brigades fight separately, without the support of artillery and infantry, against an enemy who combines tanks with anti-tank guns. The lessons were drawn in the summer and autumn of 1942: concentration of armour, artillery under a single command, new 6-pounder anti-tank guns and American Shermans, which fought in October at the Second Battle of El Alamein.