The capture of Benghazi

On 20 November 1942 the leading units of the British Eighth Army entered Benghazi, the capital of Cyrenaica and Libya’s second city. The German and Italian forces abandoned it without a fight, having first destroyed the port installations. It was the last of the five occasions on which Benghazi changed hands during the war – and the third time the British had marched in. This time the city remained in their hands until the end of the war.

Two dates appear in chronologies: according to some, the British reached Benghazi on 18 November; according to others, the Allies took the city on 20 November. The latter is correct: studies agree that the British entered Benghazi on 20 November, and the date of 18 November finds no support in them.

A city that changed hands

For both sides Benghazi was the most important port in Cyrenaica, and for the Axis its second supply port in Africa after Tripoli. When it was in Axis hands it was a constant target of night raids by British Wellington bombers from Egypt – the airmen called these regular sorties the “Benghazi mail run”. For two years of desert war the city shared the fate of the whole province. On 6–7 February 1941 it surrendered to the Australians of General Richard O’Connor’s corps, who then destroyed the retreating Italian army at Beda Fomm. On 3 April 1941 Rommel took it during his first offensive. On Christmas Eve 1941, after Rommel’s retreat from Gazala, the British entered it again, and at the end of January 1942 Rommel recaptured it. Soldiers on both sides became so used to this see-saw that the British called the successive races across Cyrenaica the “Benghazi Handicap”.

That experience weighed on the decisions of both commanders in November 1942. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel remembered the fate of the Italians at Beda Fomm, cut off by the British who had taken a short cut across the desert. General Bernard Montgomery, for his part, remembered that the two previous British pursuits across Cyrenaica had ended in a Rommel counter-offensive against overextended, exhausted units.

The pursuit across Cyrenaica

After retaking Tobruk on 13 November and capturing Derna and the Martuba airfields on 15 November, the Eighth Army pressed on along the coast road through the Jebel Akhdar uplands. At the same time Montgomery sent a column of armoured cars straight across the desert via Msus towards Agedabia, in order – as in February 1941 – to cut the line of retreat south of Benghazi. But rain had once again softened the ground, and the column made slow progress. When decrypted German signals showed that Rommel’s army was almost immobilised for lack of fuel, Montgomery ordered stronger forces sent after it.

Rommel, learning of the British armoured cars in the desert, hastened the evacuation of Benghazi. The port, warehouses and quays were blown up; Rommel later wrote that the destruction of the harbour installations plunged that “unhappy city” into chaos. His rearguards easily pushed back the light British units before the main forces arrived, and the Axis troops passed through the bottleneck between Benghazi and Agedabia without serious loss. On 20 November the British entered the abandoned city. The same day Convoy Stoneage reached Malta, covered by aircraft from the recaptured Cyrenaican airfields.

At El Agheila

On 23 November the Axis forces abandoned Agedabia and took up a position between Mersa Brega on the coast and El Agheila, on the border between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. It was a naturally strong position: here the coast road ran between the sea and salt marshes, soft sand and broken ground that restricted the movement of vehicles. German and Italian engineers mined the approaches, even burying steel helmets in the ground to confuse British mine detectors. In less than three weeks since the breakthrough at El Alamein, Rommel’s army had fallen back more than a thousand kilometres.

Rommel believed he could not hold this position. His army had only a few dozen tanks and little artillery, and it was perpetually short of fuel. After the Allied landings in North Africa, all the reinforcements the Germans and Italians could ship across the Mediterranean went to Tunisia, where the run for Tunis was under way. Rommel wanted to withdraw as quickly as possible all the way west into Tunisia and join up with the forces there. His superiors thought otherwise. Benito Mussolini, for whom Tripolitania was the last scrap of Italy’s colonial empire in Africa, ordered the El Agheila position to be defended, and Adolf Hitler backed him, demanding that it be held “under all circumstances”.

On 24 November, at the Arco dei Fileni triumphal arch on the border between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, Rommel met Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the Chief of the Italian General Staff, Marshal Ugo Cavallero, and the Governor of Libya, Marshal Ettore Bastico. The talks produced no agreement. On 28 November Rommel flew to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia to persuade him in person to allow a retreat. The meeting ended in a row: Hitler accused the African army of having thrown away its weapons and rejected the idea of abandoning Africa. Rommel came back empty-handed, although at the beginning of December Hitler and Mussolini did agree to preparations for a withdrawal to the next position, at Buerat.

Supply

On the British side the greatest problem was not the enemy but distance. The Eighth Army was now supplied from bases in Egypt hundreds of kilometres away. The railway, blown up by the retreating troops in more than two hundred places, was quickly repaired as far as the Libyan frontier; beyond that, supplies went along the coast road or by sea to Tobruk and Benghazi. The port of Benghazi, despite the damage, was reopened within a few weeks and, according to British figures, by the end of December was handling some 3,000 tons of supplies a day – almost four times as much as had been planned. Montgomery, however, did not intend to attack until he had built up his stocks. On 26 November General Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps took over the front line, and the army spent almost three weeks preparing for the attack.

Significance

The capture of Benghazi completed the reconquest of Cyrenaica. For the first time since the start of the desert war, the British entered the province without fearing that they would soon lose it again: Rommel no longer had the strength for a counter-offensive, and behind his back a new front was emerging in Tunisia. The recaptured airfields and ports allowed the RAF to cover the convoys to Malta and to attack Axis shipping, which deepened Rommel’s supply problems still further.

On 11 December the Eighth Army attacked the El Agheila position, but Rommel once again slipped out of the intended encirclement, withdrawing to Buerat. On 23 January 1943 the British entered Tripoli, ending thirty years of Italian rule in Libya, and in the spring of 1943 the Eighth Army and the Allied forces from Algeria met in Tunisia, where in May the remnants of the Axis forces in Africa surrendered.