Rommel's second offensive

At 8.30 a.m. on 21 January 1942 the German-Italian Panzer Group Africa of General der Panzertruppe Erwin Rommel went over to the attack from its positions near Mersa Brega, at the head of the Gulf of Sirte. Only three weeks earlier the Axis forces had been completing their retreat across the whole of Cyrenaica, and the British command in Cairo was convinced that the enemy would be incapable of an offensive for many weeks. Rommel planned the blow in secret from his own superiors: he informed neither the Italian nor the German high command. It was meant to be an attack with a limited objective, intended to destroy the forward British units, but within two days it had turned into a pursuit. On 22 January the Germans took Agedabia; on 23 January, at Antelat and Saunnu, they shattered an armoured brigade of the newly arrived British 1st Armoured Division; and on 25 January, in a further thrust, they drove its remnants back beyond Msus, the main supply centre of the British forces in western Cyrenaica. A few days later Rommel stood before Benghazi.

Two dates

Popular chronologies record under 6 January that the British advance pressed on to El Agheila, “on the western edge of Libya”, and under 21 January that the Afrika Korps launched a surprise counter-attack at El Agheila and that its troops, strengthened by fresh reinforcements and tanks, captured Agedabia and advanced north to Beda Fomm. Both statements concern a single operation, and each needs to be made more precise. El Agheila (Al-Uqaylah) lies not on the western edge of Libya but on the western edge of Cyrenaica, on the border with Tripolitania, several hundred kilometres east of Tripoli and far from the Tunisian frontier. Nor did the British take it in January. On 6 January, under cover of a sandstorm that lasted all day, the last Axis rearguards, which had been falling back since 1 January, left Agedabia. They were followed only by small British columns, which within a week established that the enemy had dug in on a line running from Mersa Brega on the coast into the desert. El Agheila remained behind that line, in Axis hands.

The attack of 21 January thus did not start from El Agheila itself but from the positions near Mersa Brega, several dozen kilometres farther east, and it was conducted not by the Afrika Korps alone but by the whole Panzer Group, including an Italian motorised corps. Agedabia fell on 22 January. From there the main thrust went not north along the coast but north-east, through Antelat and Saunnu towards Msus. Beda Fomm, where in February 1941 the British had cut off the fleeing Italian army, lies on the coast road between Agedabia and Benghazi. The Axis forces took that stretch of road in the last days of January, and on 28 January the German 90th Light Division set off from there towards Benghazi.

The British at the end of their tether

After Operation Crusader, which brought the relief of Tobruk and Rommel’s retreat from Gazala, the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, intended to push on into Tripolitania. The plan was code-named Acrobat and – together with the Allied landing in French North Africa considered at the Arcadia Conference – was to drive the Axis from the whole coast. Supply stood in the way. The Eighth Army under General Neil Ritchie had advanced more than eight hundred kilometres from the Egyptian frontier. According to the British official history, at the beginning of January XIII Corps needed some 1,400 tons of supplies a day, while about 1,150 tons reached Tobruk by sea and by lorry. The wrecked port of Benghazi received its first convoy only on 7 January, and German aircraft were mining its entrance. There was no question of building up stocks, and the offensive could not begin before the end of February.

So little was left in the front line. The experienced 7th Armoured Division was withdrawn to rest, and its place was taken by the 1st Armoured Division, which had arrived from Britain in the autumn and had never fought in the desert. Its commander, Major General Herbert Lumsden, had been wounded in an air raid, so it was temporarily commanded by Major General Frank Messervy, until then commander of the 4th Indian Division, which passed to Major General Francis Tuker. On the thirty-kilometre front from Mersa Brega to Wadi Faregh stood only the 200th Guards Brigade and the 1st Support Group, split into small columns of infantry and artillery. The Support Group had relieved its predecessor only on 19 January and did not know the ground. The division’s only armoured brigade, the 2nd Armoured Brigade, was training near Antelat, some hundred and fifty kilometres to the rear. It had about 150 tanks in its three regiments, but after the march from Egypt it lacked fuel even for training. The 4th Indian Division had one brigade in Benghazi and another at Barce (Al Marj), while the third was resting in Tobruk.

Auchinleck and his commanders believed that the enemy was exhausted. They underestimated, however, the strength he had left. According to some accounts, in his January appreciation Auchinleck put the Axis fighting strength at about 35,000 men, when there were more than twice as many in Libya. The British official history admits bluntly that, after the experience of the spring of 1941, when Rommel had started from El Agheila in his first offensive, the British had once again deployed in a way that invited attack without having the strength to repel it.

The tank convoy

Rommel’s situation changed at the turn of the year. From December the German II Air Corps of General Bruno Loerzer was being transferred from the Eastern Front to Sicily, under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring as German Commander-in-Chief South. Its task was to neutralise Malta, from which British ships and aircraft had sunk most of the vessels sailing to Libya during the autumn. At the turn of December and January, according to British estimates, more than four hundred aircraft were operating over the island, and raids on Malta’s airfields put them out of action one after another. After losing a cruiser and a destroyer on mines off Tripoli in December, Malta’s Force K could now muster only one cruiser and three destroyers.

In these conditions the Italian fleet ran through a convoy designated M43. Six merchant ships were escorted by four battleships, six cruisers and twenty-four destroyers and torpedo boats – in practice the whole Regia Marina. On 5 January the convoy entered Tripoli without loss. According to the British official history, it landed 54 tanks (Rommel’s own notes give 55), 19 armoured cars, 42 guns, ammunition, fuel and stores. The editor of Rommel’s papers noted that this was “as good as a battle won”. The deliveries began reaching the front on 14 January, and by 17 January the Germans had 84 tanks in the front line and the Italians 89. On 20 January Rommel became the first soldier of the army (and the sixth in the whole Wehrmacht) to receive the Swords to the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves.

A decision taken in secret

The idea of attacking did not come from Rommel himself. At a staff conference on 12 January his intelligence officer, Major Friedrich von Mellenthin, assessed that for the next two weeks the Axis forces would be somewhat stronger than the British directly facing them, after which the advantage would pass to the other side. The head of the operations section, Colonel Siegfried Westphal, proposed a pre-emptive strike against the scattered British units near Agedabia. Rommel hesitated at first but eventually agreed. German radio intercepts confirmed that the British were having supply difficulties and were not ready to fight.

The order of 18 January was modest: the Afrika Korps was to advance in the south, along Wadi Faregh, the Italian XX Motorised Corps in the centre, and an improvised battle group under Colonel Werner Marcks – two motorised infantry battalions with artillery – along the coast road. Within the army the preparations were explained as a precaution against a British attack. Rommel described his conduct in his diary: he had kept the Panzer Group’s intended attack eastwards from Mersa Brega secret and had informed neither the Italian nor the German high command; experience had taught them that Italian headquarters could keep nothing to themselves and that everything they radioed to Rome reached British ears. He had the order posted in the roadmen’s houses, the cantonieri, throughout Tripolitania only on 21 January. That was how his formal superior, the Italian Commander-in-Chief in Libya, General Ettore Bastico, learned of the attack; he was furious and reported it to Rome. According to the British official history, Bastico had earlier agreed to a limited spoiling raid and became alarmed only when the raid began to turn into an offensive. On the morning of 21 January Rommel wrote to his wife that, after carefully weighing the pros and cons, he had decided to take the risk.

21–22 January: Agedabia

The weather favoured the attackers. Sandstorms concealed the preparations, and on the night before the attack downpours turned the airfield at Antelat, where nine British fighter squadrons were based, into a bog. In the morning the aircraft were moved with difficulty to the airfields at Msus and Gazala, but in doing so they lost range. The British columns fell back along prescribed routes, inflicting losses on the enemy. The 1st Support Group fared worst: in soft sand and under dive-bomber attack it lost sixteen field guns that day, some of them abandoned when their tractors stuck fast in the dunes. Some of the veterans of the German 15th Panzer Division also got stuck in the dunes. By evening the Axis front had moved forward a dozen or so kilometres.

On the morning of 22 January the Marcks group advanced along the road and, despite fire from the Guards’ battery, entered Agedabia at 11 a.m. Rommel immediately saw his chance: he ordered a “net” to be stretched from Agedabia through Antelat to Saunnu and then a strike south-eastwards against the British units cut off from their supplies. By evening the airfield at Antelat was under artillery fire, and the last aircraft took off from a narrow strip onto which mechanics had to push them by hand. That day the Panzer Group was renamed Panzer Army Africa (Panzerarmee Afrika). According to the British official history, it then had at the front some 12,500 Germans and 25,000 Italians, in three German and seven Italian divisions, all of them well below strength.

Ritchie, who returned from Cairo in the afternoon, judged that Rommel merely wanted to gain some elbow room in front of the defile at El Agheila and would not be able to hold anything east of Agedabia beyond a strong reconnaissance force. He even hoped for a “God-sent opportunity” to hit the enemy when he “stuck his neck out”. The commander of XIII Corps, Lieutenant General Alfred Reade Godwin-Austen, was more cautious: he ordered Messervy to block the roads to Msus and the 4th Indian Division to prepare for a possible evacuation of Benghazi.

23 January: Antelat and Saunnu

On 23 January the two sides wanted different things: the British to withdraw the 1st Armoured Division northwards, and Rommel to catch as many of its units as possible in his net. At about 10 a.m. the 9th Lancers of the 2nd Armoured Brigade ran into the German 21st Panzer Division, and at midday the 10th Hussars engaged further elements of it. Both regiments covered the withdrawal of divisional headquarters and the other units, paying a high price. Towards evening the 21st Panzer Division and the British lancers met near Saunnu; a South African field battery, firing at close range, was overrun, but not before it had knocked out several tanks. The gunners supporting the Hussars likewise fought their guns to the end. By evening the 9th Lancers had 28 tanks and the 10th Hussars eight. According to German figures, the 21st Panzer Division lost half of its twenty tanks that day.

The net, however, did not close tightly. The Marcks group left Saunnu early in the morning, and the order for the 21st Panzer Division to take its place was badly transmitted. The 15th Panzer Division did not come to its neighbour’s aid, because it had not received permission from Afrika Korps headquarters. Most of the British units escaped to the north-east. Sources differ on the losses of the 1st Armoured Division. According to a footnote in the post-war edition of Rommel’s papers, it lost 70 of its 150 tanks in the first clash and more than half of the rest on the way to Msus. A German account published in the same edition speaks of as many as 117 tanks and armoured cars destroyed or captured at Antelat and Saunnu and a further 98 in the pursuit to Msus. The British official history gives far lower losses for the whole operation up to 6 February: 42 tanks destroyed and 30 damaged or abandoned through breakdown.

Cavallero at Rommel’s headquarters

On the same 23 January the Chief of the Italian General Staff, General Ugo Cavallero, summoned by the alarmed Bastico, flew to Rommel’s headquarters. He was accompanied by Kesselring. Cavallero brought a directive from Mussolini: in view of British superiority at sea and in the air there was no prospect of rapid reinforcements for Africa, and the Axis forces were to hold the line from Mersa Brega to the oasis of Marada, pushing only mobile units forward of it for limited raids. According to Rommel’s diary, Cavallero said that it should be only a raid, after which he was to come back. Rommel replied that he would go on hitting the enemy as long as his troops and supplies allowed, and that only the Führer could change that decision, since it was mainly German troops who were doing the fighting. Kesselring tried to support the Italian, but to no avail. Cavallero, as Rommel noted, “went off grumbling”. He took his revenge by holding back part of the Italian XX Corps in the area of Mersa Brega and Agedabia, beyond the reach of Rommel’s orders. The dispute was one more clash within a coalition in which the Italians were formally in command but Rommel in fact made the decisions – just as in December, when Rommel had ordered the retreat across Cyrenaica against the wishes of Cavallero and Bastico.

24–25 January: Msus

24 January was a day of waiting. Rommel, poorly informed about the results of the previous day, had the desert south-east of Agedabia combed once more, losing time and fuel. On the British side Godwin-Austen reported to Ritchie that the enemy’s striking power had been underestimated and that the armoured division could not both defend the road to Msus and cover the open flank. He asked for freedom to withdraw towards Mechili. Ritchie replied that Rommel must be at the end of his strength and that XIII Corps was to stand at Msus and cover Benghazi, but he authorised a withdrawal if necessary and ordered the evacuation of the depots and demolition plans to be prepared.

On 25 January the whole Afrika Korps struck north. The war diary of the 15th Panzer Division recorded that its panzer regiment had “burst into the enemy at breathtaking speed and thrown him into complete confusion”. The 1st Armoured Division fell back in disorder towards Charruba, and the Germans captured Msus with large stocks of supplies. There Rommel halted the pursuit, because he was running out of fuel. He judged that the spoiling attack had succeeded and that the British would not resume their offensive for a long time. “Four days of complete success behind us,” he wrote to his wife that day.

In the evening Godwin-Austen, making use of the latitude he had been given, ordered the 4th Indian Division to leave Benghazi and the 1st Armoured Division to withdraw to Mechili. That same afternoon, however, Auchinleck and the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Middle East, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, flew to Ritchie’s headquarters. They concluded that the thrust on Msus was the exploitation of an unexpected success and that there was still time to repel it. Before midnight Ritchie countermanded the withdrawal. The most offensive action possible was to be taken, and the greatest risks accepted, he wrote in his order. Godwin-Austen formally protested, convinced that the 1st Armoured Division had little more than forty tanks. Ritchie then took the 4th Indian Division under his direct command, bypassing the corps commander. The next day Messervy reported 41 serviceable tanks and 40 field guns.

Place in the war

The thrust that Rommel had begun as a raid changed the situation in North Africa within five days. The British official history judges that the Eighth Army had overestimated its capabilities: it could barely maintain itself where it stood, and the command in Cairo had gambled everything and lost. Rommel’s success, however, was also the fruit of decisions taken far from the desert. II Air Corps in Sicily and the Italian battleship-escorted convoys reversed the supply balance, while the Japanese onslaught in Asia drew reinforcements away from Auchinleck: after the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse and the defeats in Malaya, aircraft, ships and units intended for the Middle East were diverted to the Far East, and at the beginning of 1942 the Australian divisions began to be withdrawn home.

The dispute between Godwin-Austen and Ritchie, Rommel’s exchange with Cavallero and Rommel’s decision to press on in defiance of Rome determined the next act: on 28 and 29 January Rommel, feinting towards Mechili, recaptured Benghazi, and by 6 February the Eighth Army had withdrawn to the line from Gazala to Bir Hakeim, west of Tobruk. There the front came to a halt for almost four months. On 26 May 1942 Rommel launched from there the Battle of Gazala, which brought him Tobruk and the road to Egypt. Plan Acrobat collapsed, and the January defeat of the 1st Armoured Division shook British tank crews’ confidence in their own equipment and commanders.