Operation Agreement

On 19 September 1942 soldiers of the Sudan Defence Force and a patrol of the Long Range Desert Group began to withdraw from the Libyan oasis of Jalo. For several days they had been trying to take the fort there, but the garrison had held out, and a relief column was approaching from the east. This was the last act of a series of raids with which British Middle East Command had intended, in mid-September, to strike at the rear of Panzer Army Africa – at Tobruk, Benghazi, Al Marj (Barce) and Jalo. The whole enterprise has gone down in history as Operation Agreement, although strictly speaking that codename referred to the attack on Tobruk, while the other actions had names of their own: Bigamy (Benghazi), Caravan (Barce) and Nicety (Jalo).

It is often said that the attack on Jalo was beaten off by the Germans. In fact the oasis was defended by an Italian garrison, reinforced after the first attack, and the column whose approach prompted the attackers to withdraw was also Italian; what was German was the air force that hunted the retreating units across the desert in the days that followed.

The idea of striking at the rear

In the summer of 1942 Erwin Rommel stood at El Alamein, about a hundred kilometres from Alexandria, but his army lived on supplies shipped across the Mediterranean and carried hundreds of kilometres by lorry along the coast. The most important port had become Tobruk, captured on 21 June after the collapse of the Gazala Line – the same Tobruk that in 1941 had withstood a siege for eight months – and further west lay Benghazi. Ships carrying fuel put into these ports, supplies were stockpiled and vessels repaired in them, and aircraft covering the convoys took off from nearby airfields.

The idea of a raid on Tobruk was put forward by Lieutenant Colonel John Haselden, an intelligence officer who had long operated behind enemy lines, spoke Arabic and could move around Cyrenaica in disguise. At first it was to be a small overland raid, but in the headquarters in Cairo and Alexandria the plan gradually grew. In its final form it provided for a force arriving from the desert to seize part of the defences of a bay on the night of 13–14 September, after which marines and army troops would land from the sea, destroy the fuel tanks, port installations and ships in the harbour, free prisoners and withdraw before dawn. At the same time special forces were to attack Benghazi and the airfield at Barce, while the Sudanese were to take the oasis of Jalo, which was to serve as a rallying point for those returning from the raids and for several days to threaten Axis routes in the desert.

The operation was approved in August, when General Harold Alexander took over Middle East Command and General Bernard Montgomery took command of the Eighth Army. The naval part was prepared by Admiral Henry Harwood’s Mediterranean Fleet. It was hoped that the raid would relieve the front at El Alamein, force Rommel to keep troops in the rear and hit his supplies at a moment when, after the Battle of Alam el Halfa, which began on the night of 30–31 August, he was shorter of fuel than ever. Critics pointed out that the plan was too complicated, demanded precision in night operations on an unfamiliar coast, and was talked about too freely in Cairo. After the war many historians concluded that the Italians and Germans had learned of the preparations, although exactly how much they knew remains disputed.

Night at Tobruk

The overland part of the attack on Tobruk, known as Force B, numbered between eighty and ninety men according to various sources. Among them were commandos and members of the Special Interrogation Group (SIG) – a small unit made up largely of German-born Palestinian Jews who spoke German and wore German uniforms. They came across the desert from the oasis of Kufra in lorries guided by an LRDG patrol, and near Tobruk they posed as a German escort bringing in British prisoners. In this way, on the evening of 13 September, they drove through the checkpoints and reached the bay of Mersa Umm esc-Sciausc east of the port. There they seized several positions, including an Italian coastal battery, and signalled to the forces at sea.

The seaborne landing ended in disaster. The destroyers HMS Sikh and Zulu carried some 350–400 Royal Marines, who were to land north of the port from makeshift motor boats and lighters. Because of a heavy swell and navigational errors only some of the boats reached the shore, and in the wrong place at that, while the rest turned back or sank. At about 5 a.m. Sikh was caught in searchlights and hit by Italian 152 mm coastal guns and German 88 mm guns. With her steering disabled and her deck ablaze she became an easy target; Zulu tried to take her in tow but had to give up under fire. Sikh sank later that morning, and her commanding officer, Captain St John Micklethwait, and most of the survivors were taken prisoner.

The second landing party, made up of a company of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and a platoon of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, was carried by a dozen or so motor torpedo boats and motor launches. They were to enter the bay seized by Haselden, but because the entrance was poorly marked only two boats reached the shore; the rest circled in the darkness under fire, and at dawn they were attacked by aircraft. Without reinforcements from the sea Haselden’s force stood no chance. Early on the morning of 14 September the Italians – among them men of the San Marco naval infantry battalion – and the Germans counter-attacked; Haselden was killed covering the withdrawal, and most of his men were killed or captured. Only a few made their way across the desert to the British lines, some after weeks on foot.

During the day of 14 September Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers and Junkers Ju 88s appeared over the force heading back to Alexandria. The badly damaged anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Coventry had to be sunk by British torpedoes, and in the evening Zulu, already under tow not far from Alexandria, also sank after further hits. Several dozen men from each of these crews were killed or went missing.

Benghazi and Barce

That same night, 13–14 September, Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling led a Special Air Service column against Benghazi – according to various sources about two hundred men in several dozen jeeps and lorries, guided by LRDG patrols. After an exhausting drive across the Great Sand Sea they were to destroy the port installations, ships and fuel tanks at Benghazi and the aircraft at Benina airfield. The column, however, arrived late, and on the road into the town it ran into a roadblock where it was already expected. After a brief exchange of fire, with surprise lost and dawn approaching, Stirling ordered a withdrawal. Over the following days Axis aircraft hunted down the vehicles hidden in the wadis on the edge of the Jebel Akhdar; the SAS lost much of its equipment – according to Italian and British accounts several dozen jeeps and lorries – and a dozen or so men killed, wounded and captured. The last participants did not reach Kufra until the end of September.

Only the attack on Al Marj, then called Barce – an important centre of the Italian administration in Cyrenaica with a large airfield – succeeded. Two LRDG patrols under Major John Easonsmith, Guardsmen and New Zealanders, fewer than fifty men in all in a dozen or so lorries and jeeps, drove more than 1,800 km across the desert from the Faiyum oasis. On the night of 13–14 September the Guardsmen shot up the barracks and the railway station, while Captain Nick Wilder’s New Zealand patrol drove onto the airfield, set a petrol tanker on fire and for nearly an hour drove round the airfield, firing at the parked bombers and planting explosive charges under them. Wilder reported more than thirty aircraft destroyed or damaged; according to Italian figures 16 aircraft were destroyed and 7 damaged. On the way back the patrols ran into ambushes and were attacked from the air. They lost most of their vehicles, and ten wounded men were taken prisoner. The rest, partly on foot, reached the rallying point and with the help of other patrols returned to Kufra.

Jalo

Furthest south operated a strike force made up of Sudan Defence Force companies, supported by an LRDG patrol and a few armoured vehicles – about eight hundred men according to an Italian tally. It set out from Kufra on 11 September, but the journey across the desert took longer than planned, and the attack on the fort at Jalo, an oasis about 250 km south of Barce, began only on the night of 15–16 September, when the coastal raids were already over. The Italian garrison was on the alert and had been reinforced beforehand. The attack was repulsed, and further attempts achieved no more than surrounding and shelling the fort.

The Sudanese kept the garrison in check for several days, but with the failure of the other actions their presence in the oasis was losing its point. When news came of an approaching Italian relief column, Cairo ordered a withdrawal. Sources differ on the date: English-language studies say that the force left on 19 September, Italian ones that the order came on 20 September. According to the Italian tally the Sudanese lost six killed and missing and 45 wounded, most of them to air attacks, which on 19 September also caught the LRDG patrol.

Losses

The balance was exceptionally heavy for the British. In the attack on Tobruk alone they lost the anti-aircraft cruiser Coventry, the destroyers Sikh and Zulu, four motor torpedo boats, two motor launches and many landing craft. According to British and Italian figures, about 750 sailors, marines and soldiers were killed, missing or captured – some 300 Royal Marines, 160 army soldiers and about 280 sailors. About 576 men were taken prisoner; many were picked out of the water by Italian torpedo boats and German minesweepers. More than a hundred men died aboard Sikh alone. The defenders’ losses were negligible: according to Italian figures 15 Italians and one German killed and about fifty wounded.

Tobruk did not stop operating for a single day, and the fuel tanks that were to have gone up in flames remained untouched. Italian propaganda presented the defence of the town as a great victory and honoured in particular the sailors and the men of the San Marco battalion.

Place in the war

Operation Agreement was one of the costliest defeats suffered by British special forces and the Royal Navy in the North African campaign. Historians point to several causes: an over-elaborate plan that grew from a local raid into a large combined operation; poor reconnaissance of the Tobruk defences; unsuitable landing craft; the lack of air cover over the ships within range of aircraft from Crete and Libya; and, finally, carelessness that allowed news of the preparations to circulate around Cairo. Some authors maintain that the Italians were expecting an attack; others believe that they had rather stayed alert in response to increased British activity in the desert.

The defeat did not alter the balance of forces at El Alamein. Rommel was in any case being cut off from his supplies above all by the submarines and aircraft from Malta and Egypt, which in the following weeks sank Axis tankers, and by the length of his overland routes. The lesson of Tobruk led the British in the desert to return in the following months to small, mobile raids, in which the LRDG and the SAS performed best. Despite its losses at Benghazi, the SAS was expanded into a regiment in the autumn.

A few days after the raids, on 23 September, the ailing Rommel left for treatment in Europe. A month later, on 23 October, Montgomery’s Eighth Army began the Second Battle of El Alamein. After it ended, the Axis army withdrew from Egypt and Cyrenaica, and on 13 November 1942 the British entered Tobruk practically without a fight – recovering intact the port they had failed to destroy in September.