The capture of Tripoli

At five in the morning on 23 January 1943 patrols of the British 11th Hussars, the armoured car regiment of the 7th Armoured Division, drove into Tripoli. An hour later the first units of the Scottish 51st (Highland) Division entered the city – according to some accounts infantrymen of a Gordon Highlanders battalion rode in on the tanks of the 40th Royal Tank Regiment. No one resisted. The last units of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s German-Italian Panzer Army had left the capital of Italian Libya the previous night, and the Italian civil administration had stayed in the city to hand it over to the victors.

The capture of Tripoli was a symbolic moment: exactly three months had passed since the night of 23 October 1942, when the offensive at El Alamein began, and according to the New Zealand official history the Eighth Army had since covered some 1,400 miles, more than 2,200 kilometres.

Nine days’ march

General Bernard Montgomery launched his advance from Buerat on 15 January and allowed himself ten days to reach Tripoli, since that was as long as the supplies trucked up from distant Benghazi and Tobruk would last. As after the December withdrawal from El Agheila, Rommel did not make a long stand on any line. After a single day’s fighting he gave up the Buerat position and then fell back behind rearguards, minefields and demolished bridges. The Scots advanced along the coast road through Misurata and Homs, while the 7th Armoured Division and General Bernard Freyberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division pushed through the desert and hills south of the coast, via Beni Ulid and Tarhuna.

Benito Mussolini demanded that the Homs–Tarhuna line be held for at least three weeks and that Tripoli be defended as the Germans were defending themselves at Stalingrad. Rommel, who at Buerat had little more than 90 serviceable German and Italian tanks and had just had to give up the 21st Panzer Division to Tunisia, considered this impossible. When British columns began to outflank his positions from the south, through Azizia towards the Tripolitanian plain, he decided not to stop in the city. On 22 January his rearguards clashed once more with the New Zealanders at Azizia, and during the night of 22/23 January the Axis forces left along the coast road westwards, towards Zuara and the Tunisian frontier.

The city in British hands

Further units followed the Hussars and the Scots into the city. The New Zealand official history records that the first New Zealanders in Tripoli were men of a machine-gun company whose lorry had broken down the day before: once it was repaired they set off on their own in the morning and were in the city by 10.30. At noon Freyberg ordered the 5th Brigade to march straight to Tripoli. Its commander, Brigadier Howard Kippenberger, met the commander of the 51st Division, General Douglas Wimberley, in the main square, and the two divided the city between their troops. Guards were posted at important sites; the civilian population, largely Italian settlers and officials, caused no trouble. The 7th Armoured Division occupied the ground west and south-west of the city, keeping in contact with the retreating enemy.

Montgomery was very pleased with himself: he had taken Tripoli on schedule and without a fight for the city itself. Power passed to a British military administration, which went on governing Tripolitania after the war until the independent Kingdom of Libya was established in 1951.

A wrecked harbour

The most important prize was to have been the harbour, without which the Eighth Army could go no further. German and Italian engineers had destroyed the quays and port installations and blocked the entrance to the basin with scuttled ships. According to the New Zealand official history, to a layman it seemed that the port would be useless for many months. British engineers and sailors cleared the obstacles faster than anyone had expected. Until the entrance was opened, ships were unloaded by lighters in the roadstead; on 3 February the first ship entered the harbour, a whole convoy a few days later, and soon more than 2,000 tons a day were being handled. The experience of Tobruk, Benghazi and Tripoli showed that even thorough demolitions could block a port only for a short time.

The end of Italian Libya

For Italy the loss of Tripoli was a political blow even more than a military one. The city was the capital of the colony taken from Turkey in the war of 1911–1912, the “fourth shore” that Fascism wanted to populate with Italian farmers. In 1938 Governor Italo Balbo had brought in some 20,000 settlers in a single operation. It was here that in February 1941 the first German units landed, sent to save Libya after Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s defeat. Now, after losing Ethiopia and Eritrea in 1941, Mussolini had lost the last part of his African empire. In Rome the blame was laid on Rommel, who was accused of having once again abandoned the Italians and given up the colony without a fight.

The Jews of Tripoli

The British arrival meant the end of persecution for one of the oldest Jewish communities in North Africa. According to estimates cited in histories of the Jews of Libya, in 1941 Jews made up about a quarter of Tripoli’s inhabitants, and the city had 44 synagogues. From 1938 they had been subject to the Italian racial laws – applied in Libya at first more leniently than in Italy – which excluded them from public office, schools and many professions. In 1942, in line with Mussolini’s order for an “evacuation”, the Italian authorities deported more than two thousand Jews from Cyrenaica to a camp at Giado (Jadu) in the mountains south-west of Tripoli. According to historians, more than 500 people (the figure of 562 is given) died there of destitution, hunger and a typhus epidemic. Some Jews with British citizenship were interned in Italy; some of them later ended up in the German camp of Bergen-Belsen. The British reached Giado in the last days of January 1943 and set about fighting the typhus; the camp was closed down over the following months. Among the conquerors, the Jewish inhabitants of Tripoli met Jewish soldiers from Palestine serving in the British Army.

Leclerc’s column

From the other direction, out of the depths of the Sahara, came the forces of Free France. The column of General Philippe Leclerc, sent by de Gaulle from Chad, struck at the Italian Fezzan in December 1942, took Sebha on 12 January and Murzuk on 13 January. According to French accounts Leclerc reached Tripoli on 25 January, two days after the British. His force, several thousand strong and mostly African soldiers, came under Montgomery’s command and from then on fought alongside the Eighth Army in Tunisia.

Place in the war

With Tripoli, Libya was lost to the Axis. Rommel fell back towards Tunisia: in February his last units crossed the frontier and occupied the fortifications of the Mareth Line, while the Eighth Army, waiting for the harbour to open, halted for several weeks and attacked those positions only in March. The war in North Africa moved to Tunisia, where since November a campaign had been under way against the Axis forces landed there after the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria. From now on two Allied armies – the Eighth from the east, and the British First Army and the Americans from the west – closed the pincers around the Axis’s last foothold in Africa.

The capture of Tripoli coincided with the end of the Casablanca Conference, at which Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided that Sicily would come next after Africa. On his way home Churchill visited the captured city: on 3 and 4 February he took the salute at parades of the Eighth Army, among them the Scots and the New Zealanders. Freyberg called it the most moving parade of his career, and the Prime Minister told the soldiers that after the war it would be enough for a man to say that he had “marched and fought with the Desert Army”. For the British, the capture of Tripoli – the goal the Eighth Army and its predecessors had pursued since 1940 – was proof that El Alamein had not been a one-off victory but the beginning of the end for the Axis in Africa.