Rommel takes Mersa Brega

On 31 March 1941 the German 5th Light Division under Generalmajor Johannes Streich attacked the British positions at Mersa Brega (Marsa al-Brega), a small port in the innermost corner of the Gulf of Sirte. The fighting lasted all day. In the morning and afternoon the British beat off the attacks, but in the evening a German machine-gun battalion forced its way in among the coastal dunes and broke the defence. The Support Group of the British 2nd Armoured Division withdrew after dark, and the armoured regiments, which had stood all day a few kilometres away without entering the fight, followed it. Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel, who had been on the battlefield since the morning, had won the bottleneck that opened the road to Agedabia and beyond it to the whole of Cyrenaica.

Some compilations place Mersa Brega “north of El Agheila”. In fact it lies east – more precisely east-north-east – of El Agheila, some 40 kilometres away: it is here that the coast of the gulf, which until then runs from west to east, turns north towards Benghazi. The date itself is correct. The attack and the breakthrough took place on 31 March, and the Germans entered the bottleneck that same evening. The British withdrew during the night, and the Germans occupied the positions they had abandoned on 1 April, which is why some studies move the whole capture of Mersa Brega to that day, and some even move the attack itself to 1 April, which is a mistake. Rommel recalled, moreover, that news of the division’s success reached his headquarters only in the morning.

A bottleneck between the marshes and the sea

Mersa Brega was neither a town nor a fortress, but a few buildings by an anchorage and the coastal road, the Via Balbia. Its military value lay in the lie of the land. Between the sea and a belt of salt marshes and soft sand to the south there remained a narrow bottleneck that could be held with small forces, while further south, around the dry bed of the Wadi Faregh, the ground was almost impassable for vehicles. Whoever held this bottleneck closed the entrance to Cyrenaica from Tripolitania. There were also wells with good water here, far more plentiful than at El Agheila, which in the desert mattered no less than hills and marshes.

At the turn of February and March, when the first clashes with the Germans took place near El Agheila, the bottleneck was held by Australian infantry. The veterans of General Iven Mackay’s 6th Division, however, had left for Greece, and the 9th Australian Division of General Leslie Morshead, which replaced them, had so few lorries that it could not be supplied so far from the ports. In mid-March General Archibald Wavell and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, came to Cyrenaica and agreed to withdraw the almost immobile Australian brigade from the forward area. On 20 March responsibility for the bottleneck passed to Major General Michael Gambier-Parry’s 2nd Armoured Division, and the Australians took up positions some 240 kilometres further north, on the escarpment near Benghazi, with no communications with the armoured division.

The name “armoured division” was an overstatement. After a brigade had been detached for the Greek expedition, all that remained of it, in the words of the British official history, was “barely one weak armoured brigade, not fully mobile, and an incomplete support group”. Brigadier Reginald Rimington’s 3rd Armoured Brigade had an understrength light tank regiment; a regiment being equipped with captured Italian M13/40 tanks, which were slow and unreliable; and a regiment of British cruiser tanks (5th Royal Tank Regiment), which joined only in the second half of March, losing machines to breakdowns along the way. All the British tanks had long since exceeded their intended engine life. Brigadier H. B. Latham’s Support Group consisted in practice of one battalion of motorised infantry – the 1st Battalion, Tower Hamlets Rifles (formally, since January, the 9th Battalion, Rifle Brigade) – a regiment of 25-pounder field guns, an anti-tank battery and a machine-gun company. The battalion took over the bottleneck on 22 March and held a front some 13 kilometres long. The armoured brigade stood a few kilometres to the north-east, on the flank and slightly to the rear.

The commander in Cyrenaica, Lieutenant General Philip Neame, who had won the Victoria Cross in the First World War, had warned Cairo from the start that to defend the province he needed a full armoured division, two infantry divisions and air support. Wavell replied that there would be no reinforcements before May. In an instruction that reached Neame on 26 March he told him, in the event of an attack, to fight a delaying action, to conserve his tanks and not to hesitate to give up ground if necessary – even Benghazi itself, which had only “prestige and propaganda” value. On 30 March Wavell repeated that he would send no substantial forces for two months. That same day Neame wrote in an operation order that since taking El Agheila the enemy had shown no intention of advancing further, and that there was nothing to show that he would be capable of a large-scale offensive in the near future.

Rommel against orders

Rommel had quite different instructions, but also different intentions. Around 20 March he flew to Berlin to present a plan for recovering Cyrenaica and striking at Egypt. At the Army High Command, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch and General Franz Halder, absorbed in preparations for war with the Soviet Union, told him that apart from the 15th Panzer Division he would get no more troops. A written instruction of 21 March ordered him to defend Tripolitania and prepare for the recovery of Cyrenaica, and envisaged an attack on the Agedabia area only after the arrival of the 15th Panzer Division, that is around the middle of May. Rommel considered this a mistake. In his notes he later wrote that “the momentary weakness of the British in North Africa” should have been exploited with the utmost energy.

On his return to Africa on 23 March he learned that, according to radio intercepts, the British were withdrawing troops from the area south-west of Agedabia. The next day his reconnaissance battalion took El Agheila. The British fell back to Mersa Brega and began digging in there, which Rommel watched with unease. If they were given time to mine and wire this naturally strong position, he wrote, they would build themselves an equivalent of the German position at Mugtaa, “difficult to take by storm and to outflank from the south”. He could either wait until the end of May for the rest of his forces or attack at once with what he had. He chose the latter: the bottleneck was to have been the first objective of the May offensive anyway, and he needed the water from its wells.

On 30 March Streich was ordered to take Mersa Brega the following day. General Italo Gariboldi, since 25 March the Italian Governor of Libya and Rommel’s formal superior, approved the attack but forbade any further advance without his consent. The 5th Light Division was now complete. At the beginning of March its 5th Panzer Regiment, under Oberstleutnant Herbert Olbrich, had been unloaded at Tripoli, with some 150 tanks, nearly half of them light Panzerkampfwagen I and IIs and the rest medium Panzerkampfwagen III and IVs. The division also had two lorry-borne machine-gun battalions, the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, artillery and anti-tank guns. Behind it came the Italian Ariete Armoured Division and the Brescia Infantry Division. Air support was provided by the Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers of the German air command in Africa, based on Libyan airfields.

The fighting on 31 March

The attack began early in the morning. According to the history of the Tower Hamlets Rifles, at about eight o’clock German armoured cars, tanks and motorcyclists with sidecars struck a platoon of Universal Carriers pushed out in front of one company’s position. Rommel recalled “a sharp engagement with British reconnaissance units” at Maaten Bescer in the early morning, and the British official history states that the enemy made contact with the position at about ten. The carriers fell back to a hill that the soldiers called Cemetery Hill, which one of the companies held until a quarter past ten before it too, battered by dive bombers, withdrew to the main position.

Then German tanks attacked the main line held by two of the battalion’s companies. Under fire from the 25-pounders and from riflemen with Boys anti-tank rifles, they withdrew after losing one or two vehicles. From then on the Germans confined themselves to lengthy reconnaissance and a cautious, methodical attack, which the British beat off. “Our attack came to a standstill,” Rommel wrote of the 5th Light Division’s afternoon assault on the main position, “which the British were defending stubbornly.” The German infantry and artillery, however, now commanded Cemetery Hill and were firing on the British positions from it.

In the afternoon Brigadier Latham asked for the 3rd Armoured Brigade to strike at the Germans’ right flank. General Gambier-Parry refused: he judged that he could not prepare an attack before dark. British historians regard this decision as one of the key moments of the whole campaign. According to the official history, had the armoured brigade struck a heavy blow on the first day or two, Rommel might have given up any further advance, although “it would have been like him to try again soon”. But the brigade was very weak, there was no tank reserve at all, and its commanders, bound by the order to conserve their armour, were unwilling to squander it. As a result, the official history concludes, it was not used at all.

Rommel himself spent the day on the battlefield with his aide-de-camp and his chief of staff, Oberstleutnant Gerhard von dem Borne. In the afternoon he reconnoitred the possibility of an attack north of the coast road, through the belt of dunes, where the British defence was weakest. At about half past five, after the second heavy dive-bomber raid of the day, the Germans attacked the British right flank. Late in the evening Oberstleutnant Gustav Ponath’s 8th Machine Gun Battalion went into the gap and, as Rommel wrote, “in a dashing attack through the undulating dunes” threw the enemy back to the east. Tanks penetrated deep into the main position, the companies of the Tower Hamlets Rifles withdrew one after another, and one of them suffered heavy losses. The Support Group held its delaying positions until it became clear that it might be cut off.

The night withdrawal

After dark the Support Group fell back some 40 kilometres to an intermediate position south-west of Agedabia, and the 3rd Armoured Brigade followed it. All day the RAF had been reporting large numbers of vehicles in the El Agheila area; Blenheim bombers of No. 55 Squadron attacked them and Hurricane fighters of No. 3 Squadron RAAF patrolled over the front, but this could not change the outcome of the fighting. Rommel noted that the British withdrew “rather hastily”, leaving behind 50 carriers and some 30 lorries, which fell into German hands. The sources do not agree on that day’s casualties. What is certain is that for the Tower Hamlets Rifles it was the beginning of grievous losses: after the rearguard fighting of 2 April, in which it lost more than a company, it was reduced to half strength.

On 1 April all was quiet on the ground. The Germans occupied the bottleneck and brought up units, while British aircraft saw long columns of vehicles stretching far to the west of El Agheila, evidence of the presence of substantial motorised forces. Air reconnaissance and patrols sent out by Streich showed Rommel, however, that the British were falling back. “It was a chance I could not resist,” he wrote. Against the instruction from Berlin, and against the protests of Gariboldi – who warned against being drawn into large-scale fighting too early and reminded him that a further advance would be contrary to his orders – Rommel ordered the 5th Light Division to advance on Agedabia and on the small port of Zuetina.

On the British side it was understood that Mersa Brega had not been a raid. Wavell, who as late as 27 March had been assuring Winston Churchill that at El Agheila there were mainly Italians “with a small stiffening” of Germans, while admitting that in Cyrenaica he had taken a “considerable risk” in order to give Greece the greatest possible support, began to worry about the state of Neame’s forces. On 2 April he flew to Neame’s headquarters at Barce (Al-Marj), and in the evening he summoned from Egypt General Richard O’Connor, the victor of Operation Compass, intending to give him command in Cyrenaica. In the end he left Neame in post and instructed O’Connor to advise him.

Its place in the war

The fighting at Mersa Brega was small-scale but decisive. It opened for Rommel the bottleneck beyond which, all the way to Benghazi, stretched open, flat country, good for tanks and without positions on which infantry could make a stand. On 2 April the Germans took Agedabia, and in the course of the rearguard fighting the 3rd Armoured Brigade, worn down more by breakdowns and lack of fuel than by the enemy, ceased to exist as a fighting formation. During the night of 3–4 April a German reconnaissance battalion entered the abandoned city of Benghazi. Rommel sent his columns straight across the desert towards Mechili, Derna and Tobruk. During the night of 6–7 April a German patrol captured Generals Neame and O’Connor, who had lost their way while driving at night; on 8 April at Mechili General Gambier-Parry surrendered with the remnants of his division and a large part of the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade; and on 10–11 April the Germans and Italians surrounded Tobruk, where the 9th Australian Division had taken refuge. By mid-April the Axis spearheads had reached the Egyptian frontier at Sollum. In less than three weeks the British had lost almost everything they had won in two months of Operation Compass.

Mersa Brega also revealed for the first time the features that were to mark the desert war from then on. Rommel led the fighting in person, from the front line, and acted against the orders of both his Italian superior and his own high command, counting on success to justify his disobedience. The British were paying for decisions taken in February: for sending their best troops to Greece, for leaving in Cyrenaica an armoured division in name only, and for a command that had neither the staff nor the communications to conduct mobile operations over vast distances. Wavell, as the British official history stresses, blamed himself alone for this mistake.

The retreat from Cyrenaica coincided with the German attack on Yugoslavia and Greece, which began on 6 April. Soon the British had to evacuate their expeditionary force from Greece, and then from Crete. Besieged Tobruk held out until December 1941 and became a symbol of British resistance in the desert, while the dash across Cyrenaica brought Rommel a fame that Goebbels’s propaganda would soon inflate into the legend of the “Desert Fox”. At the same time his lightning victory, won against Berlin’s wishes, drew the Reich deeper into the war in Africa than Hitler – whose attention was wholly focused on preparing the attack on the Soviet Union – had intended. The front that began to move at Mersa Brega on 31 March was to roll across Cyrenaica twice more before, in November 1942, the Eighth Army passed through it for the last time after its victory at El Alamein.