Operation Aberdeen

At 2.50 a.m. on 5 June 1942 Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie’s British Eighth Army launched Operation Aberdeen – an attack intended to destroy the German and Italian armoured divisions of Colonel General Erwin Rommel, which had been dug in for a week in the Cauldron behind the Gazala Line. By evening the attack had broken down under the fire of German artillery and anti-tank guns, and Rommel’s afternoon counter-attack had scattered the headquarters of two British divisions. On 6 June the Axis forces destroyed the Indian battalions and four artillery regiments left behind in the Cauldron. It was the decisive moment of the Battle of Gazala: from then on the initiative belonged to Rommel.

The plan

When the 150th Brigade’s box fell at Sidi Muftah on 1 June, Rommel at last had a secure supply route through the British minefields, and his armour stood in the Cauldron facing east, shielded by a screen of anti-tank guns. General Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, who had for weeks been pressed by London to fight in Libya, was still proposing a bold thrust westwards from the northern sector of the line towards Bir Temrad. Ritchie and his corps commanders believed they could not at the same time keep the German tanks in check, and on the morning of 3 June they decided first to destroy the enemy in the Cauldron itself.

The plan envisaged two phases. In the first, Brigadier Charles Boucher’s 10th Indian Brigade of Major General Harold Briggs’s 5th Indian Division was, during the night and after a heavy artillery bombardment, to drive a wedge into the German anti-tank screen from the east, in the area of the Dahar el Aslagh ridge. At the same time, from the north, the 32nd Army Tank Brigade of Lieutenant General William Gott’s XIII Corps, with the 7th Battalion of the Green Howards, was to capture the Sidra Ridge. In the second phase Major General Frank Messervy’s 7th Armoured Division, with the 22nd Armoured Brigade and the 9th Indian Brigade, was to pass through the breach, destroy the Axis forces in the Cauldron and close the gaps in the minefields behind them.

The British official history draws attention to the command arrangements. No one below the army commander was responsible for co-ordinating the attacks from the north and from the east. In XXX Corps’ sector its commander, Lieutenant General Willoughby Norrie, handed command successively to Briggs and Messervy, who co-ordinated their parts of the plan as best they could; their advanced headquarters stood side by side near Bir el Harmat. The orders stipulated that in the event of a tank battle the infantry was to look after itself and not hamper the movements of the 22nd Armoured Brigade, whose first task was to destroy enemy tanks.

5 June: a blow into empty air

The attack went in by moonlight. The battalions of the 10th Indian Brigade, supported by the tanks of the 4th Royal Tank Regiment, reached their objectives with almost no losses. The field artillery regiments moved up behind them, and a battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment from the 9th Brigade occupied its allotted stretch of the Aslagh ridge. But the easy start had a bad cause. The German positions lay further west than the British believed, and because of an error in fixing their location the artillery bombardment fell on empty desert. The anti-tank screen remained untouched.

When at dawn the 22nd Armoured Brigade, with 156 tanks – American Grants, Stuarts and Crusaders – pushed on westwards, its leading regiment ran after a few kilometres into the concentrated fire of most of the German artillery. The brigade halted and swung north. A battalion of the Highland Light Infantry, which had lost some of the ground it had taken in a local counter-attack, was attacked at midday by German tanks, probably of the 8th Panzer Regiment. The 22nd Brigade, which had understood its orders to mean that it was not responsible for the infantry, did not come to its aid, and the Scots were driven back. The exposed West Yorkshire battalion had to be withdrawn.

Things went even worse in the north. The 32nd Army Tank Brigade attacked the Sidra Ridge at dawn and came under heavy anti-tank fire, then ran into an unknown minefield. The attack was called off, but according to the British official history, of some 70 infantry tanks that went into the attack about 50 were lost.

The Germans owed their success above all to the co-operation of tanks, artillery and anti-tank guns. Rommel placed a wall of guns in front of his tanks: 5 cm PaK 38 anti-tank guns and, on key sectors, 8.8 cm Flak 18 anti-aircraft guns used against tanks. The British tanks, attacking without adequate infantry and artillery support, were destroyed in front of the guns before they could reach them, and the German tanks counter-attacked only once the attack had broken down. The RAF could not help: the ground forces were unable to establish a clear bomb line, so many requests for support were turned down.

Rommel’s counter-attack

In the early afternoon Rommel judged that his northern flank was secure and went over to the counter-attack. It is often written that he struck the Knightsbridge position with the Ariete and the 21st Panzer Divisions. In reality the Ariete and the 21st Panzer Division attacked eastwards, towards Bir el Harmat, while part of the 15th Panzer Division moved towards Knightsbridge from the south, through a gap in the minefield south-west of Bir el Harmat. This group first overran a battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, which had arrived from Iraq two days earlier and been thrown in as flank protection, and then, together with troops from around Bir Hakeim and with Rommel himself, scattered the advanced headquarters of the 7th Armoured Division and the 5th Indian Division, the headquarters of the 9th Indian Brigade with two of its battalions, and the headquarters of the 10th Brigade.

Communications and command broke down completely. Messervy’s headquarters took refuge in the Knightsbridge box, Briggs’s at El Adem. The 22nd Armoured Brigade, attacked by the 15th Panzer Division, withdrew east of the Trigh Bir Hakeim track, having lost some 60 tanks during the day. The 2nd Armoured Brigade, sent up as reinforcement, received mutually contradictory orders from the 7th Division. Only around midnight did Ritchie realise that a heavy blow had driven back the 5th Indian Division, but he still hoped to gain time to reorganise his armour.

6 June: destruction in the Cauldron

In the Cauldron, around the point marked on the maps as B 180, the units that had reached their objectives so easily during the night were left without armoured cover: the 4th Battalion of the 10th Baluch Regiment, the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Gurkha Rifles, the 3rd Battalion of the 9th Jat Regiment, the 50th Reconnaissance Battalion, and the 4th, 28th and 157th Field Regiments and the 107th Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery. On 6 June the Germans and Italians attacked them one after another. The Baluchis fell first, the Gurkhas in the afternoon, and by evening the reconnaissance battalion and all the artillery. The British official history called the day at once a splendid and a tragic page in the history of the Royal Artillery: the gunners fired to the last and died at their guns. Of the infantry battalions only isolated sub-units and individual soldiers broke through to the east. Brigadier Boucher was taken prisoner, and the 10th Indian Brigade practically ceased to exist.

No help came. Messervy was at last given sole command and the 2nd and 4th Armoured Brigades, but in the prevailing chaos he could not bring them into action. Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham’s aircraft, still without a clear bomb line and under low cloud, attacked only columns on the edge of the battlefield. In two days the British lost several thousand men, a large proportion of them taken prisoner, and more than a hundred tanks – according to the British official history, the 22nd and 32nd Brigades alone lost about 110 vehicles on 5 June. Exact figures for men vary from source to source, and Rommel’s figures, as usual with the victorious side, are higher than the British ones.

Place in the war

The official historian summed up Aberdeen severely: Rommel had judged correctly how much strength he needed to hold the Cauldron, had waited for the British to bleed themselves white, and had exploited with lightning speed the moment when their plan fell apart. The Eighth Army’s system of command had been too complicated to cope with a surprise and could not match the German commander’s personal leadership; the burden had fallen on the divisional commanders, with the result that many good soldiers were wasted. The enemy, it was noted, expressed admiration for the courage of the British and Indian troops.

After the defeat in the Cauldron the Eighth Army no longer had the strength to wrest the initiative from Rommel. Rommel turned with full force against the Free French at Bir Hakeim, who withdrew on the night of 10–11 June, and on 12 and 13 June he destroyed the rest of the British armoured brigades at Knightsbridge. On 14 June Ritchie began withdrawing his troops from the Gazala Line, and on 21 June Tobruk capitulated. The lessons of Aberdeen – the need to concentrate artillery, for night break-ins by infantry, for a single commander and for close co-operation between tanks and infantry – the Eighth Army began to put into practice only in the summer and autumn of 1942 at El Alamein.