The British take Derna

On 30 January 1941 soldiers of the Australian 2/11th Battalion entered Darnah, known to the Italians and the British as Derna, a small port at the eastern end of the Jebel Akhdar uplands in Cyrenaica. The town lay about 160 kilometres west of Tobruk as the crow flies, and somewhat further by road. The Australians entered Derna itself without a fight, but this was preceded by a week of fierce fighting on the plateau above the town and in the Wadi Derna gorge, where the Italian rearguard defended itself with a determination the British had met neither at Bardia nor at Tobruk. The Italians abandoned the town only when they were threatened with encirclement from the south, and withdrew in good order into the hills.

After Tobruk

After the capture of Tobruk on 22 January, General Richard O’Connor’s XIII Corps immediately pushed on westwards. Beyond Tobruk the flat desert of Marmarica came to an end. The asphalt coast road ran through Gazala and Tmimi, then across an open plateau to Derna, where it wound down in hairpin bends from an escarpment 120–200 metres high to the town at the mouth of the Wadi Derna. The gorge runs for a dozen or so kilometres south and south-west of the town; near its mouth it is in places more than one and a half kilometres wide, and its sides drop steeply to a depth of over 200 metres. West of Derna began the green, wooded and cultivated uplands of the Jebel Akhdar, with the villages of Italian settlers.

Two further routes led up to these uplands: a track from Martuba, which skirted the upper reaches of the gorge and led to the settlement of Giovanni Berta (today Al Qubbah), and desert tracks to Mechili, an old fort some 65 kilometres south of Giovanni Berta where routes to the north, west and south converged. Through Mechili it was possible to bypass the hills and reach the road from Benghazi to Tripoli across the desert.

The line from Derna to Mechili was held by XX Corps under General Annibale Bergonzoli, who at the beginning of January had slipped out of Bardia and made his way to Tobruk on foot. He had the 60th Infantry Division Sabratha, deployed from Derna along the Wadi Derna, and General Valentino Babini’s Special Armoured Brigade, with a regiment of Bersaglieri, artillery and new M13/40 medium tanks, which had only just arrived from Italy and, according to Italian sources, still needed several days of preparation before they could go into action. The brigade was positioned at Mechili, Giovanni Berta and Chaulan, covering the flank and rear of the infantry. The commander of the 10th Army, General Giuseppe Tellera, had been ordered by Marshal Rodolfo Graziani to hold this line.

O’Connor intended to strike at Mechili, where reconnaissance had spotted the main Italian forces, and then threaten the flank of the troops on the coast. The coastal axis fell to Major General Iven Mackay’s 6th Australian Division. Mackay hoped that his advanced guard – a squadron of the Australian 6th Cavalry Regiment under a young officer named Onslow, with artillery and sappers – might take Derna without much of a fight, “as a present for Australia” on Australia Day, 26 January. In case of stiffer resistance, Brigadier Horace Robertson’s 19th Brigade followed behind the cavalry.

The clash at Mechili

On 22 January, as the Australians were entering Tobruk, the 7th Armoured Division under General Michael O’Moore Creagh set off westwards. Its 4th Armoured Brigade headed for Mechili and the 7th Armoured Brigade along the coast road towards Martuba. On 23 January British patrols reached the Italian positions at Siret el Chreiba, a blockhouse on the edge of an airfield about 16 kilometres short of Derna. That same day Tellera ordered a counter-attack to prevent XX Corps from being encircled from the south.

On 24 January, on the track from Derna to Mechili, there took place one of the few tank-versus-tank engagements of the campaign. A dozen or so of the new M13/40s from Babini’s brigade attacked the 7th Hussars, who were moving west to cut the road north of Mechili. The Hussars, in light tanks, fell back and called for help from the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, which, according to British accounts, was slow to respond. When its cruiser tanks finally arrived, they caught the Italian vehicles on the crest of a rise, clearly silhouetted against the sky. According to the Australian official history, the Italians lost nine tanks in the whole engagement, seven of them knocked out by the 2nd RTR, while the British lost one cruiser tank and six light tanks.

O’Connor was convinced that he would trap the main Italian forces at Mechili. On the evening of 25 January he ordered Creagh to prevent their escape to the north-west, towards Slonta, at all costs, and on 26 January he sent the 7th Armoured Brigade, hitherto held in reserve for lack of fuel, onto the road from Mechili to Slonta. Mackay was to bring up the 17th Brigade to attack Mechili once the tanks had pinned down the Italians. The trap failed. On the morning of 27 January patrols of the 7th Armoured Division found that Babini had slipped away during the night. His columns, pursued by the 4th Armoured Brigade, made off north-west towards El Faidia and Slonta and then further west, through sandstorms and under air attack. The pursuit petered out on 28 January for lack of fuel. O’Connor, as the Australian historian Gavin Long writes, was furious with the armoured division’s command.

A week on the Wadi Derna

Meanwhile, on the coast, the Australians were discovering that Derna would be no “present”. On the morning of 25 January Onslow’s cavalry took over the Siret el Chreiba blockhouse from the British, but its carriers could not advance across the flat, open airfield. At noon the 2/11th Battalion from Western Australia arrived – the only battalion of the division that had not yet seen real fighting at either Bardia or Tobruk. Captain Ralph Honner’s company set off across the airfield, flat as a table, under fire from artillery, machine guns and tanks dug in behind low ridges. At dusk it took the hangars, and on the morning of 26 January the Australians reached the edge of the escarpment, from which they could see the town. Honner’s company alone lost two killed and 21 wounded. On the left flank the 2/4th Battalion came out above the Wadi Derna, and Lieutenant Lindsay’s platoon crossed to the far side of the gorge during the night.

Over the following days every ridge was fought for. On 26 January a company of the 2/11th Battalion, climbing down the cliff to the narrow shore in order to approach the town from the beach, came under fire at close range and had to climb back up during the night. On 27 January Bersaglieri and Sabratha infantry counter-attacked the 2/4th Battalion’s bridgehead beyond the gorge several times; in one clash about 40 Italians were killed and 56 surrendered, in another more than a thousand men pushed two Australian companies back to the edge of the gorge. On the same day an ambush of hidden anti-tank guns and mines destroyed a patrol of 6th Cavalry carriers: four NCOs were killed and three men were taken prisoner. On the right flank Captain Shanahan’s company took Fort Rudero, capturing 290 prisoners and five guns, and during the night patrols of the 2/11th Battalion cleared the ridges above the town.

The British were now feeling the effects of an advance across hundreds of kilometres of desert. The Australian artillery was rationed to ten rounds per gun per day, while the Italian batteries shelling the road from beyond Derna seemed to be using up all the stocks they did not want to leave behind. “The shelling, judged by European standards of 1918, is really heavy,” reported the commander of the 2/11th Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Louch. He considered that without stronger artillery support he could not take the town.

The Italians abandon Derna

The fate of the town, however, was decided on the left flank. On the evening of 28 January armoured cars of the 11th Hussars reached the Chaulan area, south of the Wadi Derna, from which tracks led through the hills to Giovanni Berta. To the left of the 19th Brigade, Brigadier Stanley Savige’s 17th Brigade was taking up positions, and Mackay ordered both brigades to attack vigorously. A net began to close from Derna to the hills south of Giovanni Berta and Slonta. Bergonzoli, who was directing XX Corps from Giovanni Berta, did not wait for it to close. He ordered a withdrawal, which the rearguard covered with heavy fire.

On the evening of 29 January, after a relatively quiet day, the Italian artillery suddenly deluged the positions of the 2/11th Battalion with shells. Louch judged this to be a “last fling” before they left. During the night a patrol sent along the road still met fire, and towards morning on 30 January fires broke out in the town. Shortly after dawn a group of Libyans climbed the escarpment and told the Australians that the Italians had gone. Louch sent a patrol down the path they had used, and when it entered the town unhindered, he sent one company down the road, which the Italians had cut with a huge crater, and another down the cliff. Derna was taken without a fight. The date given in some accounts, 29 January, refers to the night in which the Italians broke contact; according to the Australian official history, the men of the 2/11th Battalion entered the town on the morning of 30 January.

Derna, taken by the Italians from the Turks in October 1911 during the Italo-Turkish War, then had about 10,000 inhabitants and was the eastern gateway to the zone of Italian settlement in Cyrenaica. The Australians found houses set among gardens irrigated with water from the gorge. The town was almost empty: the Italian civilians had been evacuated beforehand, and small groups of local Arabs roamed the streets carting off food and belongings from abandoned houses on donkeys. Complaints soon reached O’Connor’s headquarters that Derna had been “looted by the Australians”. The Australian provost established that the town had already been plundered several times before, including by the retreating Italian army, although some British and Australian soldiers had looted too; on the first day twelve Australians were arrested.

The Italians, however, had no intention of giving up the hills without a fight. On 31 January, in rain and a gale, the 2/8th Battalion passed through the town and was held up by fire from the rearguard at the hairpin bends leading back up the escarpment. During the night its companies climbed the mined road and surprised an Italian post in an old fort. Further craters in both roads up the escarpment held up the Australian guns and lorries for a whole day. On 2 February the 17th Brigade occupied the abandoned Giovanni Berta.

Its place in the war

The occupation of Derna was the final chord of the phase of Operation Compass in which the British advanced along the coast from fortress to fortress. The fighting on the Wadi Derna showed that the Italian army, well positioned in difficult terrain and supported by artillery, could fight effectively; XX Corps delayed the pursuit by a week and withdrew in good order. At the same time, however, nothing could now save Cyrenaica. Babini’s escape from Mechili opened the way across the desert south of the hills, and O’Connor, after talking to General Archibald Wavell, decided to use it. The Australians were to press along the coast to pin down the Italians, while the 7th Armoured Division, as soon as fuel and new tanks arrived, was to take a short cut across the desert and cut the coast road south of Benghazi. This was originally planned for mid-February. But when, at the turn of January and February, airmen spotted columns leaving Cyrenaica and Graziani decided to evacuate it, O’Connor speeded up the advance. On 4 February the tanks set off from Mechili, and on 5–7 February at Beda Fomm they cut off the remnants of the 10th Army and forced them to capitulate. Tellera was killed, and Bergonzoli, who had slipped away from Bardia and from Derna, was taken prisoner.

Derna changed hands twice more. At the beginning of April 1941, during Erwin Rommel’s first offensive, it was taken by the Germans, and O’Connor himself was captured near Martuba. The British returned in November 1942, after the Battle of El Alamein. Throughout this time the airfields at Derna and Martuba, for which the Australians had fought in January 1941, were important bases for the air forces of both sides, supporting the fighting in the desert and attacking convoys in the Mediterranean.