The defence of Bir Hakeim

On the night of 10–11 June 1942 Brigadier General Marie-Pierre Koenig’s 1st Free French Brigade abandoned the Bir Hakeim position at the southern end of the British line at Gazala. For fifteen days the brigade had defended itself in the open desert against Italian and German divisions, dive bombers and artillery, and Colonel General Erwin Rommel had several times personally led the assaults. When ammunition and water ran out, the French broke through the ring of encirclement at night and most of them reached the British lines. On the morning of 11 June the Germans occupied the abandoned positions. For Free France it was the first major battle with the Germans since the defeat of 1940 and the beginning of a legend that is still recalled today by the names of a bridge and a Métro station in Paris.

Under 9 June war chronologies record that Rommel renewed his attacks on the French “box”, whose already small perimeter had shrunk dangerously, and that General Ritchie ordered the brigade to withdraw the next day. Under 10 June they in turn state that Rommel drove the French out of Bir Hakeim, but that Koenig managed to find gaps in the enemy’s scattered forces and break through to his own side. Both entries are broadly accurate. They need to be refined on two points. Permission to withdraw came in the afternoon of 9 June, and Koenig wanted to leave that very night; because the British had not had time to prepare a rallying point, the breakout was put back to the night of 10–11 June. Nor did the brigade slip away through gaps: it passed through a narrow lane in the minefields and fought its way through German outposts, suffering heavier losses in that one night than in the whole of the defence before it.

The brigade and the position

The 1st Free French Brigade had been stationed at Bir Hakeim since mid-February 1942, when, after Rommel’s second offensive, the front had settled on the Gazala Line. It numbered some 3,700 men and was one of the most diverse units of the war. Its core consisted of two battalions of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion under Lieutenant Colonel Dimitri Amilakhvari, an émigré Georgian prince. In the ranks of the Legion, alongside Frenchmen, served Spaniards, veterans of the Civil War on the Republican side, as well as Germans and Austrians, among them political refugees and Jews. Beside the legionnaires stood a marine infantry battalion, the 2nd Marching Battalion made up of soldiers from Ubangi-Shari and other territories of French Equatorial Africa, a North African company, sailors manning anti-aircraft guns, and Lieutenant Colonel Félix Broche’s Pacific Battalion, formed from volunteers from Tahiti and other islands of French Polynesia, from New Caledonia and from the New Hebrides. Less than a year earlier some of these same soldiers had fought in Syria and Lebanon against French troops loyal to Vichy.

The equipment was just as mixed: British lorries and Universal Carriers (known as Bren Carriers), British Bofors anti-aircraft guns, but above all French 75 mm field guns brought from the Levant. Several dozen of them were sited to fire over open sights at tanks. Bir Hakeim was no fortress. It was an old well and the ruins of an outpost at a junction of desert tracks, on flat, stony ground visible from every side. Over three months the French hewed shelters, gun pits and vehicle hides out of the rock, and surrounded the position with extensive minefields. Rommel later counted some 1,200 firing positions.

27 May – 1 June: Ariete and isolation

When on the night of 26–27 May Rommel outflanked the Gazala Line from the south, on the morning of 27 May a tank regiment of the Italian Ariete Armoured Division attacked Bir Hakeim straight off the march. The Italian M13/40 tanks advanced without infantry support, which the French artillery had cut off with its fire. They ran onto mines and into the fire of the 75 mm guns shooting from a few hundred metres. Several broke into the position and were destroyed at close quarters. According to French tallies 32 tanks were left in front of the position, and the regiment’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Pasquale Prestisimone, was taken prisoner; Italian figures give lower losses. The brigade lost only a few wounded that day.

Further east, meanwhile, Rommel had smashed the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade and pushed back the British armoured brigades, leaving Bir Hakeim isolated. French mobile columns, equipped with carriers and lorry-mounted guns, nonetheless sallied out of the position and attacked German and Italian supply columns, which had to go round the box to the south. On 30 May some 620 Indians from the shattered brigade, released by the Germans in the desert, reached Bir Hakeim, which made the water situation even worse. On 31 May, during a sandstorm, a column of 50 lorries brought in water and took away the wounded, the Indians and the prisoners.

Meanwhile Rommel dug in in the Cauldron and on 1 June destroyed the 150th Brigade, which had been holding the gap in the minefields north of Bir Hakeim. From then on he had a short supply route through the British line and could turn against the French.

2–7 June: encirclement and siege

On the morning of 2 June Bir Hakeim was surrounded by the German 90th Light Division from the south and the Italian Trieste Motorised Division from the north. Two Italian officers brought a demand for surrender. Koenig rejected it. The next day a letter arrived signed by Rommel himself: further resistance would mean needless bloodshed, and the defenders would share the fate of the two British brigades destroyed at Got el Ualeb; if they hoisted white flags and came out unarmed, the fighting would end. According to French accounts, the reply was an artillery salvo.

From then on the position was shelled by artillery of various calibres and bombed by Ju 87s and Italian aircraft, often several times a day. The defenders sat in pits cut into the rock, and their fire came to life every time infantry and sappers tried to cross the minefields. Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham’s Desert Air Force intercepted the incoming bombers and attacked the besiegers’ vehicles. When on 4 June fighters broke up a Stuka raid, Koenig signalled to Coningham: “Bravo! Merci pour la R.A.F.”; he replied: “Merci pour le sport.” The British 7th Motor Brigade and 29th Indian Brigade harassed the besiegers from outside, and by 7 June several supply columns had got through to the position.

Ritchie, commander of the Eighth Army, wondered during these days whether to withdraw the French, but decided to hold Bir Hakeim for as long as the British counter-attack on the Cauldron went on. Operation Aberdeen on 5–6 June, however, ended in defeat, and Rommel, freed from the threat to his rear, could throw more forces against Bir Hakeim. On 6 June German sappers of the 90th Light Division cut through the outer minefield and got within less than a kilometre of the main positions, but went no further.

8–10 June: Rommel at Bir Hakeim

On 8 June Rommel brought part of the 15th Panzer Division to Bir Hakeim, together with the sappers of Group Hecker and 88 mm anti-aircraft guns, which were brought up close to the position in the morning mist to fire directly into the emplacements. He personally led the attack from the north. “I needed Bir Hakeim; the fate of my army depended on it,” he later wrote in his memoirs. Bombs hit the brigade’s dressing station; according to French accounts more than a dozen wounded were killed there. In the evening Koenig reported that his men were exhausted, losses heavy and supplies running out. During the night British aircraft dropped supplies to the defenders, but it was a drop in the ocean.

On 9 June, the day usually described as one of renewed attacks, the assault came from two sides. In the north, German battle groups from the 90th Light Division and the 15th Panzer Division, together with Italian infantry from the Trieste Division, struck at the rise marked Point 186, from which French observers were directing fire. The Ubangi-Shari battalion and the legionnaires lost some of their positions, and counter-attacks by carriers restored the line only briefly. In the south, by the old fort, German infantry came within two hundred metres of the position. That day Lieutenant Colonel Broche, commander of the Pacific Battalion, was killed by a shell splinter. The perimeter was visibly shrinking.

In the afternoon the commander of the 7th Armoured Division, Major General Frank Messervy, told Koenig that he would have to withdraw; the decision had been taken at the headquarters of the Eighth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie. Koenig asked for air cover and wanted to leave that same night, but the British had not had time to prepare the lorries and ambulances that were to wait for the French south-west of the position. The brigade had to hold out for one more day.

10 June was the hardest. According to French accounts some two hundred rounds remained for the 75 mm guns and a few hundred for the mortars, and there was almost no water. In the afternoon the northern sector, held by the Ubangi-Shari battalion and the 3rd Battalion of the Legion, suffered the heaviest air raid of the entire siege: about a hundred Stukas dropped, according to British tallies, some 130 tonnes of bombs on the position. German tanks and grenadiers came up to the emplacements, but a counter-attack by Captain Pierre Messmer’s company – Messmer was a future prime minister of France – and by Captain de Lamaze’s carriers, supported by the last mortar rounds, threw them back. Rommel expected the position to fall the next day and did not want to lose tanks on the mines.

The night of 10–11 June: the breakout

After dark, sappers began clearing a lane through the mines in the western part of the position, and the heavy equipment that could not be taken away was prepared for destruction. Two companies stayed behind to cover the departure. Koenig handed over command within the position itself to Amilakhvari and set off at the head of the column in a car driven by Susan Travers, his English driver, who after the war became the only woman ever to serve formally in the Foreign Legion. Clearing the mines took longer than planned, and instead of a corridor two hundred metres wide there was only a narrow lane. The column set off late, and vehicles lost their way and ran onto mines.

A flare gave the movement away and the Germans opened fire. When the head of the column was halted by outposts of the 90th Light Division, Koenig ordered his men to break through regardless of the mines. Travers drove through the German lines under fire; more than a dozen bullet holes were later counted in the car. Most of the brigade broke out in small groups, on foot and in vehicles, knocking out machine-gun posts on the way. Among those killed were Captain de Lamaze and the deputy artillery commander, Major Charles Bricogne, while the commander of the 3rd Battalion of the Legion was taken prisoner. Towards morning the first Frenchmen reached the rallying point of the 7th Motor Brigade, and by about 7–8 a.m. on 11 June most of the brigade was in the area designated by the British. British patrols spent the whole day gathering stragglers. On the morning of 11 June the 90th Light Division occupied the abandoned position, finding in it the dead and the wounded who could not be taken away.

Rommel later wrote that at the point where the French broke out the encirclement had not been closed as ordered, and he added that it had been shown once again that a French commander determined to fight to the end could achieve almost impossible things. He also admitted that in Africa he had rarely encountered such fierce fighting.

Losses and prisoners

The figures vary according to the source. Of the brigade’s roughly 3,700 men, between about 2,400 and about 2,700 got out of the encirclement, according to various tallies; French post-war figures give 2,619 out of 3,723. According to figures cited by Koenig and Messmer, during the siege the brigade lost 99 killed and 109 wounded, and on the night of the breakout 41 killed, 21 wounded and 763 missing, most of whom were taken prisoner. British and American authors give a total of some 140 killed, more than 220 wounded and more than 800 prisoners. German and Italian losses are estimated in the literature at about 3,300 killed, wounded and missing, but these figures are uncertain. According to British tallies, between 2 and 10 June the Desert Air Force flew some 1,500 sorties over Bir Hakeim and lost several dozen aircraft, while the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica flew some 1,400.

The fate of the prisoners caused anxiety. In June German radio announced that the French taken prisoner at Bir Hakeim did not belong to a regular army and would be treated as partisans. De Gaulle replied from London on the BBC that if the Germans began killing French prisoners, he would regretfully do the same to German prisoners; Berlin soon gave assurances that de Gaulle’s soldiers would be treated as soldiers. According to the American historian Douglas Porch, Hitler also ordered that German political refugees captured in the Legion be shot, and Rommel did not carry out this order. The prisoners from Bir Hakeim were handed over to the Italians. According to French figures more than twenty died soon after capture, when they were given no water for several days, and more than a hundred were killed when, in August 1942, a British submarine torpedoed the ship Nino Bixio, which was carrying them to Italy.

Also part of the Bir Hakeim legend is the story of a company of Jewish sappers from Palestine fighting near the position. According to accounts, Koenig allowed it to fly its own flag with the Star of David, contrary to British regulations; the details of this story are known mainly from later memoirs.

Significance

Militarily, the defence of Bir Hakeim did not change the outcome of the Battle of Gazala, but it delayed it. In the first days the French forced Rommel to supply his troops by a roundabout route around the position, and then for nine days they tied down a large part of his infantry, artillery and aircraft. The British official historian Ian Playfair judged that the defence gave the Eighth Army a chance to recover from its defeat in the Cauldron. On 12 June General Claude Auchinleck wrote that the United Nations owed the French soldiers and their gallant general admiration and gratitude. Some historians, among them the French scholar Benoît Rondeau, warn against exaggeration, however: Rommel’s halt at El Alamein in July was also decided by his overstretched supply lines, the wear on his equipment and the proximity of British bases, and the Eighth Army squandered the time gained at Bir Hakeim in failed counter-attacks.

Politically, Bir Hakeim meant much more. General Charles de Gaulle, who in the last days of the defence had sent Koenig a radio message – “Know, and tell your soldiers, that all France is watching you and that you are her pride” – described in his memoirs how on the evening of 11 June, on hearing that the brigade had got out, he shut himself alone in his office and wept for joy. For the first time since 1940 a French unit had fought a major battle against the Germans and Italians as an independent formation and emerged from it with honour. Bir Hakeim strengthened de Gaulle’s position vis-à-vis Churchill and Roosevelt, and in July 1942 his movement took the name Fighting France. Even the collaborationist weekly L’Illustration conceded that the “French dissidents” had defended themselves heroically.

The following days brought the Eighth Army further defeats: on 13 June the destruction of its armoured brigades at Knightsbridge, the retreat from the Gazala Line, and on 21 June the surrender of Tobruk. Koenig’s brigade, rebuilt in Egypt, fought at El Alamein in the autumn and later in Tunisia, Italy and France. Koenig received the Order of Liberation, and in 1944 he became head of the French Forces of the Interior. After the war the Passy bridge in Paris was renamed the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, and the nearby Métro station Bir-Hakeim. André Malraux later said that Bir Hakeim was not Austerlitz but that, like Joan of Arc’s first fight at Orléans, it proved that France had not died.