Rommel leaves El Agheila

On the evening of 12 December 1942 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s German-Italian Panzer Army began to leave its last positions between Mersa Brega and El Agheila, on the border of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Only rearguards stayed behind. That same morning General Bernard Montgomery, commander of the British Eighth Army, alerted by patrols that the enemy was thinning out the trenches, brought his attack forward by two days. By then, however, it was too late to trap Rommel. Although heavy fighting followed over the next few days, the Axis army slipped away westwards, and the position that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini had ordered to be held “in all circumstances” fell almost without a fight.

Popular war chronologies record that on this day Rommel left El Agheila and withdrew to Tripoli, and that he was to make his last stand on the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia. Two qualifications are needed. First, the retreat did not begin out of nowhere on 12 December: Rommel had decided to abandon the position at the beginning of December, and the infantry without transport of its own, mostly Italian, had been marching west for many days; on 12 December the last motorised units set off. Second, the army did not fall back to Tripoli at that point, but to a position at Buerat, halfway between Sirte and Tripoli. Tripoli fell only on 23 January 1943, and Rommel’s forces reached the Mareth Line in February 1943. Nor was it the scene of a “last stand” – the fighting in Tunisia went on until May.

A position no one wanted to give up

El Agheila held a special place in the desert war. In March 1941 Rommel had opened his first offensive by taking El Agheila, and in January 1942, after his defeat in Operation Crusader, it was from here that he launched his second offensive. The ground favoured the defender: the coast road ran through a narrow neck between the sea and salt marshes, soft sand and broken country that restricted the movement of vehicles. The position was strengthened by a chain of minefields. For the British, El Agheila was a place of bad memories – twice their pursuits across Cyrenaica had come to an end here.

When the Axis forces occupied it on 23 November, after the retreat from El Alamein, the loss of Tobruk and the abandonment of Benghazi, Mussolini ordered it to be defended. Behind it lay Tripolitania, the last remnant of Italy’s colonial empire in Africa. Hitler backed the Duce and demanded that the position be held “in all circumstances”. Rommel took a different view. He believed that without new tanks, artillery, stronger air support and above all fuel, no position in Libya would withstand an attack by the Eighth Army, and that the only sensible course was a rapid retreat to Tunisia to join the forces that the Germans and Italians were moving there after the Allied landings in North Africa.

The dispute over the retreat

For almost three weeks Rommel waged a bitter dispute with his superiors. Formally he came under the Italian command: Marshal Ettore Bastico, Governor of Libya and commander of Axis forces in North Africa, and above him the chief of the Italian General Staff (Comando Supremo), Marshal Ugo Cavallero. Alongside them stood Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, German Commander-in-Chief South, responsible for supplies from Italy. On 24 November all three met Rommel at the Arco dei Fileni on the border of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, but reached no agreement. Bastico accused Rommel of defeatism. Rommel replied that he was a realist and that the men he was talking to lacked the courage to face the facts.

On 28 November Rommel flew to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. The meeting ended in a row: Hitler accused the African troops of throwing away their weapons and would not hear of leaving Africa. Rommel then travelled with Hermann Göring to Italy and put his case to Mussolini. In the end he obtained only a partial concession. Hitler and Mussolini agreed to preparations for a retreat, but only as far as Buerat, some 400 kilometres to the west – and this new position too was to be held to the last man. According to the New Zealand official history, based on Rommel’s papers and German documents, on 2 December Rommel had already decided to abandon El Agheila and set the start of the retreat for 5 December, when the forward garrison in the oasis of Marada was to withdraw.

Rommel was driven above all by the arithmetic of fuel. In the German army’s reports from those weeks not a day passes without complaints about the shortage: the motorised divisions were at times “completely immobilised”, and only part of the quantities needed was being delivered. British submarines and aircraft from Malta and from the recaptured airfields of Cyrenaica were sinking the ships bound for Tripoli and Benghazi. According to German figures, in November just under 4,900 tons of fuel reached the army in Africa, while more than 8,100 tons went to the bottom. All reinforcements and most supplies were in any case being sent to Tunisia, where the race for Tunis was under way, and at the beginning of December General Walther Nehring launched the counter-attack at Tebourba. For Berlin and Rome the Libyan front had become secondary. At El Agheila Rommel had only a few dozen German tanks and a small Italian armoured group formed from the remnants of the Ariete division.

From mid-November, therefore, the non-motorised troops, mostly Italian, were pulled back in stages – first to the El Agheila position, then further, to Nofilia and Buerat. By the beginning of December the position was held mainly by the German motorised divisions and the Italian armoured group, which were to defend themselves for as long as possible and fall back under heavy pressure.

Montgomery’s plan

Montgomery, too, remembered the lessons of previous years and had no intention of attacking until he had built up his stocks. His army was supplied from its bases in Egypt: by rail to Tobruk, and from there along the coast road or by sea to Benghazi. On 26 November the front was taken over by Lieutenant General Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps, with the British 7th Armoured Division, the 51st (Highland) Division and General Bernard Freyberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division. The plan was to repeat the manoeuvre that in February 1941 had ended in the destruction of the Italians at Beda Fomm. The New Zealanders, reinforced by the 4th Light Armoured Brigade, were to swing in a wide arc round the position to the south, across trackless country near the oasis of Marada, and come out on the coast road far in the enemy’s rear. The frontal attack by the 51st Division along the coast and the 7th Armoured Division further inland was planned for the night of 16–17 December, by which time the trap would be closed. Before that, from the night of 11–12 December, artillery bombardments and infantry raids were to divert attention from the outflanking move.

On 2 December the New Zealand Division set out from near Bardia and after eight days on the march reached the area of El Haseiat, in the desert south of Agedabia. On 11 December it moved to its first assembly area further south. Meanwhile the Allied air forces, supplied with fuel flown in by transport aircraft, were driving Axis aircraft from their forward airfields and bombing the port of Tripoli.

12 December: a race the British lost

Rommel took the raids and bombardment of the night of 11–12 December for the start of a major attack and speeded up his withdrawal. On the morning of 12 December British patrols reported that the enemy was thinning out his positions. Montgomery concluded that unless he struck at once, Rommel would slip away without a fight. At around 11 a.m. the New Zealanders learned that all timings had been brought forward by 48 hours, and that the main attack was now to go in on the night of 14–15 December. Freyberg promised to do everything in his power, but pointed out that preparations for the move were not complete. By the evening of 12 December the withdrawal of the German and Italian motorised troops was in full swing, and only rearguards remained in the position.

On 13 December German reconnaissance aircraft spotted some 300 vehicles north of Marada – the New Zealand column, which threatened to cut the line of retreat. Rommel wanted to throw the rest of his tanks against it, but the lack of fuel prevented him, so he ordered the retreat to continue. The same day an attack by the 7th Armoured Division south-west of El Agheila was repulsed by the Italian Ariete group, supported by a counter-attack by the armoured regiment of the Centauro division. Rommel, sparing in his praise of his allies, later wrote that the Italians had fought “magnificently”, and that the British left 22 burnt-out or damaged tanks on the battlefield (the figure comes from his own account).

A trap that never closed

The New Zealanders completed their outflanking move on 15 December, but after an exhausting march across difficult country they were scattered, and according to British studies they had only about 17 serviceable tanks left. On the escarpment above the coast road, in the area of the Arco dei Fileni (which the British called Marble Arch) and Bir el-Merduma, they ran into the German 15th Panzer Division, which was covering the road. The 6th New Zealand Brigade tried to block the road further west. During the night of 15–16 December, however, the last units of Rommel’s army broke through westwards in small, fast columns, tanks among them, through the gaps between the scattered New Zealand sub-units. At around midday on 16 December Freyberg reported frankly that the enemy had slipped through at high speed and widely dispersed, and that most of them had escaped round the flanks and through the gap.

The New Zealand official historian W. G. Stevens attributed the failure to the fact that vehicles could move faster on the road than across the desert, that the enemy was experienced and carefully covered his flanks and rear, and that deploying troops at night in unfamiliar country after a long march was extremely difficult. Rommel later criticised Montgomery for opening his bombardment and attacks on the defensive line before the outflanking column was in position. On 17 December the New Zealanders took the landing ground at Marble Arch, and the next day fought a brief action with the rearguard at Nofilia; there too they failed to cut the line of retreat. Losses were small: according to the British official history (Playfair), between 13 and 17 December the Axis forces lost some 450 prisoners, 25 guns and 18 tanks, and according to Stevens the 2nd New Zealand Division’s losses were 11 killed, 29 wounded and 8 taken prisoner.

What came next

Rommel’s army fell back to Buerat, some 320 kilometres east of Tripoli, and took up a new position there at the end of December. The Eighth Army, once again far from its bases, needed several more weeks to bring up supplies. Montgomery attacked only on 15 January 1943, with an overwhelming superiority in infantry and tanks. Rommel withdrew again, and on 23 January the British entered Tripoli – three months after the start of the Battle of El Alamein. Italy had lost Tripolitania, the last remnant of its African empire. In February 1943 Rommel’s troops occupied the old French fortifications of the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia, built in the 1930s against the Italians. In March Montgomery broke through them in the Battle of the Mareth Line, and the fighting in Tunisia ended with the surrender of the Axis forces in May 1943.

The withdrawal from El Agheila was a setback for Montgomery, who had once again failed to cut Rommel off, but it also vindicated his method: the cautious, well-supplied pursuit gave Rommel no opening for the kind of counter-stroke he had twice launched from this very position in 1941 and 1942. Rommel saved his army, but merely postponed the decision. His troops were soon to join the Axis forces in the Tunisian campaign, where victory over Allies closing in from two sides was no longer a realistic prospect.