Rommel takes the Halfaya Pass

On 25 April 1941 the German battle group of Colonel Maximilian von Herff, which for two weeks had been holding the Libyan–Egyptian border near Sollum (As-Sallum), attacked the British covering forces defending the Halfaya Pass. After two days of fighting, on 25 and 26 April, the British withdrew eastwards to the Buq Buq–Sofafi line, and the pass, the only convenient way through the escarpment between the desert plateau and the Egyptian coast, fell into the hands of the Afrika Korps. With this Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel brought his first offensive in Africa to a close: his troops stood on Egyptian soil, more than 120 kilometres east of Tobruk, which was still holding out in their rear.

Clarifications

War chronologies spread these events over three dates. Under 10 April they state that part of Rommel’s forces set off eastwards to take Fort Capuzzo and Sollum on the Egyptian border. The move did indeed begin in the days when the Germans were encircling Tobruk, but the places themselves fell later: according to the British official history and Rommel’s own recollections, on 12 April the Germans entered the abandoned town of Bardia, and on 13 April they took Fort Capuzzo and the barracks at Sollum. Under 25 April they speak of an “important victory” for Rommel at the Halfaya Pass. The date agrees with the sources: according to the British official history, Herff’s group attacked on 25 and 26 April and forced the British to withdraw, and the pass was in German hands before the end of the month. The word “victory”, however, should be understood modestly: it was a small action by weak motorised units against forces whose task was to delay the enemy, not to fight to the last.

The entry under 26 April, according to which Rommel “attacks the Gazala line and crosses the Egyptian border”, needs the most correction. Gazala lies some 60 kilometres west of Tobruk, and thus far behind Rommel’s troops, and in April 1941 there was no defensive line there at all. The Germans began to build one only in May, as a position to fall back on, and the famous Battle of Gazala was fought a year later. The Axis forces, on the other hand, had already crossed the Egyptian border on 13 April, when they took Sollum, a small Egyptian town a few kilometres beyond the frontier. On 25–26 April they merely moved a little further into Egypt.

From Tobruk to the border (10–13 April)

Rommel had no intention of stopping at Tobruk. On 10 April he announced that the British were collapsing and that his troops’ objective was the Suez Canal. When the fortress proved too strong to be taken on the march, he sent part of his forces further east towards the Egyptian border. Lieutenant Colonel Irnfried von Wechmar’s 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, the same unit that in early April had been the first to enter Benghazi, was directed on Bardia, and from whatever units happened to be at hand one more group was cobbled together under Lieutenant Colonel Knabe, commander of the 15th Motorcycle Battalion of the 15th Panzer Division, which was only just arriving. As the British official history put it, the group was given Sollum as its interim objective and, as a “carrot”, Mersa Matruh, more than 200 kilometres further into Egypt.

On the morning of 12 April Wechmar drove into the abandoned Bardia, the coastal fortress that the Australians had taken from the Italians in January. On the afternoon of 13 April, Easter Sunday, the Germans took Fort Capuzzo, an old Italian fort on the frontier, and two hours later the barracks on the edge of the plateau above Sollum. Both armies already knew the ground around them. It was by this route that Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s divisions had advanced into Egypt in September 1940, and in December the British, pursuing them, had entered Libya through Sollum and Capuzzo. Now the prize changed hands for the third time in seven months, and again almost without a fight.

The importance of the Halfaya Pass was a matter of terrain. Along the coast, a few kilometres from the sea, runs a steep escarpment some 200 metres high, separating a narrow coastal strip from the stony plateau. On the stretch running south-east from Sollum, vehicles could climb it in only a few places: by the road of hairpin bends in Sollum itself and through the Halfaya Pass, about 11 kilometres from the border. Whoever held both passages could advance into Egypt along the coast road or close it to the enemy. British soldiers later twisted the name of the pass into “Hellfire Pass”.

The British screen: Gott’s Mobile Force

After the defeat in Cyrenaica the British had to rebuild the defence of Egypt from scratch. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, decided not only to hold Tobruk but also to assemble on the frontier near Bardia and Sollum the most mobile forces he could, to harry the flanks and rear of the troops besieging the fortress. Around Mersa Matruh work began on defences similar to those of 1940. On 14 April Cyrenaica Command was disbanded – its head, General Philip Neame, had been captured – and its place was taken by a re-formed Western Desert Force headquarters under Lieutenant General Noel Beresford-Peirse, until then commander of the 4th Indian Division.

On the frontier itself stood the so-called Mobile Force of Brigadier William Gott, built around the reorganised Support Group of the 7th Armoured Division. According to the British official history, it consisted of the motorised 22nd Guards Brigade in the Halfaya Pass area and four small mobile columns posted at Halfaya, Sofafi, Buq Buq and Sidi Barrani. Each had a few 25-pounders, a company of infantry and some armoured cars or light tanks. A company of a French motorised battalion held another passage through the escarpment further on. Beresford-Peirse ordered Gott to gain time, to press the enemy wherever possible and to give way only before superior forces. The men of the 11th Hussars, who had been roaming this desert in their armoured cars since June 1940, kept contact with the Germans along the frontier wire.

The columns from Halfaya and Sofafi at once began to harass the Germans around Capuzzo and Sollum. On 13 April Gott’s operations near Sollum were supported from the sea by the destroyers HMAS Stuart and HMS Griffin and the gunboat Gnat, which was hit by German artillery fire. Ships of the Mediterranean Fleet shelled Axis columns near Bardia and Capuzzo several more times in April, and on the night of 19–20 April a battalion of British commandos landed from the transport Glengyle near Bardia. The raid, as the official history admits, found no targets worth destroying and did only minor damage, but it added to the impression that the frontier was restless.

Herff’s attack (25–26 April)

The Axis forces on the frontier were weak. Rommel was pulling everything he could to Tobruk, where his first assault had failed on 14 April, and his attacks from the west on 16 and 17 April. Left on the frontier were light motorised units, mostly from the 15th Panzer Division, whose sub-units were still arriving from Italy. Command over them passed from Knabe to Colonel Maximilian von Herff, commander of the division’s 115th Rifle Regiment. Herff, a professional infantry officer and a veteran of the First World War, later became an SS general and head of the SS Personnel Main Office, but in the spring of 1941 he was an ordinary Wehrmacht regimental commander whose lot was to guard the rear of the siege.

The harassing raids of Gott’s columns made a strong impression on him. After one of them, when British artillery shelled German transport columns between Capuzzo and Sidi Azeiz, Herff sent, according to the British official history, a greatly exaggerated report of British activity. Rommel concluded that his units near Bardia and Capuzzo were in danger of being cut off, and that if this happened the siege of Tobruk would have to be abandoned: the fortress lay on the only road by which the troops in the east could be supplied, and the frontier garrison, shut in between Tobruk and Egypt, would be caught in a trap. He therefore decided to push the British back from the border before they could reinforce.

Herff’s group set off on 25 April and attacked for two days, along the coast and across the plateau. Gott, in accordance with his orders, did not accept a decisive fight. His columns and the Guardsmen withdrew from the area of Sollum and the Halfaya Pass to a general line Buq Buq–Sofafi, several dozen kilometres further east, and from there continued to watch and harass the enemy. Losses on both sides were small, and the available sources do not give them. Rommel devoted a single sentence to these events in his notes: “A surprise attack by Herff’s group brought us the Halfaya Pass.” He added at once that until the middle of May neither this pass nor the passage at Sollum had really begun to be fortified, and that the whole Sollum front was in fact a line of outposts manned by a few light battle groups.

In military terms, then, it was a minor action, but its consequences reached further. The Axis forces now held both passages through the escarpment, and with them the coast road from Egypt into Libya, and their outposts on the pass now covered the entire siege of Tobruk from the east. Before the British could even think of relieving the fortress, they first had to retake the pass.

Why Rommel halted

Rommel still talked of the Suez Canal, but by the end of April he had nothing with which to go further. His supplies travelled by lorry from Tripoli and Benghazi, hundreds of kilometres away, and since Tobruk was holding out the convoys had to skirt it in a wide arc through the desert. Most of the German and Italian forces in Cyrenaica were tied down by the siege. In Berlin the Afrika Korps commander’s wilfulness was causing growing irritation. The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, noted in his diary on 23 April that Rommel had not sent a single clear report, was spending whole days driving between his scattered units and was frittering away his forces. Halder’s deputy, Lieutenant General Friedrich Paulus, was sent to Africa and arrived at Rommel’s headquarters on 27 April. Among other things, he was to assess whether the Afrika Korps could hold on if it lost Sollum, and to make Rommel understand that he could not count on major reinforcements. In the instructions Paulus left in early May, the main task of the Afrika Korps was to hold Cyrenaica, regardless of who held Sollum, Bardia or even Tobruk.

The British judged the situation just as soberly. Wavell had very few tanks in Egypt, especially fast cruiser tanks, and most of his troops were committed in Greece, from where they were just then being evacuated, in East Africa and soon in Iraq. On 18 April reconnaissance established that the second German division in Libya was an armoured one. On that basis, on 21 April, the Defence Committee in London, under pressure from Winston Churchill, decided to send the Tiger convoy, carrying tanks and Hurricane fighters for the army in Egypt, through the Mediterranean rather than round Africa. The loss of the Halfaya Pass changed nothing in these plans, but it marked the place where the British counter-attacks were to begin.

Place in the war

For the months that followed, the Halfaya Pass became the most bitterly contested point on the frontier. In Operation Brevity on 15 May 1941 Gott’s units retook it along with Fort Capuzzo, but a German counter-attack forced them to withdraw from Capuzzo, and on 26–27 May Herff’s group, in an attack named Operation Skorpion, again drove the British Guardsmen from the pass. This time the Germans fortified it thoroughly: they dug in 88 mm anti-aircraft guns and anti-tank guns, and mined the floor of the pass. When on 15 June the British launched the larger Operation Battleaxe, its first attack on Halfaya broke down under the fire of these guns – of twelve tanks attacking at the top of the pass the Germans, according to the British official history, destroyed eleven – and it was then that the name “Hellfire Pass” stuck. After the failure of Battleaxe, Churchill replaced Wavell with General Claude Auchinleck.

The German and Italian garrison of the pass survived even Rommel’s retreat after Operation Crusader. Cut off and bombarded from the air and the sea, it did not capitulate until 17 January 1942, to the 2nd South African Division. The capture of the pass in April was thus the last step of Rommel’s first offensive and at the same time the beginning of a front which, on the border of Libya and Egypt, with Tobruk in its rear, lasted until the end of 1941. For Hitler, who was already preparing his attack on the Soviet Union, this front was enough: the Afrika Korps was to tie down the British and protect Libya, not conquer Egypt. Rommel, who owed his April successes to disobeying his superiors, had to wait until January 1942 for his next great offensive.