The offensive on Tripoli

On the morning of 15 January 1943 General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army attacked Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s German-Italian Panzer Army in its position at Buerat, on the Gulf of Sirte. The objective was not the position itself but Tripoli – the capital of Italian Libya and its largest port, some 320 kilometres from the front line along the coast road. Montgomery gave himself ten days to get there. This was not bravado but a matter of supply arithmetic: had the advance taken any longer, the army would have run out of fuel and food before the captured port could start receiving ships.

War chronologies describe this day as the start of a British offensive aimed at “distant Tripoli”. The description is apt – and it was precisely that distance, rather than the strength of the enemy, that was the greatest problem for the British.

The pause at Buerat

After Rommel’s withdrawal from El Agheila in mid-December 1942, the Axis forces fell back to a position at Buerat, about 80 kilometres west of Sirte. The Eighth Army did not pursue them in full strength. Its bases lay in Egypt and Cyrenaica, and every kilometre of advance westwards lengthened the haul for the lorries carrying fuel, ammunition and water. The main supply port was now Benghazi, captured in November, from where cargo still had to be carried several hundred kilometres by road.

Montgomery therefore decided against reconnaissance in force or preliminary attacks that would have alerted Rommel. The army was to build up stocks where it stood and then advance from Buerat all the way to Tripoli in one continuous drive. According to the New Zealand official history, the staff calculated that supplies would allow ten days of fighting and movement; if Tripoli had not fallen by then, some divisions would have to be pulled back and the continuation of the offensive would be in doubt. At the same time Montgomery feared that Rommel would leave Buerat prematurely and stop only on the better line of Homs (Al-Khums) – Tarhuna, where hills and ravines favoured the defence.

The plan provided for an attack by Lieutenant General Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps. Along the coast would advance Major General Douglas Wimberley’s 51st (Highland) Division and the 23rd Armoured Brigade, and originally the 50th Division as well. From the south, across the desert, the Axis position was to be outflanked by Major General John Harding’s 7th Armoured Division and Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division, reinforced by a tank regiment, the Royal Scots Greys. The 22nd Armoured Brigade formed the army reserve. The armoured regiments were brought up to full strength in tanks at the expense of the 1st Armoured Division, which was sent far to the rear.

The storm at Benghazi

At the beginning of January the plan almost fell apart. According to the New Zealand official history, a violent storm swept over Benghazi on 4–6 January (some studies give slightly earlier dates). The waves breached the breakwater, several ships sank – one of them carrying two thousand tons of ammunition – and the daily discharge in the port fell from about 3,000 to about 1,000 tons. The army had to fall back once again on distant Tobruk.

Montgomery did not postpone the attack. Instead he reduced the forces involved: the 50th Division took no part in the coastal thrust, and the lorries of the whole of X Corps, which was later to have taken over the coastal advance, were used to carry supplies from Tobruk. Since X Corps headquarters could not come forward, Montgomery decided to direct the advance along the road himself from his tactical headquarters, leaving the southern outflanking move to XXX Corps. The one real risk, as the New Zealand historian writes, remained unchanged: that the army would not reach Tripoli in ten days.

Rommel between Rome and Tunisia

On the other side of the front the argument that had been going on for weeks continued – over whether Tripolitania should be defended at all. Rommel regarded the Buerat position as temporary. Formally he was subordinate to the Governor of Libya and commander of Axis forces in North Africa, Marshal Ettore Bastico, and above him to the Italian Comando Supremo under Marshal Ugo Cavallero. Benito Mussolini demanded that the last scrap of Italy’s African empire be defended “to the last”. Rommel replied that the British could simply outflank him to the south, and that he had a fraction of the fuel he needed: according to his report of 24 December, the army used 200 cubic metres of petrol a day when stationary and twice as much in battle, while in December it was receiving about a hundred.

On 31 December Adolf Hitler and Mussolini agreed that the main Axis front in Africa would henceforth be in Tunisia, where fighting against the Americans and British had been going on since November, and that Libya would become a secondary front. Rommel was to withdraw gradually, but to hold the enemy for three weeks in front of the Homs–Tarhuna line and for another three in front of Tripoli, before finally taking up position on the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia. Rommel gave no guarantees. On 3 January he began sending the non-motorised Italian XX and XXI Corps westwards, and on 13 January, on orders from above, the 21st Panzer Division left for Tunisia – handing over its tanks and their crews to the 15th Panzer Division.

On the day of the British attack, therefore, the southern sector of the position was held by the 15th Panzer Division with 35 tanks and the Italian Centauro battle group with 57 tanks, while the 90th Light Division and the 164th Light Division stood near the coast. The Eighth Army had a manifold superiority in tanks, artillery and aircraft.

15 January: the Dor Umm er Raml ridge

On the night of 14 to 15 January the 51st Division approached the positions astride the coast road, made contact and prepared a night attack. The main events of the day, however, took place in the desert. The New Zealand divisional cavalry crossed the start line at 7.15 a.m. and quickly took the first ridge west of the Bu Ngem track. Further on, on the Dor Umm er Raml ridge, it ran into a screen of infantry and anti-tank guns, while the 7th Armoured Division on its sector came up against the guns and tanks of the 15th Panzer Division. Freyberg changed the direction of advance several times to get round the enemy to the south; only late in the afternoon did his units get beyond the end of the ridge and fire on German tanks and vehicle columns.

By evening the ground gained amounted to only a dozen or so kilometres, and the first day’s objectives, the area of Sedada and Tmed el Chatua, lay far ahead. The Germans reported heavy losses inflicted on British tanks; the 7th Armoured Division had indeed suffered losses, though it had also destroyed some of the enemy’s vehicles. Freyberg was nevertheless satisfied – and rightly so. Rommel judged that his defence had performed well, but he realised that the pressure would increase the next day and that he had neither the men nor the fuel for prolonged resistance. As early as noon on 15 January he gave the signal for a withdrawal to begin at 8 p.m. The Buerat position, built up over several weeks, was given up after a single day’s fighting.

The pursuit

In the days that followed Rommel conducted what he did best: a retreat covered by successive rearguards, minefields and demolished bridges. The 90th Light Division fell back along the road towards Misrata, pursued by the Highlanders and the 22nd Armoured Brigade; the columns of the 7th Armoured Division and the New Zealanders forced their way across the Wadi Zemzem and the Wadi Sofeggin, and were held up for a long time in a narrow defile at Bani Walid. Allied aircraft bombed the roads and the Castel Benito airfield near Tripoli. On 19 January, in fighting south of Tarhuna, General Harding was wounded by shell splinters and had to be evacuated; the following night the Highlanders entered Homs.

On 20 January Rommel received a signal from Cavallero stating that the Duce did not approve of his moves, since he had ordered the Homs–Tarhuna line to be held for at least three weeks and considered the threat from the south exaggerated. That same afternoon there was a stormy conference between Rommel and Bastico, Cavallero and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. According to his own account, Rommel declared that he did not intend to carry out orders about timetables he had never accepted, and asked whether he should stay and lose the army or go to Tunisia with the army more or less intact. During the meeting news came that the British had sunk ten of fourteen fuel barges west of Tripoli. Mussolini, as Galeazzo Ciano noted in his diary, would have liked Tripoli to be defended house by house, as at Stalingrad, but knew this was impossible, and had harsh words for Cavallero and for “that madman Rommel, who thinks only of retreating to Tunisia”.

Place in the war

The attack from Buerat was the final stage of the pursuit of Rommel’s army from El Alamein, which had been going on since November. For the first time since 1941 a British advance westwards did not end in Cyrenaica: the Eighth Army pushed deep into Tripolitania, and Rommel did not even attempt to fight a decisive battle there. His decision, taken against Mussolini’s wishes, saved the German motorised divisions but sealed the fate of the Italian colony. For the Italians the loss of Tripolitania meant the end of the empire they had been building in Libya since 1911, and another blow to the Duce’s regime, already shaken by the defeats on the Don and at El Alamein.

At the same time the Casablanca Conference was under way in Morocco, where Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were planning what to do once North Africa had been cleared of Axis forces. Montgomery’s haste therefore mattered beyond Libya: the sooner the Eighth Army reached the Tunisian frontier, the sooner the two Allied armies – the one from Egypt and the one from Algeria – could trap Rommel and General von Arnim’s army in Tunisia.

Montgomery kept to his timetable: on 23 January, the ninth day of the offensive, the first British patrols entered Tripoli. Rommel fell back towards the Tunisian frontier and the Mareth Line, which the Eighth Army did not attack until March, and the port of Tripoli, wrecked by Axis sappers, received its first ship at the beginning of February. The campaign that had begun in February 1941 with the landing of the first Afrika Korps units at Tripoli was drawing to a close in Libya – it would now be decided in Tunisia.