The Eighth Army retakes Tobruk

On 13 November 1942 units of the British Eighth Army entered Tobruk – the port whose fall in June had become for the British a symbol of defeat. The German and Italian forces abandoned the town without a fight, destroying whatever they could not carry away. The capture of Tobruk was the most telling episode of the pursuit that General Bernard Montgomery had been conducting westward across the whole of Cyrenaica since his victory at El Alamein. The offensive “beginning at Sollum” (10 November), the recapture of Tobruk (13 November) and the taking of Derna (15 November), which chronologies record separately, were stages of this single movement.

From El Alamein to the Libyan frontier

After the retreat from El Alamein, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s panzer army fell back along the coast road, covered by rearguards. Montgomery hoped that his armoured divisions would cut it off with wide sweeps through the desert, but these attempts came too late and the units ran short of fuel. On 6 and 7 November torrential rain turned the desert tracks to mud and brought the pursuit to a halt, while the Germans and Italians drove on along the tarmac. The last rearguards left Mersa Matruh on the night of 7–8 November, and held Sidi Barrani until the evening of 9 November.

On 8 November news arrived of the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria. Rommel, who now had an enemy far in his rear as well, decided to fall back in a single bound all the way to the position at El Agheila, on the border of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania – the place from which he had launched his offensives in 1941 and 1942.

Under 10 November many chronologies state that Montgomery “launched a great offensive at Sollum”. In reality this was not a new offensive but the continuation of a pursuit that had been under way since 4 November. On the evening of 10 November the 2nd New Zealand Division stood at the foot of the Halfaya Pass, while the 7th Armoured Division was bypassing Sollum to the south, heading for Fort Capuzzo and Sidi Azeiz. On the morning of 11 November the 5th New Zealand Brigade took the pass, capturing, according to British figures, some 600 Italian prisoners. By evening there were no Axis troops left on Egyptian soil. Bardia, the scene of heavy fighting in January 1941 and in January 1942, was occupied by the British without a fight on 11–12 November; chronologies usually give 11 November.

Beyond the frontier, supply problems began. The Eighth Army was moving away from its bases faster than the lorry columns could keep up, and the retreating enemy blew up roads and bridges and left minefields behind. Montgomery had to order that west of Bardia the pursuit should be carried on only by armoured cars and artillery, while the main forces – the 1st Armoured Division and the New Zealanders – halted to rest and replenish.

Tobruk for the third time

Tobruk mattered to both sides far more than its size suggested. It was the only good harbour between Alexandria and Benghazi. The Australians had taken it from the Italians in January 1941 and then defended it for eight months during the siege that made the “Rats of Tobruk” a legend. All the greater, then, was the shock for the British of the fall of the fortress on 21 June 1942, when General Klopper surrendered the town to Rommel after a single day’s assault and some 33,000 soldiers went into captivity. The news reached Winston Churchill during talks at the White House and was, as he himself wrote, one of the heaviest blows he received during the war.

This time Rommel had no intention of defending Tobruk. He wanted only to get as much equipment and stores out of the port as possible – some 10,000 tons, according to some studies – but there was neither the time nor the transport. What could not be taken away was blown up or burned. Montgomery tried to trap the garrison in the town by sending an armoured column across the desert towards Acroma, west of Tobruk, but this manoeuvre also came too late: the Axis units withdrew along the coast road towards Gazala and Derna without serious loss. On 13 November the British entered the abandoned town. Tobruk had changed hands for the third time in less than two years, and this time for good.

Some lists place the capture of Tobruk under 12 November. Historical studies, however, agree on 13 November.

Derna and the Martuba airfields

Beyond Tobruk the coast road runs through Ain el Gazala and the Jebel Akhdar uplands to Derna. On 15 November the Eighth Army took Derna and the airfields at nearby Martuba. In ten days the Axis forces had fallen back some 640 kilometres.

The Martuba airfields mattered far beyond Africa. For months German and Italian aircraft had flown from them to attack convoys sailing from Alexandria to Malta. Many ships had been lost in 1942 in “Bomb Alley” between Crete and Cyrenaica, and the June convoy from Alexandria never reached its destination at all. Now the Royal Air Force immediately moved its fighters to Martuba, from where they could cover ships over most of the route. A few days later, on 16 November, Convoy Stoneage left Alexandria and on 20 November reached the starving island. The reconquest of Cyrenaica was thus also Malta’s salvation.

A cautious pursuit

The pace of the pursuit was controversial at the time and remains so today. Montgomery’s critics – some British commanders during the war, and later historians such as Basil Liddell Hart and Correlli Barnett – accused him of acting too cautiously after breaking through at El Alamein, sending his armoured divisions on sweeps that were too short and halting his main forces too early. As a result Rommel, although he had lost most of his tanks and almost all the non-motorised Italian infantry, saved the core of his German motorised units and brought them back to Tripolitania and then to Tunisia.

Montgomery’s defenders point to the circumstances: divisions dispersed after twelve days of heavy fighting, the rain of 6 and 7 November, fuel shortages and a single road that had to be cleared of mines. Above all, though, the experiences of 1941 and 1942 were remembered. Twice the British had swept rapidly through Cyrenaica – in February 1941 as far as El Agheila, in December 1941 to Benghazi and Agedabia – and twice Rommel, striking by surprise at overextended and poorly supplied units, had thrown them far back to the east. The soldiers called this see-saw the “Benghazi Handicap”, like a race at a racecourse. Montgomery resolved that this time he would give Rommel no opportunity to counter-attack: he advanced as fast as his supplies allowed, and no further. Thanks to decrypted German signals he knew, moreover, that the enemy army was very weak and almost out of fuel, which his critics regard as proof that he could have taken greater risks.

Significance

The recapture of Tobruk closed, in a symbolic sense, the chapter opened by the defeat of June 1942. The Eighth Army regained the place whose loss had shaken Churchill’s position and in July had prompted a motion of no confidence in the House of Commons. The harbour, though wrecked, was quickly brought back into use, and the rebuilt railway from Egypt soon reached the Libyan frontier, making it possible to supply the army as it pressed on westwards.

The capture of Derna and Martuba was of strategic importance: British aircraft could now cover the Malta convoys from Alexandria, and Malta, bombed for two years and close to starvation, soon had breathing space. The island once again became a base from which aircraft and ships attacked the shipping bound for Africa.

The pursuit continued. On 20 November the Eighth Army entered Benghazi, and on 23 November Rommel abandoned Agedabia and halted on the position at Mersa Brega and El Agheila. In mid-December Montgomery drove him out of that position, and on 23 January 1943 he took Tripoli. Meanwhile in Tunisia, towards which the Americans and British were advancing from the west after the landings in North Africa, the Axis was building a new front. Within a few months the two Allied armies would meet there, and the war in North Africa would end in May 1943 with the surrender of the Axis forces in Tunisia.