What happened at the Battle of Gazala?
On 26 May 1942 Erwin Rommel attacked the British Eighth Army’s fortified line at Gazala, west of Tobruk, and sent his armour round its southern end at Bir Hacheim. After a crisis in the area called the Cauldron he destroyed the British 150th Brigade, beat off Ritchie’s counter-attack and took Bir Hacheim from the Free French, who broke out on the night of 10 June. After a final tank battle on 12 and 13 June the British fell back, and on 21 June Tobruk surrendered with about 33,000 men.5
Playfair’s official history calls the fall of Tobruk a staggering blow to the British cause, and for South Africa, it adds, it was particularly tragic, since about a third of all her forces in the field went into captivity. For Rommel it was the high point of the African war and brought him a field marshal’s baton. The whole campaign is told in our guide to the North African campaign, and the next battle in the Battle of Mersa Matruh.6
The Gazala line
After Rommel’s winter counter-offensive the two armies faced each other west of Tobruk. The National Army Museum writes that from early February to late May 1942 Rommel was halted by a heavily mined British line running from Gazala on the coast to Bir Hacheim, also spelled Bir Hakeim, in the south. Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, describes a defensive system built up through March, April and early May inside the quadrilateral of Gazala, Tobruk, Bir el Gubi and Bir Hacheim.7
The line was not continuous. It was a chain of fortified brigade positions, or boxes, with minefields between them. The French Ministry of the Armed Forces describes the southern anchor at Bir Hacheim, held from mid-February by the 1st Free French Brigade: an old Italian desert post at a crossing of tracks, about 70 kilometres from the sea, with no natural obstacle around a triangle some sixteen kilometres in perimeter.8
Both sides were preparing to attack. Auchinleck writes that he and his Eighth Army commander, General Neil Ritchie, meant to resume the offensive in mid-June, and that by the middle of May it was evident the enemy thought himself strong enough to strike first.9
Two armies in the desert
Churchill told the House of Commons in July that the armies drew up in the middle of May about 100,000 a side, 100,000 British against 90,000 Axis troops, of whom 50,000 were Germans, and claimed a British superiority of perhaps seven to five in tanks and nearly eight to five in artillery. Rommel recalled that many German and all Italian units were well below strength, the 90th Light Division going into battle with companies of only fifty men.10
Playfair counts the Axis striking force at 332 German and 228 Italian tanks. Of the German tanks only 19 were the new Panzer III Specials with the long 50 mm gun. On the British side he lists 167 Grants, 149 Stuarts and 257 Crusaders in the armoured divisions and reserves, and 166 Valentines and 110 Matildas in the army tank brigades, with another 75 Grants and 70 Stuarts about to join.11
Numbers were not everything. Auchinleck admits that British tanks were on the whole still inferior in quality, despite the new American Grants, and that the new six-pounder anti-tank gun had only just reached the troops. In the air Playfair puts the Axis at 704 aircraft in Libya, 497 of them serviceable, against some 320 in the Desert Air Force, about 190 serviceable.12
Rommel’s plan
Rommel planned a deception and a hook. The Italian infantry would attack the northern half of the line frontally, while lorries and tanks drove in circles behind the front to suggest armour massing there. At night the Afrika Korps, the Italian Ariete and Trieste divisions and the 90th Light Division would swing round Bir Hacheim, drive north to the coast behind the British and then take Tobruk.13
Playfair notes that the Germans gave themselves four days for the whole operation. Auchinleck writes that he had foreseen both courses, a hook round Bir Hacheim or a break through the centre, and meant to destroy the enemy armour east of the minefields with both armoured divisions held centrally. Liddell Hart, editing Rommel’s papers, argues that Ritchie placed the weaker 7th Armoured Division too far south, where it was overrun on the first morning.14
The hook round Bir Hacheim
The Italian diversion began on the afternoon of 26 May, and that night the striking force moved round the south of Bir Hacheim. Early on 27 May it struck north towards Acroma and El Adem.15
The first to be hit was the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade, south-east of Bir Hacheim. The Indian official history describes the Ariete and then about two hundred German tanks rolling over its positions, and by eight o’clock all organised resistance was at an end. It counts 41 officers and 453 men killed and wounded and about 600 prisoners.16
The 4th Armoured Brigade was caught on the move by the 15th Panzer Division, and shortly after ten o’clock German armoured cars overran the advanced headquarters of the 7th Armoured Division and captured its commander, General Frank Messervy, who soon escaped. At Bir Hacheim the French Ministry of the Armed Forces writes that the French threw back the Ariete within an hour, taking 91 prisoners and leaving some thirty tanks on the field.17
By evening Rommel was worried. He wrote that far more than a third of his German tanks had been lost in one day, that the 90th Light Division had become separated from the Afrika Korps, and that British motorised groups were streaming through the gap and hunting down his supply columns.18
Into the Cauldron
For several days Rommel’s armour fought in the area between the minefields and Knightsbridge that the British called the Cauldron. Auchinleck writes that the enemy belatedly cleared ways through the minefields in the centre of the British position and settled down to holding a bridgehead strong in anti-tank guns. On 29 May General Ludwig Crüwell, commanding the Axis infantry in the north, fell into British hands with his Storch aircraft, as Rommel told his wife.19
The gaps lay next to the box of the British 150th Infantry Brigade at Sidi Muftah. Rommel attacked it with infantry, tanks and dive-bombers, and on 1 June the whole position fell. Rommel wrote that he took 3,000 prisoners and destroyed or captured 101 tanks and armoured cars and 124 guns. Auchinleck records the brigade group destroyed.20
The failed counter-attack
Ritchie planned a direct assault on the salient, first for 31 May and then for the night of 4 to 5 June. Auchinleck writes that it had some initial success before enemy tanks and artillery stopped it, that the British armour met strong anti-tank fire and failed to make its presence felt, and that the enemy overwhelmed the forward infantry and destroyed four regiments of field artillery.21
Auchinleck called this unsuccessful counter-stroke probably the turning point of the whole battle, which until then had not been wholly unfavourable to the British. Churchill told the Commons that the attempt of 4 June was repulsed with heavy loss by artillery.22
Bir Hacheim
Rommel then turned on Bir Hacheim. The French Ministry of the Armed Forces counts more than 3,700 men under General Marie-Pierre Koenig, including two battalions of the Foreign Legion, a marine infantry battalion, the Pacific battalion and a battalion from Oubangui, while Playfair gives an original garrison of 3,600. The French rejected three summonses to surrender, on 2, 3 and 5 June.23
Rommel wrote that the battle lasted ten whole days and that “seldom in Africa was I given such a hard-fought struggle”. The French fought from slit trenches, small pillboxes and gun nests surrounded by dense minefields, and his sappers had to clear lanes under fire. He puts the Luftwaffe’s effort at 1,300 sorties against the fort, and Playfair at about 1,400, while the Desert Air Force flew close on 1,500 in its support. Churchill told the Commons that the struggle surged round Bir Hakeim for eight or nine days.24
On 10 June the German assault broke into the main position from the north. Auchinleck writes that Ritchie ordered the post evacuated, and the French Ministry that Koenig ordered a general sortie for the night of 10 to 11 June. The brigade fought its way through the Axis lines to British lorries waiting a few kilometres away. Rommel admitted that his orders for sealing the ring had not been properly carried out at the point of the breakout.25
The figures for the escape differ. Playfair counts about 2,700 brought away, 200 of them wounded, out of 3,600, and the French Ministry about 2,500, with more than a thousand killed, wounded, captured or missing. Rommel says some 500 French prisoners fell into his hands, most of them wounded. On 10 June de Gaulle telegraphed Koenig that all France was watching and that they were its pride.26
The armour is beaten
With Bir Hacheim gone, Rommel turned north. On 12 and 13 June the armoured forces fought round El Adem and Knightsbridge, and Auchinleck calls this the culmination of the armoured fighting and decisive in its results. Afterwards, he writes, the British could muster only about fifty medium and twenty infantry tanks near Acroma, while the enemy probably had twice that number and held the battlefield, where he could recover his damaged tanks.27
On 14 June Ritchie, with Auchinleck’s reluctant agreement, ordered the two divisions still in the Gazala line to withdraw. The 1st South African Division went back along the coast road through Tobruk. The 50th Division, Auchinleck writes, had to withdraw through the enemy and suffered considerably, in what Churchill described as a 120-mile journey round the enemy’s southern flank.28
Tobruk is invested
Auchinleck had made clear that he had no intention of letting his forces be besieged in Tobruk again, as in 1941. He now accepted that it might be temporarily isolated. Ritchie put four infantry brigade groups with their artillery and some infantry tanks into the fortress under Major General Hendrik Klopper of the 2nd South African Division.29
On 17 June the enemy took Sidi Rezegh, the last British armoured brigade lost all but twenty of its tanks, and the troops at Belhamed withdrew. Katz writes that Tobruk was invested on 18 June. He also shows from the Court of Enquiry that the garrison compared well with that of 1941 in tanks, anti-tank guns and artillery, with 23 of the new six-pounders.30
The fall of Tobruk
Early on 20 June Rommel attacked the eastern face of the perimeter after heavy dive-bombing and artillery fire. Auchinleck writes that the infantry tanks of the fortress reserve were defeated in detail early on, and that by evening German tanks had reached the harbour. South African History Online describes Rommel bringing the Afrika Korps against the eastern perimeter under cover of darkness while the garrison believed he had bypassed the town.31
Klopper asked to break out, then found his transport cut off. Ritchie left him to act on his own judgement, and Playfair quotes Klopper’s reply: “Situation shambles. Terrible casualties would result.” At about 9.40 on 21 June, Rommel writes, Klopper met him on the Via Balbia west of the town and announced the capitulation, and the road was lined with about ten thousand prisoners.32
Not everyone obeyed. Playfair writes that the last to surrender were the Gurkha Rifles on the evening of 21 June and the Cameron Highlanders on the morning of 22 June, and the Indian official history describes the 2nd/7th Gurkhas rooted out platoon by platoon. South African History Online names the same units among those who fought on. Major Sainthill of the Coldstream Guards broke out with 199 of his battalion and 188 men of other units.33
Counting the cost
The number of prisoners at Tobruk is uncertain. Playfair lists 19,000 British, 8,960 South African Europeans, 1,760 South African Natives and 2,500 Indian troops, 32,220 in all, or perhaps 33,000. Horn and Katz give about 33,000, of them 12,000 South Africans, and Katz puts the garrison at 34,000. Churchill told the Commons that the garrison had been about 25,000 men, and another member spoke of 30,000.34
The booty was enormous. Playfair writes that about 1,400 tons of fuel, some 2,000 serviceable vehicles and about 5,000 tons of provisions were found. Rommel’s order of the day claimed over 45,000 prisoners for the whole battle, more than 1,000 armoured fighting vehicles and nearly 400 guns destroyed or captured.35
The German casualties since 26 May, reported to the army high command on 24 June, were about 300 officers, 570 non-commissioned officers and 2,490 other ranks, some 15% of their strength, with officer losses up to 70% in the panzer units, Playfair writes. He gives no Italian figure.36
The day after the fall of Tobruk Hitler made Rommel a field marshal. The Neue Deutsche Biographie and the Deutsches Historisches Museum both date the promotion to 22 June, and Rommel’s papers add that he was forty-nine.37
Shock in London and Pretoria
Churchill was in Washington. He told the Commons that on the morning of Sunday 21 June he was greatly shocked to be handed, in the President’s room, a report that Tobruk had fallen. Katz notes that in his memoirs Churchill wrote that defeat is one thing and disgrace another.38
In London a vote of censure on the central direction of the war was moved in the Commons. One member said the country could not stand the holding out of Sebastopol for months and the collapse of Tobruk in 26 hours. On 2 July the House rejected the motion by 475 votes to 25.39
In South Africa the loss was the single biggest defeat in the history of the Union Defence Force, Horn and Katz write. A Court of Enquiry largely absolved Klopper, but many prisoners blamed him, and South African History Online still attributes the fall partly to his poor judgement. Katz, weighing the evidence, asks whether the surrender was an avoidable blunder or an inevitable disaster.40
After Gazala
Auchinleck writes that the precipitate and wholly unexpected collapse of Tobruk denied the British the respite they needed, and that he had to fall back to Mersa Matruh. The National Army Museum notes that Rommel pushed the British back into Egypt. At Mersa Matruh and then at El Alamein the retreat finally stopped.41
The next fights are told in the Battle of Mersa Matruh and the Battle of El Alamein, the first siege of the fortress in the Siege of Tobruk, 1941, and the commander who won here in our biography of Erwin Rommel.42
