The capture of Bardia

On 5 January 1941, after three days of fighting, the last Italian positions surrendered at Bardia, a coastal fortress in eastern Cyrenaica some 25 kilometres beyond the Egyptian frontier. It was taken by the 6th Australian Division under Major General Iven Mackay, supported by British infantry tanks, artillery, ships of the Mediterranean Fleet and aircraft. The Italian XXIII Corps of General Annibale Bergonzoli, which according to the assurances given to Mussolini was to defend Bardia “to the end”, ceased to exist. Tens of thousands of soldiers were taken prisoner, while the Australians lost fewer than five hundred men. It was the Australian Army’s first victory of the Second World War and, after the battle of Sidi Barrani, the second great defeat of the Italian Tenth Army in Operation Compass.

Under 5 January war chronologies record that Australian troops of XIII Corps, as the Western Desert Force had been renamed, took Bardia and captured 45,000 prisoners, and that Tobruk, the next objective, lay 70 miles further on. The date and the name of the corps are correct: General Richard O’Connor’s Western Desert Force was renamed XIII Corps on 1 January 1941, and the last centres of resistance in the fortress capitulated on 5 January. The figure of 45,000, however, is the number of defenders, not of prisoners. According to the Italian Army’s historical office (Ufficio Storico dell’Esercito) about 36,000 men were taken prisoner; the British official history speaks of more than 40,000 killed and captured. Several thousand soldiers, among them Bergonzoli himself, got through to Tobruk, some 120 kilometres away by road – that is, roughly 70–75 miles.

The fortress and its defenders

Bergonzoli had shut himself up in Bardia on 16 December 1940, when the Italians gave up Sollum, the Halfaya Pass and Fort Capuzzo without a fight. He gathered all or part of five divisions in the fortress. The northern sector of the perimeter, named after the Wadi Gerfan, was held by the 2nd Blackshirt Division “28 Ottobre”; the central sector (Ponticelli) by the 1st Blackshirt Division “23 Marzo” with part of the 62nd Division “Marmarica”; and the southern sector (Meriega) by the 63rd Division “Cirene” with the rest of the “Marmarica”. In addition there were some six thousand survivors of the “Catanzaro” Division, shattered at Sidi Barrani, about as many frontier guards, companies of Bersaglieri and a dismounted cavalry regiment. Altogether about 45,000 men.

The perimeter of the fortress ran for some 29 kilometres. In front of it lay an almost continuous anti-tank ditch and wire entanglements, and behind them two rows of concrete posts set roughly 700 metres apart. Each had one or two 47 mm anti-tank guns and several machine guns, and trenches linked them to underground shelters. In the southern corner the Italians had built a third line, the so-called Switch Line. The garrison had more than 400 guns, but many of them dated from the First World War, the barrels were worn, and according to Gavin Long’s Australian official history about two-thirds of the fuses were past their shelf life, so that a large proportion of the shells failed to explode. The armoured reserve consisted of 13 M13/40 medium tanks without radios and more than a hundred L3 tankettes, worthless against tanks.

Weaker than the concrete was morale. The garrison, shaken by the defeat at Sidi Barrani, had lived for two weeks under bombardment from the sea and from the air. Bergonzoli, not knowing how long he would have to hold out, rationed food and water, and lice and dysentery took their toll.

Mackay’s plan

On 24 December O’Connor ordered Mackay to prepare an attack. The corps commander expected an easy victory and proposed basing it on the 23 serviceable Matilda infantry tanks of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, whose armour the Italian guns could not penetrate. Mackay, a veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front, assumed that the Italians would put up a stiff defence, and prepared the assault the way the Hindenburg Line had been broken in 1918. He drew up the plan together with the division’s chief of staff, Colonel Frank Berryman.

The blow was to come from the west, where the defences were weaker, at the junction of the Gerfan and Ponticelli sectors, so as to cut the fortress in two and disorient the defence. The 16th Infantry Brigade under Brigadier Arthur Allen was to lead: its sappers were to blow gaps in the wire and fill in the ditch, and the Matildas were to drive through the breaches. Behind it, Brigadier Stanley Savige’s 17th Brigade was to widen the breach to the south, while Brigadier Horace Robertson’s 19th Brigade stood in reserve. The artillery, reinforced by British regiments, was concentrated so that 96 guns covered a breakthrough sector about 700 metres wide. Mackay demanded that 125 rounds be brought up for each gun, and for that reason the assault was postponed from 2 to 3 January.

The division was not complete. It lacked its third artillery regiment, its machine-gun battalion and most of its anti-tank guns, and only one artillery regiment had modern 25-pounders. The main worry, however, was supply. “This is a quartermasters’ war,” said the head of the division’s administrative services, Colonel George Vasey. Ammunition, water and food were carried in captured Italian lorries, and the navy delivered water to Sollum. Before the assault the soldiers were issued with sleeveless leather jerkins, gloves for cutting wire and 350 captured Italian wire-cutters. The attackers numbered some 16,000 men, fewer than half the number of the defenders.

Bombs and naval guns, 2–4 January

It is usually recorded that from 2 to 4 January Bardia was bombed by British aircraft and shelled by ships lying off the coast. That is so, although the preparatory bombardment had begun earlier: the monitor HMS Terror and gunboats had been shelling the fortress since mid-December. From 31 December to 2 January the air force flew about a hundred bombing sorties over Bardia, and on the night of 2–3 January bombs from the Wellingtons of No. 70 Squadron RAF and the Bombays of No. 216 Squadron fell on the fortress. During the assault Lysander aircraft directed the artillery fire, and fighters patrolled the sky between Bardia and Tobruk to cut the fortress off from the help of the Italian air force.

On the morning of 3 January, as the Australians were already going into the attack, three Queen Elizabeth-class battleships, Warspite, Valiant and Barham, appeared off Bardia with a destroyer escort, sent by the commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Andrew Cunningham. Aircraft from the carrier Illustrious, which two months earlier had struck at Taranto, spotted for the guns and provided air cover for the force. The ships fired 244 rounds of 381 mm, 270 of 152 mm and 240 of 114 mm at the northern part of the fortress, and then withdrew. For the rest of the battle the bombardment was carried on by Terror and the gunboats Ladybird, Aphis and Gnat. Terror’s shells even brought down a section of the coastal cliff together with the Italian guns standing on it.

3 January: the breach

The assault companies moved off to the start line at 4.16 a.m., after a meal and a tot of rum. At 5.30 the artillery opened fire. Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Eather’s 2/1st Battalion advanced under mortar and artillery fire. Ahead of it crawled the sappers of the 2/1st Field Company, carrying Bangalore torpedoes – tubes almost four metres long filled with explosive – which were pushed under the wire every few dozen metres. One of them was set off by an Italian shell, killing four men and wounding nine. The rest exploded when the time came, and the sappers broke down the walls of the anti-tank ditch with picks and shovels to make crossings for the tanks. The infantry burst into the posts, which fell one after another, often after fighting with grenades and bayonets.

Behind the 2/1st Battalion the Matildas passed through the breaches, and with them Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Chilton’s 2/2nd Battalion, which rolled up the defences to the right along the double line of posts. Later Lieutenant Colonel Victor England’s 2/3rd Battalion moved off with the Bren carriers of the 2/6th Cavalry Regiment. The Italians tried to counter-attack: half a dozen M13/40 tanks freed some 500 prisoners and ran into a platoon of Australian portée anti-tank guns. Corporal A. A. Pickett’s gun knocked out several tanks before it was itself hit, and the last M13 was disabled by another gun. By noon some six thousand prisoners had been escorted to the collecting point at Post 45. The Italian attempt to stop the attack on the outer perimeter had failed.

Things went worse for the 17th Brigade, which was to widen the breach to the south. Its battalions advanced over ground where the Italian artillery and machine guns were still intact, and some of the tanks came to a halt out of fuel and ammunition or with broken tracks. The commander of the 2/5th Battalion was wounded, the battalion lost many officers, and one of its companies almost all its NCOs. The companies of the 2/7th Battalion took post after post until nightfall, creeping up on them silently from the rear in the dark. At Post 22 an Italian prisoner shot an Australian captain; his men killed the culprit, but the captain’s second-in-command would not allow revenge on the other prisoners. The 2/6th Battalion, which was meant only to demonstrate against the south-western corner of the fortress, attacked on its commander’s initiative and was held up before Post 11. By evening, according to the brigade’s account, the situation in this sector was “extremely confused”, and the attack had stalled.

4 January: the fortress cut in two

On the evening of 3 January Berryman concluded that unless the defence collapsed soon, the exhausted 16th and 17th Brigades would be incapable of further effort, and he advised Mackay to commit the 19th Brigade. O’Connor, who came to divisional headquarters during the night with his chief of staff, Brigadier John Harding, agreed to the change of plan without hesitation. For 4 January it was settled that the 16th Brigade, supported by all serviceable tanks and the artillery, would drive due east towards the small town of Bardia and cut the fortress in two.

In the morning the 2/1st Battalion met heavy fire at Post 54 and took it only in the afternoon, after a concentration of artillery and mortar fire that also blew up a nearby ammunition dump. The fall of this post brought down the whole northern sector: further posts surrendered without a fight, and white flags were hoisted over others. In the Wadi Gerfan the 2/3rd Battalion came upon thousands of men from technical and rear units who had neither the training nor the will to fight. An eight-man patrol sent out to reconnoitre came back with five hundred prisoners, and one company took more than two thousand, including sixty officers.

The carriers of Major Denzil MacArthur-Onslow’s 2/6th Cavalry Regiment, making for the heights above the road to the town, came upon an Italian hospital with five hundred patients, among them several wounded Australians, and three thousand able-bodied soldiers. At about 4 p.m. tanks, carriers and a company of the 2/3rd Battalion entered Bardia. At the same time the 2/2nd Battalion came down the ravine of the Wadi Scemmas towards the sea and took the fort on the southern headland above the harbour. When a tank made for the gate, the defenders opened it themselves. Individual carriers and forward artillery observers were rounding up a thousand prisoners or more at a time.

By evening the defenders of the Gerfan and Ponticelli sectors were cut off from each other and the rear of the fortress had been broken. On the afternoon of 4 January Bergonzoli judged the position hopeless and left Bardia on foot for Tobruk with his staff, about 120 men. Some soldiers also escaped by boat along the coast. The commander of the Tenth Army, General Giuseppe Tellera, considered a relief expedition but concluded that it had no chance whatever.

5 January: the capitulation

The last act was played out in the south, in the Meriega sector. On the morning of 5 January the 19th Brigade struck south from the area of the Bardia road behind an artillery barrage. It was supported by six Matildas, all that were still running; the others had struck mines, been damaged by shells or broken down. The 2/11th Battalion received its orders so late that instead of two companies only one, under Captain Ralph Honner, was in time for the attack, with all six tanks. His men literally had to chase the creeping barrage. Most posts surrendered at the sight of infantry and tanks. By 11.15 the company had reached the Switch Line, and the second company following it captured the commanders of the “Marmarica” and “Cirene” Divisions, General Ruggero Tracchia and General Alessandro De Guidi. Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Dougherty’s 2/4th Battalion then passed through its positions.

Meanwhile in the north the garrisons of the last posts in the Gerfan sector capitulated to the 16th Brigade and the 7th Support Group of the 7th Armoured Division. The longest resistance came in the south-west from Post 11, before which the 2/6th Battalion had been held up the day before. Now the battalion attacked it from the front, the carriers from the rear, and the Matildas came in from the flank. The wounded Italian commander lowered his flag and raised a white one. Some 350 men surrendered with two field guns, six anti-tank guns and several dozen machine guns. The post commander wore on his uniform a British Military Cross from the First World War, when Italians and Britons had fought on the same side; Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Godfrey shook his hand. The Australian official historian Gavin Long later wrote that on a battlefield where Italian soldiers had won little glory, the last to lay down their arms were men whose determined fight would have done honour to any army.

The balance

Exact Italian losses cannot be established, and the sources differ. According to figures from the Italian Ufficio Storico, 1,703 soldiers, including 44 officers, were killed at Bardia, 3,740 were wounded and about 36,000 were taken prisoner. The British official history states that the Italians lost more than 40,000 men killed and captured, more than 400 guns, 13 medium tanks, 117 light tanks and more than 700 vehicles. The numbers of prisoners given in the literature thus range from about 36,000 to over 40,000. At most a few thousand men slipped out of the fortress.

The 6th Australian Division lost 130 killed and 326 wounded. This was a surprisingly low toll for the storming of a fortified stronghold held by a garrison almost three times as numerous. Long attributed it to a combination of bold reconnaissance, a careful plan, artillery fire that neutralised the Italian guns at the decisive moment, and a swift, relentless infantry advance. Crediting the victory to the tanks alone or the artillery alone he likened to staging Hamlet without the prince. The Matildas, whose armour the Italian guns could not pierce, nevertheless played an enormous part, and the wear on them showed that stocks of British equipment in North Africa were running out fast.

The battle was the first of the war in which an Australian general commanded a large Australian formation and the plan was prepared by an Australian staff. In Australia the news of the victory was received with enthusiasm, and more volunteers came forward for the Second Australian Imperial Force. The American press wrote about the Australian soldiers with admiration. This response had political significance: the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, cabled General Archibald Wavell that the victories in Libya were helping in the United States, where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was then preparing a bill for aid to Britain.

Place in the war

The fall of Bardia opened the road to Tobruk. On 5 January itself, before resistance in the fortress had ceased, the 7th Armoured Brigade moved west, and on 7 January the British took the airfield at El Adem near Tobruk. A few days later the fortress was surrounded. The assault, carried out by the same 6th Australian Division and on the same pattern, began on 21 January, and on 22 January Tobruk capitulated. Bergonzoli, who reached it after several days’ march across the desert, was given no task in Tobruk. At the end of January he was in command in the area of Derna and Mechili, and on 7 February, at the battle of Beda Fomm, where the remnants of the Tenth Army were cut off on the road to Tripolitania, he was taken prisoner.

The defeat at Bardia, the second in a month, hastened decisions in Berlin. On 6 January Mackay noted in his diary that the Germans could no longer stay out of Africa. He was right. Adolf Hitler, less worried by the military importance of Libya than by the threat of Mussolini’s political collapse, on 9 January set out to the Wehrmacht commanders his intention of sending a German blocking force to North Africa. In February General Erwin Rommel arrived in Tripoli, and in April 1941 Bardia was once again in Axis hands. During the war it changed hands three more times: at the turn of 1941 and 1942 it was retaken by the 2nd South African Division, in June 1942 Axis troops occupied it again, and in November 1942, after the Second Battle of El Alamein, the British entered it for the last time, without a fight.

For the Australians Bardia became what Gallipoli had been for their fathers: the first great test of a new army. Mackay, whom his soldiers called “Mr Chips” after the hero of the novel about an old schoolmaster, proved that a cautious, methodical style of command, learned in 1918, could bring a quick and cheap victory. A few months later his division, sent to Greece, was to face an entirely different enemy.