On 10 April 1941 the first shots were exchanged on the perimeter of Tobruk, the Libyan port that Australian troops had taken from the Italians only three months before. By the next afternoon German and Italian forces under Erwin Rommel had surrounded it. The garrison, mostly men of the 9th Australian Division, was expected to hold for a few weeks. It held for eight months, supplied by sea under constant air attack, until the siege was lifted in December. The defenders took their nickname from an enemy insult: the Rats of Tobruk.
From victory to retreat
In January 1941 British and Australian troops routed the Italian army in eastern Libya, and the Australian 6th Division captured the fortress of Tobruk on 21 and 22 January. Hitler sent German troops to Tripoli under Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel to prevent an Italian collapse, and the first of them arrived in mid-February.1
At the same time the British sent much of their strength to Greece, and the experienced 6th Division was replaced by the untested 9th Division. Rommel saw that his enemy was overstretched and attacked at the end of March. The British and Australians fell back in confusion across Cyrenaica, and part of the retreating force shut itself up in Tobruk.2
Encircled
According to the Australian War Memorial, the last Australians entered Tobruk shortly before the first shots were exchanged on the perimeter on 10 April, and by the afternoon of 11 April, Good Friday, the town was surrounded. The garrison included more than 14,000 Australians of the 9th Division and the 18th Brigade of the 7th Division, supported by British artillery, a few tanks and an Indian regiment.3
Tobruk mattered because of its harbor, the best natural harbor in North Africa. As long as the Allies held it, the Axis had to haul most of its supplies overland from Tripoli, some 1,500 kilometers away, and could not safely push on into Egypt. Its outer perimeter, the Red Line, ran for more than 45 kilometers and was protected by anti-tank ditches, wire and mines.4
The Easter battle
Rommel expected a quick victory. On the night of Easter Sunday, 13 to 14 April, German machine gunners slipped through the Red Line near Post R33. A small party of the 2/17th Battalion charged them with the bayonet, and Corporal Jack Edmondson, mortally wounded, became the first Australian to win the Victoria Cross in the Second World War. The main German attack came before dawn. Tanks broke through the perimeter but were stopped by artillery and anti-tank guns, while the infantry stayed in their posts and cut down the troops following the tanks.5
Major General Leslie Morshead, who now commanded the fortress, set the tone in a sentence the Memorial quotes: there was to be no surrender and no retreat. Night after night his patrols went out into no man's land, a policy he described as making the besiegers the besieged.6
Rats, Poles and relief
The pro-Nazi broadcaster William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw, mocked the defenders as rats living in holes, and they adopted the name with pride. The harbor was kept open by British and Australian warships, the Tobruk ferry, at a heavy cost in ships. From August most of the Australians were relieved by sea, and their place was taken partly by the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade under General Stanisław Kopański.7
The siege ended in December during Operation Crusader. The Institute of National Remembrance credits the Poles, who took Medauar hill and Acroma on the night of 9 to 10 December and linked up with the Eighth Army. The sources date the end differently: the Memorial's Wartime article gives 7 December, when Rommel abandoned the siege, and its encyclopedia 10 December. The Polish brigade lost 127 killed and 467 wounded in four months. The siege, and the Polish part in it, is told in our article on the siege of Tobruk.8
Also on this day
- 1741: Battle of Mollwitz. At Mollwitz in Silesia, the Prussian army of the young Frederick II fought the Austrians under Wilhelm von Neipperg in the First Silesian War.
