The first clash with the Afrika Korps

On 20 February 1941 a troop of armoured cars of the British 1st King’s Dragoon Guards under Lieutenant Edgar Williams, patrolling the desert west of El Agheila, exchanged fire with unfamiliar armoured vehicles. They were eight-wheeled armoured cars of a kind the British had not yet seen in Africa: vehicles of the German 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, which had landed at Tripoli less than a week earlier. According to Gavin Long’s volume of the Australian official history, these were the first German fighting vehicles British troops had encountered in Africa. Nobody was killed, and the staffs in the rear were still unwilling to believe that Germans had appeared in the desert.

The 20 February encounter, however, needs qualifying. On that day there was only a brief exchange of fire between patrols. The first real engagement, with vehicles knocked out and prisoners taken, was a German ambush on 24 February, also near El Agheila, and it is this that some accounts – among them the next volume of the Australian official history, by Barton Maughan – call the first contact between the two armies on land in Africa. El Agheila itself, moreover, lies not in western Libya but in the middle of its coastline, at the innermost point of the Gulf of Sirte, just on the Cyrenaican side of the old boundary between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. In February 1941 it was the westernmost point of the British conquest.

The Germans on the Gulf of Sirte

Only a few weeks earlier a German presence in Libya had seemed unlikely. After the surrender of the remnants of the Italian Tenth Army at Beda Fomm on 7 February, British patrols reached El Agheila on 9 February, and in Tripolitania there was no longer an army that could have stopped a determined advance westwards. As late as 12 February German and Italian staffs were wondering whether it was worth sending German units to Africa “only for them to be taken prisoner”. General Richard O’Connor, the victor of Operation Compass, was convinced he could take the rest of Libya. As he wrote a few weeks later, he would at once have sent the Support Group of the 7th Armoured Division to Sirte, formed a new armoured force from the best of the tanks and set off onwards from Sirte around 20 February. On the very day O’Connor had set himself for moving out from Sirte, his men met the first Germans near El Agheila.

Hitler had promised the Italians help as early as January, at the Berghof, and at the beginning of February he widened the plan: under Operation Sonnenblume the 5th Light Division was to go to Libya, followed later by a whole panzer division. Command of the German forces in Africa went to Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel, who flew into Tripoli on 12 February and on 14 February received the first units in the port: Major Irnfried von Wechmar’s 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion and the 39th Anti-Tank Battalion. Rommel had no intention of waiting behind fortifications outside Tripoli. Mussolini had already ordered on 10 February that Tripolitania be defended as far east as possible, and the new German commander at once sent the reconnaissance battalion along the coast road to Sirte, nearly 500 kilometres from Tripoli. The Germans reached it on 16 February, and on 18 February their advance guard stood at Nofilia, some 120 kilometres from El Agheila. It was then that the new corps also got its name: from 19 February the German forces in Libya were called the Deutsches Afrikakorps.

The Axis forces at the front were still modest. The Italian Pavia and Bologna infantry divisions and the Ariete Armoured Division, equipped only with light tanks, were moving up to the Sirte area; the headquarters of the 5th Light Division arrived in Tripoli on 21 February, and its panzer regiment was not due until March. Rommel therefore sent small, mobile groups eastwards and had dummy tanks built on car chassis so that the enemy would overestimate his strength. Wechmar’s battalion was to find out where the British were and how strong they were.

“The minimum possible force”

On the other side of the front the British were busy dismantling their victorious army. On 12 February Winston Churchill congratulated General Archibald Wavell on taking Cyrenaica “three weeks ahead of time”, but at the same time reminded him that from now on his “major effort” was to be help for Greece, which ruled out any serious operations against Tripoli. The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, were already preparing to fly to Cairo to arrange the dispatch of an expeditionary force to Greece. Wavell earmarked most of his best units for the expedition and decided to hold Cyrenaica, as he himself put it, with “the minimum possible force”.

XIII Corps headquarters was disbanded, and O’Connor returned to the Nile as commander of British Troops in Egypt. Cyrenaica was administered as military governor by General Henry Maitland Wilson, who was soon appointed to command the Greek expedition; on 27 February he was replaced by General Philip Neame, a sapper and a holder of the Victoria Cross from the First World War, who had never commanded armoured troops. From 18 February the exhausted 7th Armoured Division was withdrawn to Egypt to refit, and in its place came the 2nd Armoured Division, newly arrived from England, under General Michael Gambier-Parry, who had taken command on 12 February. The division had arrived with worn-out tanks whose tracks, according to its commander at the time, were “practically worn through”, and at the end of February it gave up another armoured brigade to the Greek expedition. All that remained of it in Cyrenaica were the weak 3rd Armoured Brigade and the Support Group.

The front at El Agheila was held by Brigadier Stanley Savige’s 17th Australian Brigade of General Iven Mackay’s 6th Division, dug in among the dunes at Mersa Brega, where salt marshes covered the approaches. Reconnaissance further west was carried out by the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards, an old cavalry regiment that had received its South African Marmon-Herrington armoured cars only in January. Armed with machine guns and the Boys anti-tank rifle, they were inferior to the German eight-wheelers with their 20 mm cannon in both firepower and cross-country performance. The veterans of the 6th Australian Division were soon to sail for Greece, and their place was to be taken by General Leslie Morshead’s 9th Australian Division, short of both training and weapons, which the commander of the Australian forces, General Thomas Blamey, had put together at the end of February from the least trained brigades, because he wanted to send the best to Greece.

Wavell considered the risk justified. He reckoned that the Germans would need at least two months after landing at Tripoli to prepare a serious offensive, and that Cyrenaica faced no threat before May. He also believed that the Germans would not risk shipping large armoured forces across the Mediterranean. By the time Williams’s patrol was exchanging fire with the Germans near El Agheila, that assessment was already out of date.

Patrols near El Agheila

Williams’s report of 20 February caused no stir among the staffs. Savige was at first advised that the vehicles his cavalrymen had fought were most probably Italian Fiat-Ansaldo armoured cars. The next day a reconnaissance pilot saw a column of sixteen vehicles, including three eight-wheeled armoured cars whose crews wore uniforms of a different colour from anything he had seen in Libya before. Savige then concluded that he was facing Germans. The staffs in the rear did not share his concern. As late as 23 February the command in Cyrenaica wrote in an instruction to General Mackay that there was no sign that the enemy intended to advance from Tripolitania, and that his main effort would continue to be in the air. The regimental history of the King’s Dragoon Guards later recalled that its reports were received with scepticism, as if a few young troop leaders, “new to the game”, had mistaken an Italian rearguard for Germans.

The illusions were dispelled on 24 February. Two troops of King’s Dragoon Guards armoured cars, one of them Williams’s, and a troop of Australian anti-tank guns from Lieutenant T. Rowley’s 16th Anti-Tank Company were patrolling near El Agheila when they ran into an ambush laid by a German detachment. According to the Australian official history, the Germans had seven tanks, three armoured cars and fourteen motorcycle combinations. Since the 5th Light Division’s panzer regiment was still on its way to Africa, the “tanks” were most probably other fighting vehicles of Wechmar’s battalion. According to German accounts, the Germans destroyed one British armoured car, two light scout cars and a lorry without loss to themselves. Rowley and two crewmen of a disabled armoured car were taken prisoner, and the Germans drove off towing the captured vehicle.

The next day Savige sent a squadron of armoured cars westwards with two infantry platoons and field and anti-tank guns to pay the Germans back in their own coin. The ambush waited for four days, but the German patrol did not reappear. Instead, on 27 February a strong formation of aircraft came over, damaging three armoured cars and two lorries and killing or wounding nine men. On 24 February air reconnaissance had spotted a column of 500 vehicles heading south from Misurata along the shore of the gulf, and by 28 February the same column was already close to the Cyrenaican border. General Mackay, who had taken over command at the front on 24 February after the departure of the Australian corps headquarters, wrote in a note of 28 February that the possibility of the enemy attempting to retake Cyrenaica “cannot be disregarded”, and ordered that contact with the Germans be used to learn their tactics.

Place in the war

The skirmishes of 20 and 24 February were minor, but they opened a two-year duel between the Germans and the British in the Libyan and Egyptian desert. They also showed at once what would prove decisive in the following weeks: the German reconnaissance units were faster and better armed than the British ones, and the British command underestimated both their numbers and the intentions of their commander. By 2 March Wavell was admitting that there were German armoured forces in Tripolitania, but he thought that at most the enemy would “test” the British with patrols near El Agheila. At the beginning of March the first transports set off for Greece carrying troops who had only recently been conquering Cyrenaica.

Rommel, who had orders to defend Tripolitania and wait for a second panzer division, exploited this weakness faster than anyone expected. On 24 March his troops took El Agheila, on 31 March they attacked at Mersa Brega, and at the beginning of April they retook Benghazi and in less than two weeks drove the British out of the whole of Cyrenaica, except for besieged Tobruk. The 2nd Armoured Division was smashed, General Gambier-Parry was captured at Mechili, and on the night of 6–7 April a German patrol took prisoner General Neame and General O’Connor, whom Wavell had sent to help him. Wechmar’s battalion, the first to make contact with the British near El Agheila, led the way in this offensive and was among the first to enter Benghazi.

Lieutenant Williams, who had exchanged the first shots with the Germans on 20 February, later became one of the most important British intelligence officers of the war, head of intelligence to General Bernard Montgomery in the Eighth Army and in 21st Army Group. The desert war that began with his patrol lasted more than two more years and gave rise to Rommel’s legend as the “Desert Fox”. It ended only in May 1943 with the surrender of the German and Italian forces in Tunisia.