The siege of Tobruk begins

On 10 April 1941 the spearheads of the German Afrika Korps and the Italian divisions, which in two weeks had swept across the whole of Cyrenaica, arrived outside Tobruk. That day Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel announced that the British were collapsing and that his troops’ objective was the Suez Canal, and he ordered that the garrison must not be allowed to escape from the fortress. His momentum, however, was enough only to surround the port. On 11 April the ring closed on the west, south and east, leaving some 36,000 men, mainly Australians and British, behind the lines of the old Italian fortifications under the command of the Australian Major General Leslie Morshead. Over the next three weeks Rommel tried three times to take Tobruk and failed three times. So began a siege that lasted until the end of November 1941 and for many months tied down a considerable part of the Axis forces in North Africa in front of the fortress.

War chronologies spread these events over four dates: on 10 April the Germans encircle Tobruk, beginning the siege; on 14 April Rommel attacks the fortress but has to turn back; further unsuccessful assaults follow on 16 and 30 April; and on 30 April Rommel is ordered to halt his attacks. This account agrees with the sources in its main outlines but needs some refinement. The first Axis units reached the fortress on 10 April, and the ring closed a day later. The first assault began on the evening of 13 April and reached its climax at dawn on 14 April. The attack of 30 April lasted until 4 May, and the ban on further assaults was issued by Generalleutnant Friedrich Paulus, the envoy of the German Army High Command, only after it had failed – on 4 May, according to most studies.

A fortress that was not meant to be

After taking Benghazi on the night of 3–4 April, Rommel’s forces split into several columns and set off across the desert, across the bulge of Cyrenaica, to cut off the British line of retreat. The British army in Cyrenaica fell apart: at Mechili on 8 April the headquarters of the 2nd Armoured Division surrendered with several thousand men, and on the night of 6–7 April General Philip Neame, the commander of the troops in Cyrenaica, and General Richard O’Connor, the victor of Operation Compass, were taken prisoner. The only large formation to emerge from the retreat as an organised force was Morshead’s 9th Australian Division. It fell back along the coast road to Tobruk.

The decision to hold Tobruk was taken in Cairo. On 6 April the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, and the three commanders-in-chief in the Middle East concluded that the enemy had to be stopped as far west as possible, and that Tobruk offered the best opportunity: a port with large stocks, water and a ring of fortifications, without which Rommel’s advance into Egypt would be hampered. The commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, gave assurances that his ships would keep the fortress supplied. On 7 April Winston Churchill cabled that Tobruk seemed a place “to be held to the death without thought of retirement”.

On 8 April the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, flew into Tobruk with Major General John Lavarack, commander of the 7th Australian Division. He gave him temporary command of all the troops in Cyrenaica and set him a task: to hold the enemy at Tobruk in order to gain time to gather reinforcements, especially armour, for the defence of Egypt. According to the British official history, Wavell assumed that the fortress would have to be held for about two months. He had his doubts, since the perimeter was too long for the number of defenders, but he knew that the troops in Tobruk wanted to fight.

The fortress had been built by the Italians, who in January 1941 had lost it to the 6th Australian Division. Its perimeter consisted of a double ring of concrete posts 13–15 kilometres from the port, more than 45 kilometres long in all. Behind them there was no defence in depth, the wire had many gaps and the anti-tank ditch had not been finished. From mid-March the fortifications had been repaired, and a second, inner line of defence had been laid out a few kilometres behind the perimeter. The 9th Australian Division was joined by the 18th Australian Brigade of the 7th Division, brought from Egypt by sea, and the remnants of the British 3rd Armoured Brigade were formed into an improvised unit with several dozen tanks. The fortress had four regiments of 25-pounder guns, two anti-tank regiments and the British 4th Anti-Aircraft Brigade. According to the British official history, a third of the roughly 36,000 men in Tobruk were rear-echelon troops, Libyan refugees and prisoners.

“There’ll be no Dunkirk here”

Morshead, who had inspected Tobruk’s fortifications himself in January, took command of the perimeter defence, and on 14 April, when Lavarack returned to his division in Egypt, he became commander of the entire fortress, answering directly to Wavell. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, he told his officers: “There’ll be no Dunkirk here. There is to be no surrender and no retreat.” Lavarack and Morshead planned an aggressive defence from the outset. Each battalion had on average eight kilometres of front to hold, so enemy penetration at some point was inevitable. The soldiers were told, however, that every breach was to be sealed off and that there would be no withdrawal, either by land or by sea.

Morshead also issued an instruction that was to decide the first battles. If German tanks broke through the perimeter, the infantry were neither to take them on nor to fall back, but to let them pass and deal with the infantry following behind. The tanks were to be stopped in depth by the artillery, the anti-tank guns and the defenders’ own tanks. In Poland, in France and in Cyrenaica the Germans had grown used to the enemy retreating once the front was broken.

The ring closes (10–11 April)

Rommel’s columns arrived outside Tobruk piecemeal, exhausted and out of fuel. On 8 April the commander of the 15th Panzer Division, Generalmajor Heinrich von Prittwitz und Gaffron, reached Africa ahead of his division, which was still being shipped from Italy. Rommel immediately gave him a group made up of reconnaissance and anti-tank units, a machine-gun battalion and a few guns, and ordered him to close the eastern exit from the fortress. On 10 April Prittwitz, who was observing the defenders’ positions in person from the front line, was killed when his car came under fire from Australian infantry, who were also using captured Italian anti-tank guns. The Australian covering brigades, which had held positions in front of the fortifications until 9 April, had by then withdrawn inside the perimeter.

By 11 April the ring was closed, though not as Rommel had planned. In the rush Generalmajor Johannes Streich’s 5th Light Division ended up on the east, the former Prittwitz group, now under Colonel Gerhard von Schwerin, on the south, and the Italian Brescia Division on the west. Rommel was convinced that the ships in the harbour had come to evacuate the garrison and that only stragglers were putting up resistance. On 11 and 12 April the 5th Panzer Regiment probed the defences of the Australian 20th Brigade west of the road to El Adem. The tanks were scattered by artillery fire, and the German infantry who reached the anti-tank ditch were driven back by Australian patrols. Rommel sent part of his forces further east towards the Egyptian frontier, where over the following days his spearheads took Bardia, Fort Capuzzo and Sollum.

On 13 April, Easter Sunday, leaflets fell over Tobruk calling on the garrison to lay down its arms and recalling the fate of the defenders of Mechili.

The Easter battle (13–14 April)

Rommel ordered the 5th Light Division to take Tobruk on the night of 13–14 April. Throughout the day the assembled German vehicles were bombed by British Blenheims of Nos. 45 and 55 Squadrons RAF, which were rearming at airfields inside the fortress. After dark on 13 April Lieutenant Colonel Gustav Ponath’s 8th Machine Gun Battalion, with engineers, tried to seize a bridgehead beyond the anti-tank ditch west of the El Adem road, in the sector of the Australian 2/17th Battalion. In the fight for post R33 Corporal John Edmondson, badly wounded in the neck and stomach, charged with the bayonet at Germans who were closing in on his officer and saved his life. He died of his wounds towards morning and became the first Australian of the war to be awarded the Victoria Cross, posthumously.

The Germans renewed the attack before dawn and won a small bridgehead, through which 38 tanks of the 5th Panzer Regiment passed at first light. They turned north towards the port; one column was to make for Tobruk, the other to swing back west and cut off the “fleeing” garrison. What happened, however, was exactly what Morshead had foreseen. The Australian infantry did not fall back; they let the tanks through and pinned down the German infantry with their fire. The tanks drove straight into the fire of the 25-pounders of the British 1st Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery, firing over open sights at a few hundred metres. They turned back and ran into British cruiser tanks hidden behind a ridge, while anti-tank guns fired on them from the flanks. Under fire from three sides, they withdrew by the same route, losing 16 of their 38 tanks according to the British official history. By midday on 14 April it was all over.

The 8th Machine Gun Battalion lost more than three-quarters of its strength, and Ponath was killed. The defenders took some 250 prisoners and lost 26 killed and 64 wounded, two tanks and one gun. Rommel blamed the commanders of the 5th Light Division for the defeat, but abandoned further attacks from the south. His division began to dig in.

Attacks from the west (16–17 April)

Rommel shifted the weight of his attack to the western sector of the perimeter, below Ras el Medauar, the highest point in the vicinity of the fortress. On 16 April he personally led the Italian Ariete Armoured Division there, reinforced by the 62nd Infantry Regiment of the Trento Motorised Division. The Italian infantry, poorly prepared and worn out by the march across the desert, went into the attack without conviction. When the Australian 2/48th Battalion counter-attacked, 26 officers and 777 men surrendered, according to the British official history. The next morning, 17 April, Ariete tried again. A few of its tanks reached the most forward Australian posts, but the infantry did not follow, and the tanks withdrew, losing five vehicles.

So ended the attempt to take Tobruk on the run. The Axis forces were scattered, surprised and exhausted, and on the stony plateau they could not dig in quickly. Morshead lacked the strength for a major blow, since his first task was to hold the fortress, but he began a campaign of continual harassment. Every night Australian patrols went out into no man’s land, taking prisoners, destroying guns and disrupting minelaying. Morshead repeated that no man’s land was to be “our land”. On 22 April a company of the 2/48th Battalion, with three infantry tanks and a troop of horse artillery, attacked a hill south-west of Ras el Medauar held by the Italian Fabris detachment, destroyed two guns and came back with some 370 prisoners. At the same time a company of the 2/23rd Battalion attacked beyond the Derna road and, at the cost of significant losses, took about a hundred prisoners from the Brescia Division.

A fortress supplied from the sea

Tobruk could hold out only because it had a port and the Royal Navy was prepared to sail to it. The main burden fell on the Inshore Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet: destroyers, sloops, minesweepers, gunboats, armed merchant ships, captured Italian schooners and South African whalers converted into minesweepers. Among the destroyers running to the fortress were Australian ships nicknamed the “Scrap Iron Flotilla” because they were among the oldest in the navy. Ships could not approach Tobruk before dusk and had to leave before dawn, and unloading was done in darkness and in haste. The soldiers called these runs the “Tobruk Ferry”.

According to the British official history, in April the fleet delivered almost 5,000 tons of supplies to Tobruk, including twelve infantry tanks. The port, however, was bombed incessantly by German and Italian dive-bombers, and in April Axis aircraft sank the supply ships Fiona and Chakla, serving with the Royal Navy. The port’s air defence was conducted almost entirely by the artillery: the Hurricane fighters of No. 73 Squadron RAF, based on an airfield inside the fortress, suffered such heavy losses in April that they were withdrawn to Egypt on 25 April. According to figures covering the whole siege, from 11 April to 10 December 1941 ships carried more than 34,000 soldiers and almost 34,000 tons of supplies into the fortress and took out more than 47,000 people, losing 34 vessels sunk and 33 damaged.

German radio propaganda called the defenders “rats” trapped in a hole. The Australians took up the nickname as a badge of honour, and the name “Rats of Tobruk” later stuck to all the soldiers who defended the fortress, the Poles included.

Paulus and the attack on Ras el Medauar (30 April – 4 May)

Rommel’s wilfulness – he had advanced into Cyrenaica against his instructions and reached the Egyptian frontier – was causing growing alarm in Berlin. The army was preparing for war with the Soviet Union. The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, complained in his diary that Rommel sent no clear reports and was squandering his forces. Halder’s deputy, Generalleutnant Friedrich Paulus, the Oberquartiermeister I of the General Staff, was sent to Africa. According to the British official history, Halder noted that he had been chosen as “perhaps the only man with sufficient personal influence to head off this soldier gone stark mad”. He was to assess the situation, find out Rommel’s intentions and make him understand that he could not count on much more help.

Paulus arrived at Rommel’s headquarters on 27 April and found a ready plan for a new assault on Tobruk, set for 30 April. At first he withheld his approval, but after two days, having studied the situation, he sanctioned the attack. General Italo Gariboldi, the Italian Commander-in-Chief in Libya, also agreed. There was no longer any talk of the Suez Canal. This time the blow was to come from the south-west, on both sides of Ras el Medauar, with the 5th Light Division and the newly arrived 15th Panzer Division, which was not yet accustomed to the desert. Italian assault groups were to pass through the breach and roll up the defence on the flanks, while the Germans were to see whether it was possible to push on towards the port.

On the evening of 30 April, after bombing and shelling, the Germans, under cover of dust and darkness, broke in between the posts of the Australian 26th Brigade, held by the 2/23rd and 2/24th Battalions. By about 9.30 p.m. they had a bridgehead, but from then on nothing went their way. Several Australian posts held out all night, and the Italians confused their tasks. On the morning of 1 May, in thick fog, German tanks drove in the wrong direction, ran onto a newly laid minefield between the outer and inner lines of defence and turned back under fire from anti-tank guns. Paulus concluded that the attack had failed. Rommel tried once more to widen the breach along the perimeter, but in the afternoon Morshead threw his armoured reserve against the German tanks and stopped them, losing five tanks. In the evening a counter-attack by the 2/48th Battalion on Ras el Medauar was repulsed, and on the night of 3–4 May a counter-attack by two battalions of the reserve 18th Brigade also failed. In the early hours of 4 May Morshead called it off, so as not to leave his men in the open in daylight.

The Germans and Italians had driven a salient into the perimeter almost five kilometres wide and up to three kilometres deep, and had gained a good observation point. According to the British official history, this cost some 650 German and 500 Italian killed, wounded and missing. Paulus called the result an important success, but forbade any further assaults on the fortress unless the British themselves began to abandon it. The Afrika Korps’s main task was to be holding Cyrenaica regardless of who held Sollum, Bardia or even Tobruk, and a defensive line was to be built in the rear, at Gazala. In his report of 12 May Paulus wrote that the Afrika Korps was in a difficult position and its supply situation highly unsatisfactory: it needed first ammunition, fuel and food, then vehicles, and only after that new units.

Place in the war

Tobruk proved to be the limit of what Rommel’s first offensive could achieve. As long as the fortress held, the Axis forces on the Egyptian frontier had to be supplied by land from Benghazi and Tripoli, hundreds of kilometres away, and most of the German and Italian forces in Cyrenaica had to be kept in front of Tobruk. The Easter battle was one of the first defeats suffered by German armour in the war and showed that a well-organised defence, in which the infantry did not give way to tanks, could stop a German attack. Morshead, nicknamed by his soldiers “Ming the Merciless” after the villain of the Flash Gordon comic strip, became one of the best-known Australian generals.

The siege went on for more than six months. British attempts at relief – Operation Brevity in May and Operation Battleaxe in June – failed, and a disappointed Churchill removed Wavell from the Middle East. In the summer, at the demand of the Australian government, which was worried about the health and strength of its soldiers, they began to be relieved by sea. In August the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade of Brigadier General Stanisław Kopański arrived in Tobruk, followed in September and October by the British 70th Infantry Division of Major General Ronald Scobie, who took over command of the fortress. Morshead left Tobruk on 22 October. The garrison linked up with the advancing troops of the British Eighth Army during Operation Crusader at the end of November, and the siege was finally lifted at the beginning of December 1941. Half a year later, on 21 June 1942, Rommel took Tobruk in a single day’s assault. The defence of 1941 nevertheless remained in the memory of Australians and Poles as one of the most important events of the war in Africa.