Rommel’s dash to the wire

On the morning of 24 November 1941 Erwin Rommel placed himself at the head of the German panzer divisions and led them east across the desert towards the Egyptian frontier. The day before, his tanks had shattered the British armoured brigades and the 5th South African Brigade at Sidi Rezegh, and Rommel concluded that the Eighth Army was beaten. Now he meant to get into its rear, cut its supply lines, free his encircled frontier garrisons and force the British to retreat into Egypt. The raid, known in English as the “dash to the wire” – after the barbed-wire fence with which the Italians had sealed off Libya from Egypt before the war – caused chaos in the British rear and very nearly ended with the capture of the Eighth Army’s commander. It did not, however, bring a decision. While the German tanks were wandering about near the frontier, the New Zealand Division fought its way through to besieged Tobruk and on the night of 26–27 November joined hands with its garrison.

Clarifications

Popular chronologies record under 24 November that Rommel began a “surprise raid 15 miles into Egypt” and “met no resistance”, and under 26 November that after this short raid he withdrew to Bardia for fuel, and that this was when the Eighth Army linked up with the Tobruk garrison. Both statements concern the same manoeuvre, but the first needs correcting. The raid was no short foray: according to the British official history, in the first afternoon alone Rommel’s spearheads covered about a hundred kilometres (sixty miles) from Sidi Rezegh to the frontier, and for the next two days they roamed on both sides of it. Nor did it pass without resistance. There was indeed panic in the British rear, but on the way the German columns came under fire from the remnants of the 7th Armoured Division and from South African artillery, they were bombed incessantly by the British air force, and their attacks at the frontier were beaten off by the 4th Indian Division. The second statement is broadly accurate, with one reservation: the link-up with Tobruk on 26 and 27 November was temporary, and the siege finally ended only at the beginning of December.

Rommel’s decision

On the evening of 23 November, the sixth day of the British offensive, after his victory over the South Africans, Rommel assessed the situation in his own way. In his view the British armoured corps no longer counted, and the rest of the Eighth Army – the infantry of XIII Corps, the New Zealanders and the Indians – was strung out between Tobruk and the frontier, with a long and exposed supply line. At Bardia, Sollum and the Halfaya Pass encircled Germans and Italians were holding out. A thrust to the east was meant to finish off the shattered brigades, cut the Eighth Army off from Egypt and induce its command to retreat, as it had in the spring after his first offensive and in the summer during Battleaxe. Rommel expected to be back at Tobruk by the following day at the latest.

The commander of the Afrika Korps, General Ludwig Crüwell, preferred first to complete the work at Sidi Rezegh and round up the stragglers, but Rommel would not wait. He left command of the whole of Panzer Group Africa at his headquarters near Tobruk to his chief of operations, Oberstleutnant Siegfried Westphal, and himself rode with the spearhead of the 21st Panzer Division. Behind it came the 15th Panzer Division and the Italian Ariete, placed under Rommel’s command on 23 November. According to various figures the Afrika Korps then had fewer than a hundred serviceable tanks.

24 November: panic in the rear

The column set off eastwards at about 10 a.m. along the desert track of the Trigh el Abd. In its path there was no front, only the rear echelons of XXX Corps scattered across the desert: dumps, workshops, columns of lorries carrying fuel and water, dressing stations, headquarters. At the sight of the German tanks thousands of vehicles fled east and south towards Egypt, and in the dust and confusion nobody knew where the enemy was. XXX Corps headquarters came under fire and some of its officers were captured, while the commander of the Eighth Army, Lieutenant General Alan Cunningham, who had flown there for a conference, managed to take off in his aircraft at the last moment, as German shells were already falling on the landing ground. From the air he could see Rommel’s tanks racing east.

The Germans, however, drove past the most important target. In the desert near the frontier the British had in the autumn secretly built up huge forward supply dumps without which the Eighth Army could not have fought. Rommel’s columns passed within a few kilometres of them without knowing they were there. On the way the tanks were shelled by the artillery of the 1st South African Brigade and the remnants of the 7th Armoured Division’s Support Group, which delayed the 5th Panzer Regiment in particular. At about 4 p.m. Rommel and the spearhead of the 21st Panzer Division reached the frontier at Gasr el Abid; according to the British official history the column had travelled at an average speed of about sixteen kilometres an hour. One group passed through the wire and entered Egypt.

In the evening Rommel decided to encircle the British forces at the frontier and issued orders for the following day. He himself set off in the dark with a few officers towards the Halfaya Pass. His car broke down, and the commander of the panzer group was saved by chance: Crüwell happened to drive past in a command vehicle captured from the British, which the Germans called the “Mammut” (Mammoth). The two generals and a handful of men spent the night on the Egyptian side of the wire, among British and Indian units, and only at dawn found a way back through. For much of these days Rommel had no contact with his headquarters, and the troops of Panzer Group Africa around Tobruk were left without a commander.

Auchinleck stands firm

The 24th of November was also a day of trial for the British command. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, had flown to Eighth Army headquarters the day before, when Cunningham, alarmed by his tank losses, was considering breaking off the offensive and retreating to Egypt. Rommel’s raid seemed to confirm the army commander’s worst fears. Auchinleck, however, who knew from decrypted German signals that Rommel too was running short of tanks, fuel and ammunition, judged the German manoeuvre to be a desperate gamble. He handed Cunningham a written directive: the Eighth Army was to attack the enemy “relentlessly using all your resources even to the last tank”, and the objective remained the capture of Cyrenaica and an advance on Tripoli. XIII Corps was to press on towards Tobruk without looking over its shoulder at the Germans in its rear.

Auchinleck returned to Cairo and there, after talks with the air commander, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, and the Minister Resident, Oliver Lyttelton, decided that Cunningham could no longer conduct the battle. On 25 November he wrote him a letter asking him, for the sake of appearances, to agree to go into hospital. On 26 November command of the Eighth Army passed to Auchinleck’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Major General Neil Ritchie, who had never before commanded even a division in battle. Cunningham was admitted to hospital in Alexandria. The doctor who examined him on 29 November found extreme exhaustion after a week with almost no sleep, but no nervous breakdown. Even so, Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons in December of the general’s “serious overstrain”, and the story of his breakdown long clung to his name. In reality Auchinleck had lost confidence in a commander who had ceased to believe in victory.

25–26 November: attacks at the frontier

On the morning of 25 November the Germans went into action at the frontier, but not where Rommel had expected. The 15th Panzer Division headed north-east towards Sidi Azeiz, where it expected to find the New Zealanders, and found nothing there, while all day long it was bombed by the British air force. The 5th Panzer Regiment of the 21st Division attacked the positions of the 7th Indian Brigade at Sidi Omar, which the Indians of Major General Frank Messervy’s 4th Indian Division had captured a few days earlier. The attack was beaten off by the British 1st Field Regiment firing over open sights, and a second attack ended even worse for the Germans: the panzer regiment was left with a handful of serviceable tanks. By the evening of 25 November, according to British figures, the 15th Panzer Division had 53 tanks – almost all that the Afrika Korps had left.

That was the end of what the raid could achieve. The divisions were short of fuel, ammunition and water, and their only route to the dumps on the coast between Bardia and Tobruk ran past the New Zealand brigades. On 26 November, around midday, the 15th Panzer Division reached Bardia to replenish, while the remnants of the 21st Division fought north of Halfaya against the 5th New Zealand Brigade, which was holding out between Fort Capuzzo and the barracks at Sollum. Meanwhile at headquarters near Tobruk, Westphal, out of touch with Rommel, watched with growing anxiety as the New Zealanders approached the fortress. On 26 November, on his own responsibility, he recalled the 21st Panzer Division to Tobruk. According to Westphal’s memoirs Rommel at first received the news angrily, but soon acknowledged that it had been right. Early on the morning of 27 November he met his divisional commanders at Bardia and ordered them back to the west.

Ed Duda: the link-up with Tobruk

In the absence of the German tanks, Major General Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand Division was advancing west along the Trigh Capuzzo. The New Zealanders did not know how badly things had gone for XXX Corps, and for several days no one warned them that their left flank was exposed; the fact that the Afrika Korps had just driven off to the east proved their salvation. The 4th Brigade took the airfield at Gambut, and the 6th Brigade held Point 175, captured on 23 November. During the night of 25–26 November both brigades attacked the escarpments at Belhamed and Sidi Rezegh, defended by the German Afrika Division and Italian Bersaglieri of the Trieste Division. The fighting went on all night and the following day, and battalions lost several hundred men each, but on 26 November the 6th Brigade retook Sidi Rezegh airfield and the escarpment with the tomb, which the armoured brigades had lost three days earlier.

At the same time Major General Ronald Scobie’s Tobruk garrison pushed out from the corridor it had driven into the Axis positions on 21 November towards the Ed Duda ridge. On the afternoon of 26 November British infantry with tanks of the 32nd Army Tank Brigade captured the ridge. During the night of 26–27 November the New Zealand 19th Battalion, with Matilda tanks, moved from Belhamed to Ed Duda and, according to New Zealand accounts, met soldiers from Tobruk at about one in the morning. More than seven months after the beginning of the siege, the fortress had a land link with the Eighth Army. Units of the garrison were also sent from the perimeter into the corridor, among them, according to Polish accounts, on 26 November, a composite artillery battalion of the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade, which earlier, on the day of the sortie, had made a diversionary attack on the hill of Ras el Medauar. The remaining Polish battalions held the western sector of the perimeter.

Place in the war

The dash to the wire was one of Rommel’s most controversial manoeuvres. Its defenders see it as a bold stroke that very nearly broke the will of the British command: had it not been for Auchinleck, Cunningham would almost certainly have ordered a retreat, and Tobruk might still have fallen. Its critics, among them a number of historians and officers of his own staff, argue that at the moment of victory Rommel scattered the remnants of his tanks across the desert, for several days failed to direct his forces as a whole, and allowed the New Zealanders to do exactly what he was supposed to prevent. The tanks lost in failed attacks at the frontier and under bombing from the air were irreplaceable, and the fuel burned in driving east and back again was fuel that was later lacking at Tobruk.

The battle did not, however, end on 27 November. That day the 15th Panzer Division, returning westwards, overran the headquarters of the 5th New Zealand Brigade at Sidi Azeiz and took several hundred men prisoner, together with its commander, Brigadier James Hargest. In the last days of November the Afrika Korps struck at the New Zealanders at Sidi Rezegh and Belhamed, on 1 December shattered their brigades and once again cut the corridor to Tobruk. The Axis forces were exhausted, however; supplies from Italy – thinned out by ships and aircraft from Malta – were not getting through, and Ritchie’s Eighth Army, rebuilt thanks to its enormous stocks, was still the stronger. In the first days of December Rommel abandoned the siege of Tobruk and withdrew to Gazala, and then to El Agheila. Cunningham never again held a field command, while Ritchie remained at the head of the Eighth Army until the defeat at Gazala in June 1942.