Rommel retakes El Agheila

In the early hours of 24 March 1941 the German 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, reinforced by a motorcycle company, drove along the coast road into El Agheila, the westernmost British outpost in Libya. The small British garrison did not fight: it mined the fort, the wells and the landing ground and then withdrew eastwards along the coast towards Mersa Brega. The Germans took the old Italian fort, the water points and the airfield almost without loss. Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel, who had returned from Berlin the day before, later noted that the enemy had “skilfully” withdrawn before the attack. The clash was minor, but it marked the start of Rommel’s first offensive in North Africa, which within three weeks took almost the whole of Cyrenaica from the British.

Another date is usually linked with this day: German tanks, which gave Rommel his striking power, are said to have arrived in North Africa on 12 March. That is broadly true but needs qualifying. The main body of 5th Panzer Regiment landed at Tripoli between 8 and 11 March, and on 12 March a parade was held in the city that made their arrival widely known. Under 24 March, in turn, it is stated that Rommel reoccupied El Agheila as part of his first offensive and that within three weeks the British had been thrown back into Egypt. El Agheila had indeed belonged to the Italians until 8–9 February, when, after the defeat at Beda Fomm, British armoured cars occupied it. The retreat into Egypt, however, is a simplification, as the course of the following weeks shows.

Tanks in Tripoli

The panzer regiment was the most important part of Generalmajor Johannes Streich’s 5th Light Division, the first formation the Germans sent to Libya under Operation Sonnenblume. The division had been put together in haste from units of the 3rd Panzer Division, and its tank regiment came from that division: the tanks arrived in Africa still painted dark grey, with the emblem of the 3rd Panzer Division on their armour. In mid-February only a reconnaissance battalion and an anti-tank battalion had reached Tripoli, and they were at once sent east towards Sirte. The tanks had to wait for later convoys.

According to German studies, the convoy carrying the main part of the regiment was assembled in Naples on 4 March. The transports Ankara, Kybfels, Marburg and Reichenfels put into Tripoli at noon on 10 March; earlier, from 8 March, the first units of the regiment had been arriving. Rommel recorded in his notes that on 11 March 5th Panzer Regiment completed unloading and that its modern equipment “made an enormous impression on the Italians”. The numbers of tanks given in the literature vary, depending on whether light vehicles and command tanks are counted. Ian Playfair’s British official history speaks of about 70 light and 80 medium tanks; the notes to the post-war edition of Rommel’s papers speak of 120 vehicles, of which only 60 were Panzer III and Panzer IV medium tanks; and tallies based on German documents give 155 tanks: 25 Panzer I, 45 Panzer II, 61 Panzer III, 17 Panzer IV and 7 command vehicles. Either way, it was the first armoured formation in Africa equipped with medium tanks carrying 50 mm and 75 mm guns, which outclassed anything the British and Italians had there.

On 12 March Rommel staged a German–Italian parade in Tripoli. The tanks drove past a stand of commanders, past a crowd of onlookers and, it was reckoned, past enemy spies, then turned round and drove past again, several times in a row, so as to seem far more numerous. Dummy tanks of wood and canvas, mounted on Volkswagen car chassis in workshops south of the city, served the same purpose. The ruse was necessary because the main body of the German forces, the 15th Panzer Division, was not due to reach Libya until April and May.

The front on the Gulf of Sirte

Before the tanks reached the front, the Germans and Italians had pushed it far to the east. After the first skirmishes with the British on 20 and 24 February, General Streich, who had taken command in the front line, occupied the Mugtaa defile, some 30 kilometres west of El Agheila, on 4 March and closed it with mines. There the Sebkha el Kebira salt marsh stretched inland from the coast, and the only passages for vehicles were easy to block. Rommel considered this an important gain: the front now stood some 800 kilometres east of Tripoli, and supplies could be brought in by small ships to the landing place at Ras el Aali. On 7 March the Italian Ariete armoured division came under German command and took up position east of Nofilia, and soon the whole Italian Brescia infantry division moved into the positions at Mugtaa, freeing the 5th Light Division for mobile operations.

The Germans also reached deep into the desert. According to the British official history, on 13 March a German–Italian detachment occupied the oasis of Marada, some hundred kilometres south of El Agheila, to protect the front against being outflanked from the desert. On 15 March a mixed column under Count Gerhard von Schwerin set out from Sirte on a march of several hundred kilometres into the Fezzan, towards Murzuq. The Italians had asked for this, alarmed by the raids of the Free French from Chad, who on 1 March, under Colonel Philippe Leclerc, had taken the oasis of Kufra. For Rommel it was above all a test of men and equipment on a long desert march. On 13 March he himself moved his headquarters to Sirte, and his flight from Tripoli was interrupted by the first sandstorm of his African service, a ghibli, which he later described with undisguised respect.

On the other side of the front the British were still weakening their forces. From 4 March the first convoys carrying troops for Greece were sailing from Egypt, and the best units, which not long before had been conquering Cyrenaica, were going to the landing in Greece. In the first half of March the leading brigade of General Leslie Morshead’s 9th Australian Division relieved the veterans of the 6th Division at Mersa Brega as they left for Greece. The Australians, however, had no transport, and their commanders feared that on the open desert infantry without vehicles would easily be surrounded. In mid-March Cyrenaica was visited by the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, accompanied by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill. Wavell agreed to withdraw the Australians from the forward area, and on 18 March Dill reported to London that between Benghazi and El Agheila there were no positions on which infantry could fight, and that in open country victory would go to whoever had the stronger tanks. On 20 March responsibility for the forward area passed to General Michael Gambier-Parry’s 2nd Armoured Division, and the Australians moved north to the hills above Benghazi.

The armoured division was one in name only. After giving up one brigade to Greece, it was left with the weak 3rd Armoured Brigade – with a regiment of light tanks, a regiment equipped with captured Italian M13/40 tanks and a third regiment with worn-out cruiser tanks, which had arrived from the Tobruk area only in the second half of March and lost many vehicles to breakdowns on the way – and a reduced support group. General Philip Neame, in command in Cyrenaica since 27 February, judged that to defend it he needed a full armoured division, two infantry divisions and adequate air support. He was told that no reinforcements would come before May. Wavell instructed him, if attacked, to fight a delaying action, conserve his tanks and if necessary give up even Benghazi, which mattered for prestige but had little military value. The most favourable defensive position, west of El Agheila, Neame considered impossible to hold for lack of transport to supply the troops. In El Agheila itself and in the desert in front of it, therefore, only light covering forces remained, above all the armoured cars of the 2nd Armoured Division’s reconnaissance regiment, the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards, slower and more lightly armed than the German eight-wheelers with their 20 mm cannon.

A brake from Berlin

At the beginning of March Rommel concluded that the British in front of Cyrenaica were weak and were not planning an attack. As the immediate threat to Tripolitania had passed, he proposed to the Italian Commander-in-Chief, General Italo Gariboldi, an offensive as early as May, before the onset of the heat: first the recapture of Cyrenaica, then an advance into north-western Egypt, and finally a thrust at the Suez Canal. Gariboldi agreed to this bold plan, but reinforcements from Germany were needed.

On 19 March Rommel flew to Hitler’s headquarters. On 20 March Adolf Hitler presented him with the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross, chiefly for his command of the 7th Panzer Division in France, but his talks with the army high command disappointed him. Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch declared that he had no intention of delivering a decisive blow in Africa and that apart from the 15th Panzer Division Rommel would receive no reinforcements. The Wehrmacht was already preparing for war with the Soviet Union, of which, as his biographers stress, Rommel was not told at the time. A written directive of 21 March defined his task unambiguously: in accordance with the directives of the Italian command, he was to secure the defence of Tripolitania and prepare for the recapture of Cyrenaica. Only when the 15th Panzer Division had reached the front, that is around mid-May, was the German corps, together with the Italian divisions, to take the Agedabia area as a base for further operations. Benghazi could be taken later. Rommel replied that Benghazi could not be held on its own without the whole of Cyrenaica, and took bitterly the attitude of Brauchitsch and the Chief of the General Staff, General Franz Halder, who, as he wrote, were leaving the future of this theatre to chance instead of exploiting the temporary weakness of the British.

The capture of El Agheila

Before leaving for Germany, Rommel had ordered the 5th Light Division to prepare an attack on El Agheila for 24 March. He gave two reasons. The British at El Agheila were harassing the supply columns heading for the garrison at Marada, and the village had water points, which were lacking at the Mugtaa defile. When he returned to Africa on 23 March, his staff reported that, according to radio intercepts, the British were withdrawing some of their forces from the area south-west of Agedabia. Streich confirmed that El Agheila was weakly held and even proposed a reconnaissance in force as far as Mersa Brega. Rommel approved the plan and ordered El Agheila to be taken together with its wells. The day before, the panzer regiment had reached the front by road from Tripoli; its workshop company noted that the tanks performed well as long as they drove at night or in the cooler hours of the day, and not too fast.

The attack was led by the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, reinforced by motorcyclists, and met no real resistance. The British patrols and the small garrison of the fort withdrew, leaving minefields around the fort, the water points and the landing ground behind them. Rommel later admitted that the withdrawal had been skilfully carried out. The British fell back to Mersa Brega, some 35 kilometres to the east, where the support group of the 2nd Armoured Division occupied a position on the hills between the sea and the salt marshes, while the 3rd Armoured Brigade stood behind it on its flank.

Formally, the capture of El Agheila did not exceed the orders from Berlin. It could be presented as an improvement in the defensive position of Tripolitania and as cover for Marada, and Gariboldi later also approved the attack on Mersa Brega, stipulating that no further advance was to be made without his consent. The spirit of these orders, however, was different: the army high command counselled caution and envisaged no attack before May. Some studies date Rommel’s insubordination precisely from 24 March: despite repeated instructions to wait for the 15th Panzer Division, he had no intention of standing still. On 26 March he wrote to his wife: “I have to hold the troops back to stop them surging forward. They have taken another position, 30 kilometres further east. Our Italian friends will be looking worried.”

“The tortoise sticks its head out”

The British did not regard the loss of El Agheila as the start of an offensive. Their intelligence estimated that the Germans and Italians would be ready to attack with one German light division and one Italian motorised division around mid-April at the earliest, and only after building up thirty days’ supplies in the forward area. Wavell hoped that the blow would not fall before May, by which time he would be able to reinforce Cyrenaica. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was more worried. According to his memoirs, on 26 March he cabled Wavell that the Germans had a habit of advancing wherever they met no resistance, adding: “I presume you are only waiting for the tortoise to stick his head out far enough before chopping it off.” Wavell replied on 27 March that the enemy at El Agheila were mainly Italians with a small German “stiffening”. He admitted that he had taken a big risk in Cyrenaica in order to give Greece as much help as possible and that the coming months would be a period of anxiety, but he considered the enemy’s strength to be overestimated. As late as 30 March Neame wrote in an operation instruction that since the capture of El Agheila the enemy had shown no intention of advancing further. That same day Wavell informed him that for two months he would receive no major reinforcements and was to delay the enemy in the meantime.

In fact the British assessment of the enemy’s capabilities did not differ greatly from that of the German and Italian commands. The British official historian stressed that its error lay elsewhere: no one had reckoned with a commander who was prepared to act faster than his supplies and his superiors’ orders allowed.

Place in the war

The capture of El Agheila opened Rommel’s first offensive. On 30 March Streich received orders to take Mersa Brega the next day. After it fell on 31 March, Rommel, against Gariboldi’s objections and without Berlin’s consent, pressed on: on 2 April he took Agedabia, on the night of 3–4 April his troops entered Benghazi, abandoned by the British, and columns cutting across the desert through Msus and Mechili threatened to cut off the whole of Cyrenaica. The 2nd Armoured Division disintegrated in the retreat, losing its tanks mainly to breakdowns and lack of fuel, and on the night of 6–7 April a German patrol captured General Neame and General Richard O’Connor, whom Wavell had sent to assist him. On 8 April Gambier-Parry surrendered at Mechili with a large part of the garrison.

The popular version, according to which the British were thrown back into Egypt within three weeks, is therefore only partly accurate. Roughly three weeks after 24 March, on 13–15 April, the German spearheads reached the Egyptian frontier at Sollum and Fort Capuzzo. Behind them, however, remained Tobruk, surrounded by Axis forces from 11 April and defended by General Morshead’s 9th Australian Division. Its siege lasted eight months, and from August 1941 the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade fought there. As long as Tobruk held out, Rommel could not advance deep into Egypt.

The events of these weeks shaped the desert war for the next two years. Rommel showed that he was ready to act on his own initiative, against his superiors in Rome and Berlin, and that his boldness could make up for the weakness of his forces. The British paid for the decision to send troops to Greece with the loss of almost all the gains of Operation Compass, and El Agheila itself, which they had abandoned without a fight on 24 March, twice more became a turning point of the campaign: in January 1942 Rommel launched another offensive from there, and in December 1942, after the defeat at El Alamein, the Germans and Italians finally abandoned it, falling back into Tripolitania and on into Tunisia.