The destruction of the 150th Brigade

In the early afternoon of 1 June 1942 the German and Italian troops of Colonel General Erwin Rommel captured the box of the British 150th Infantry Brigade at Sidi Muftah, in the middle of the Gazala Line. The brigade had held out for three days and nights, surrounded and without help, and its commander, Brigadier Cecil William Haydon, was killed on the last day of the fighting. Rommel, who a few days earlier had been close to defeat in the Cauldron, gained a short and secure supply route straight through the British minefields. From that moment the initiative in the Battle of Gazala began to pass into his hands.

The box at Sidi Muftah

The 150th Brigade belonged to the 50th (Northumbrian) Division, a Territorial division from north-east England. It had fought in France and Belgium in 1940 and returned home through Dunkirk. It arrived in Egypt with the division in June 1941 and reached the desert at the end of November, as Operation Crusader was drawing to a close. From February 1942 it stood on the Gazala Line, in one of the so-called boxes – all-round defensive positions surrounded by wire and mines and held by an infantry brigade with artillery.

The 150th Brigade’s box lay between two desert tracks, the Trigh Capuzzo and the Trigh el Abd, and covered more than 8 km of front. It was held by the 4th Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment, the 4th and 5th Battalions of the Green Howards, a machine-gun company of the Cheshire Regiment, the 72nd Field Regiment, a medium battery, an anti-tank battery and an anti-aircraft battery, and engineers. The nearest British position to the north was the box of the 69th Brigade of the same division, while the French at Bir Hakeim to the south were more than 20 km away. The empty spaces were filled with minefields and patrols. The Germans, who had not known of this box before the battle, called it by the local name of Got el Ualeb.

Attack from the east

It is often written that Rommel attacked from the east a position prepared to defend against an attack from the west. This is largely true, although it needs qualifying. The boxes were by design positions for all-round defence, but the whole Gazala Line had been built against an advance from the west: that was where the main mine belt ran, where the best emplacements faced and where the enemy was expected. When on 27 May the Axis mobile divisions swung round Bir Hakeim and emerged in the British rear, the 150th Brigade found itself between the Italian infantry to the west and the German tanks to the east.

By the evening of 28 May Brigadier Haydon was in no doubt that he would be attacked from the east. He pulled in his southern battalion, which until then had been holding off the Italian Trieste Division, and prepared an all-round defence. On the morning of 29 May the advanced headquarters of the 1st Army Tank Brigade under Brigadier W. O. L. O’Carroll arrived with the 44th Royal Tank Regiment and a squadron of the 42nd – some 30 infantry tanks in all. That same day the aircraft of General Ludwig Crüwell was shot down over the brigade’s positions and he was taken prisoner.

Rommel, meanwhile, had pulled the Afrika Korps back right up against the minefields and turned it to face east, shielding himself with a wall of anti-tank guns. From the west Italian engineers were clearing two gaps through the mines, along the Trigh Capuzzo and the Trigh el Abd, on either side of the box. The 150th Brigade’s artillery kept these gaps under fire. It could not stop the traffic, but it hampered it so much that, according to the British official history, the German panzer divisions began to run short of fuel, ammunition and food, and the water ration fell to half a cup per man. As long as the box held, Rommel had no safe route to his own rear.

Three days of defence

On the morning of 30 May strong elements of the Afrika Korps, including the 5th Panzer Regiment, tried to open a route west of Sidi Muftah. The attack was broken off after the loss of eleven tanks; only then did the Germans realise that the ground between the two tracks was strongly fortified and defended by infantry tanks. In the afternoon Rommel reconnoitred the position in person and assigned elements of the Afrika Korps, the 90th Light Division and the Trieste to the assault.

On 31 May the assault made slow progress. German war diaries described the defence as skilful and stubborn, and Rommel recalled that his men had gained ground yard by yard. At one point he personally led a platoon of panzer grenadiers into the attack. By evening the attackers were deep inside the British positions, but had not taken them.

On 1 June Rommel reinforced the attackers with artillery and elements of the 21st Panzer Division. The attack was preceded by heavy raids by Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers; the RAF, weakened by the losses of previous days and hampered by sandstorms, could do little. A series of blows from several directions broke the defence one strongpoint at a time. By early afternoon it was all over. Brigadier Haydon had been killed, and the surviving soldiers, among them Brigadier O’Carroll, were taken prisoner.

A report by Panzer Army Africa from that day conveyed the ferocity of the fighting: the encircled enemy, supported by numerous infantry tanks, had defended himself with extraordinary tenacity, every element of the fortifications had to be fought for separately, and the operation, which had cost the attackers considerable losses too, had ended in complete success. Rommel stated that he had taken about 3,000 prisoners and destroyed or captured 101 tanks and armoured cars and 124 guns of various kinds; these figures come from the victorious side and also include the 1st Army Tank Brigade. The 150th Brigade was never re-formed.

The relief that never came

The gravest charge later levelled at the British command concerned its inaction over the brigade’s fate. On 30 May the 2nd and 22nd Armoured Brigades of XXX Corps attacked the German anti-tank screen on the eastern edge of the Cauldron and were repulsed. Half of the 4th Armoured Brigade was sent south in pursuit of damaged enemy tanks, and a column of the 201st Guards Brigade, which set out west from Knightsbridge along the Trigh Capuzzo in the evening, ran into an alert enemy and came back, having lost twelve guns and 157 men missing.

Optimism prevailed at Eighth Army headquarters. Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie and General Claude Auchinleck believed that Rommel was pinned against the minefields and would use up the last of his supplies. Auchinleck, relying on inflated reports of German losses, urged a bold thrust westwards towards Bir Temrad; Ritchie thought the enemy must first be destroyed in the Cauldron. He decided that on the night of 1–2 June XIII Corps would occupy the Sidra Ridge north of the Cauldron and XXX Corps would form a new box west of Bir el Harmat; these two points and the 150th Brigade’s position, whose fate was not yet known, were to serve as start lines for an attack.

It was too late, and the night operation, according to the British official history, proved a fiasco. A single battalion of the 151st Brigade was sent to the Sidra Ridge and never reached it, while the 10th Indian Brigade, hurriedly brought up from Tobruk, received its orders too late to carry them out. The official historian observed ruefully that Rommel had been able, with impunity, to take enough troops from the northern and eastern sides of the Cauldron to crush a single brigade holding more than 8 km of front and attacked from all sides at once. Auchinleck warned Ritchie from Cairo that the loss of the position at Sidi Muftah might mean the initiative passing to the enemy.

Place in the war

The fall of the box changed Rommel’s situation. From then on his columns drove along the Trigh Capuzzo and the Trigh el Abd straight from the west into the Cauldron, and the British minefields shielded his rear. The German command did not come through these days unscathed – the army’s chief of staff, General Alfred Gause, and its chief of operations, Colonel Siegfried Westphal, were wounded – but as early as 2 June Rommel sent the 90th Light Division and the Trieste south against the Free French at Bir Hakeim, the last obstacle in his rear.

The Eighth Army had lost an infantry brigade, its artillery and several dozen tanks, and above all time. The attack on the Cauldron, prepared over the next few days, went in on 5 June as Operation Aberdeen and collapsed under the fire of the German guns. After the fall of Bir Hakeim on the night of 10–11 June and the defeat of the British armoured brigades at Knightsbridge on 12–13 June, the remaining brigades of the 50th Division broke out of the Gazala Line on the night of 14–15 June, fighting their way west through the Italian positions and returning east by a roundabout route. On 21 June Tobruk fell.

The destruction of the 150th Brigade became, in British military history, an example of the weakness of the box system: scattered strongpoints, too far apart to support one another, could be destroyed one by one if their own armour did not come to their aid. When in July Auchinleck, by then in direct command of the Eighth Army, halted Rommel at El Alamein, he tried to fight differently: concentrating the artillery and not leaving brigades alone in the desert.