The retreat from the Gazala Line

On 14 June 1942, the day after Black Saturday at Knightsbridge, the British Eighth Army began to abandon the Gazala Line, which it had been building and fortifying west of Tobruk since February. The 1st South African Division moved off eastwards along the coast road, while the British 50th Division, for which there was no room on that road, broke out westwards at night through the Italian lines and reached the Egyptian frontier by a roundabout route through the desert. The soldiers called this hasty retreat the “Gazala Gallop”. That same day the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, asked from London where the troops were going and added that he presumed there was no question in any case of giving up Tobruk. On 15 June General Claude Auchinleck replied that he had no intention whatever of giving up Tobruk. Behind this assurance, however, lay an ambiguity that a week later would cost the British the fortress and its garrison.

Ritchie’s decision

On the evening of 13 June the commander of the Eighth Army, Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie, had to face the facts. The day before, he had decided to fight on, and now he had lost that fight. Some 70 tanks were left of his armour, and Colonel General Erwin Rommel’s panzer divisions stood between El Adem and Acroma, in the rear of the two divisions that were still holding the line from the coast into the desert. He did not have the strength to cover their long southern flank, and it could not be rebuilt quickly. Rommel could at any moment break through to the sea and cut their line of retreat.

Ritchie did not wait for Cairo’s consent. By 7 a.m. on 14 June he had ordered the commander of XIII Corps, Lieutenant General William Gott, to withdraw the 1st South African Division and the 50th Division all the way to the Egyptian frontier, into army reserve. At 9.30 a.m. he made a cautious report by telephone, and an hour later he sent a long telegram to Cairo. In it he asked what to do about Tobruk: whether to allow the fortress to be invested for a time, or to give it up and withdraw the whole army to the frontier. He himself inclined towards the first option. The question was direct: “Do you agree to my accepting the risk of Tobruk being invested?”

It is often said that on 14 June Auchinleck permitted Ritchie to withdraw his troops from the Gazala Line. That is true, but the sequence was the reverse: the orders to retreat had already gone out, and Auchinleck’s telegram, sent from Cairo at 11.30 a.m., crossed with Ritchie’s. In it the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, agreed, albeit reluctantly, to the withdrawal of the two divisions if they were in danger of being cut off. He believed, however, that Rommel, who had achieved all his successes with three German divisions, must have suffered heavy losses and would not be able to keep up the pace of his attack for long. Therefore, he wrote, Tobruk must be held and the enemy must not be allowed to invest it. The Eighth Army was to stand on a line running from Acroma through El Adem to the south and repel every attempt to cross it. Ritchie saw this telegram only at 4 p.m., on returning from his corps commanders. He accepted the task but warned that he could not guarantee to hold the line. In the evening Auchinleck confirmed the order: the Acroma–El Adem–Bir el Gubi line was to be closed to the enemy, the troops were not to let themselves be shut up in Tobruk, and the army was to remain mobile.

The South Africans on the Via Balbia

On the morning of 14 June both divisions received the order to retreat. A plan for such a move existed, but since the Germans were already almost at Acroma, it had to be changed. The 1st South African Division was to go east along the coast road, the Via Balbia, through Tobruk. Its commander, Major General Dan Pienaar, protested against withdrawing in daylight under the enemy’s eyes and obtained permission to hold his positions until 6 p.m. and to bring his rearguards through Tobruk by 7 a.m. on 15 June. Throughout the day, in both divisions, the stocks of food, water and fuel that could not be taken away were quietly destroyed. The first South African brigade left in the afternoon under cover of a sandstorm, the other two after dark.

The retreat had to be covered from the south. On 14 June the panzer divisions moved north to break through to the sea. Rommel rode with the tanks and urged his commanders on because, as he wrote, British vehicles were streaming east “in their thousands”. They ran, however, into minefields and the fire of the remnants of the British armour and artillery. A battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment on Point 187 held out until the evening before the position fell; at Eluet et Tamar the 21st Panzer Division broke into the South African positions but was driven out by artillery fire and a counter-attack by the Cape Town Highlanders. The British official history also attributes the Germans’ failure to cut the road to the extreme exhaustion of the Afrika Korps. By the evening the Germans were west of Acroma but had not reached the road. During the night XIII Corps withdrew the shattered 1st Armoured Division to the rear.

The main body of the South Africans got through. On the morning of 15 June, however, a battalion of German infantry with tanks blocked the road at El Mrassas, and the rearguards of two brigades and elements of the 50th Division were left on the wrong side of the block. The commander of the rearguards had already passed through, so there was no one to lead them. In the afternoon Lieutenant Colonel J. E. S. Percy of the 9th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, gathered together a scratch force and broke through the German barrier. Most of the rearguard did not follow him and by nightfall had been overrun or taken prisoner. According to the British official history, Pienaar’s division lost 27 killed, 366 wounded and missing and 13 guns during the retreat. As a whole it came out of the Gazala Line practically intact.

The 50th Division: west in order to go east

For Major General William Ramsden’s 50th (Northumbrian) Division the coast road was closed: it could not take two divisions at once, and German tanks threatened it from the south. Of the division’s three brigades two remained, since Rommel had destroyed the 150th Brigade on 1 June. Ramsden therefore decided to strike in the opposite direction – west and south-west, through the positions of the Italian X Corps with the Brescia and Pavia Divisions – then to swing in an arc through the desert south of Bir Hakeim and only there turn east, towards the Egyptian frontier.

The division set off just after dark on 14 June in two groups: Brigadier L. L. Hassell’s 69th Brigade and Brigadier J. S. Nichols’s 151st Brigade. In each, one battalion with supporting weapons was to punch a gap in the Italian positions and hold it open, while the rest passed through in independent columns. An afternoon sandstorm covered the preparations. The gaps were made by the 5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment, and the 8th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, and with few exceptions the columns drove through under fire, sometimes straight across enemy positions, and came out into the open desert. The exception was the 9th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, which, after a series of delays, lost its chance to get through and turned instead onto the coast road behind the South Africans. By 16 June most of the division was already assembling on the Egyptian side of the frontier.

Rommel admitted that although the Italians and Germans had destroyed some 400 vehicles and taken several hundred prisoners, a force of roughly brigade strength had slipped away to the south, and its columns had done considerable damage on their way through his supply area. He believed that the British should have withdrawn both divisions in this way – rather than sacrificing their last tanks in a hopeless defence at Acroma.

The air forces over the retreat

It is sometimes written that the British air force, though numerically weaker, gallantly covered the retreat. The picture was more complicated. On 14 June sandstorms hampered flying, and Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham’s day bombers could take off only in the evening, when they were urgently needed near Acroma. The air forces of both sides were taken up above all with the Vigorous convoy, which was sailing from Alexandria to Malta between Crete and Cyrenaica: German dive bombers attacked the ships, and British fighters protected them. A few Italian aircraft and a small group of Messerschmitt Bf 110s attacked the columns on the crowded road, but air activity over the desert that day was lower than usual. On 15 June British bombers and fighter-bombers took to the air in full strength. The British official history observes that without the convoy the attacks on the retreating army would have been heavier, but that more British fighters would then have been available to oppose them.

The telegrams about Tobruk

In London the news of the divisions’ withdrawal from Gazala caused alarm. In May the War Cabinet had ordered Auchinleck to fight in Libya in June at the latest, and now the battle was slipping out of British hands. Churchill remembered 1941, when besieged Tobruk had tied Rommel down in his rear for eight months. On 14 June he cabled Auchinleck, asking to what position Ritchie intended to withdraw the troops from Gazala and writing: “Presume there is no question in any case of giving up Tobruk.” As long as Tobruk was held, he went on, no serious enemy advance into Egypt was possible; they had been through all this in April 1941. He added that the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, fully agreed with him.

Auchinleck replied on 15 June. He wrote that he had ordered Ritchie not to allow the enemy east of the Acroma–El Adem–Bir el Gubi line, and that the two divisions from Gazala were to help in this. He went on: “Although I do not intend that Eighth Army should be besieged in Tobruk, I have no intention whatever of giving it up.” He also announced that a reserve would be assembled in the area of Sollum and Fort Maddalena for a counter-offensive, and that the New Zealand Division would be brought over from Syria.

This reply contained an ambiguity. In February the three Commanders-in-Chief in Cairo had decided that Tobruk would not undergo a second siege: the Eighth Army was to do everything to avoid losing it, but not to go on defending it once the enemy managed to invest it effectively. Its fortifications had been neglected, and some of its mines had been moved to the Gazala Line. Now Auchinleck was at once assuring London that he would not give up Tobruk and forbidding the army to be shut up in it, while Ritchie, who wanted to know whether he could leave an invested garrison in the fortress, received no clear answer. Churchill wrote after the war that these orders did not require Ritchie to defend Tobruk at all costs and did not satisfy the Cabinet. On 15 June he therefore asked again whether the War Cabinet was right in understanding that, if need be, Ritchie would leave in Tobruk as many troops as were necessary to hold it for certain. On 16 June Auchinleck confirmed that a garrison of four brigade groups would remain in the fortress, with stocks of ammunition, food, fuel and water sufficient to hold out even if it were cut off for a time. That same morning he had at last agreed that Tobruk might be temporarily isolated.

Its place in the war

On 15 June Rommel noted: “The battle is won, and the enemy is breaking up.” The British official history concedes that this was painfully close to the truth. Of the Eighth Army’s cruiser tanks one weak brigade remained, most of its infantry divisions were disorganised, and its reserves were far away. The Acroma–El Adem–Bir el Gubi line that Auchinleck had ordered to be defended did not hold: on 15 and 16 June one strongpoint after another fell, on the night of 16–17 June the British abandoned El Adem, and on 17 June the Afrika Korps destroyed the last British tanks in the area at Sidi Rezegh and reached the sea near Gambut. Tobruk was surrounded, and Ritchie withdrew the rest of the army to the frontier and beyond, towards Mersa Matruh.

Some 33,000 soldiers, many of them from rear-area units, remained in the fortress under the command of Major General Hendrik Klopper. A garrison prepared for a short isolation rather than a siege could not withstand the assault that began on the morning of 20 June; on 21 June Klopper surrendered. The news reached Churchill at the White House. The ambiguous promise of 15 June that no one intended to give up Tobruk became part of the dispute over responsibility for the British army’s greatest defeat in the desert. On 25 June Auchinleck relieved Ritchie of his command, took over the Eighth Army himself and in July halted Rommel at El Alamein. In August Churchill replaced him with General Harold Alexander. The 50th Division and the 1st South African Division, saved on 14 and 15 June, fought in the autumn at the Second Battle of El Alamein.