THE Easter Battle was a severe shock to the Germans, but it was by no means a crippling defeat. The German units involved suffered heavily, but the losses were light in relation to the total Axis strength in Cyrenaica. Because of the speed with which the garrison had snapped off the spearhead of the attack, the bulk of the forces that the enemy had intended to send against the Fortress that Easter Monday had not been brought into action. Tobruk was still in great danger, especially as fresh German and Italian forces were arriving outside the perimeter every day. The garrison, on the other hand, had little chance of being reinforced. In view of the German threat to the frontier and Egypt all Wavell could send immediately was eight new ‘I’ tanks.
Wavell could, however, force Rommel to divert German troops from Tobruk to the frontier. On April 13th they had captured Sollum and Halfaya Pass, but Brigadier Gott’s force, backed by a most effective bombardment from H.M.A.S. Stuart and a British destroyer and gunboat, had stopped them going farther into Egypt. Before Rommel could consolidate his gains, Gott struck back. He had been reinforced by the 22nd Guards Brigade and a few tanks, and on April 15th he sent a mobile column around the enemy’s open desert flank to attack Capuzzo, while other columns went for Halfaya and Sollum. This combination of direct attack and outflanking movement forced the Axis troops from those positions though they held Capuzzo. Five nights later British commandos raided Bardia and caused some damage and great consternation.
Rommel’s reply was to switch a large number of tanks from Tobruk and to consolidate his position on the frontier before he renewed his assault on the garrison. Rommel had two tank regiments in Libya – the 5th and the 8th – each originally with about 150 tanks. After the Easter Battle it seems that the 5th rested and refitted, while one battalion of the 8th Regiment went to the frontier. Its other battalion was evidently still on its way up from Bengazi. The Easter Battle had shown that he would need at least a hundred German tanks, plus a heavy concentration of artillery, if he were to have a chance of breaking through the Tobruk defences. But such a force represented nearly half the tanks he then had in the Tobruk–Sollum area. He could not afford to concentrate so many against Morshead’s garrison until he felt safe from attack on the frontier and had been reinforced by the remaining tanks of the 15th Armoured Division, which were already moving up from Bengazi.
He must have realized too that the next attack on Tobruk would need to be much more carefully prepared. The Germans had obviously been over-confident when they attacked at Easter and had not troubled about such detailed preparations as Mackay’s forces had made the previous January. He had made a deliberate attack, but the Germans had evidently believed that a strong immediate thrust would bring swift success. Mackay had gained the advantage of surprise as to both place and time of attack. Once the bridgehead had been made, the Anglo-Australian forces had not pushed recklessly through the narrow gap and bolted for the town. They had widened it and established secure flanks before attempting deep penetration. They had been supported by thorough artillery bombardment, because they had taken care to locate all enemy batteries and amass the guns and ammunition necessary to silence them. Colonel Pohnhardt, C.O. of the 8th M.G. Battalion, who had led the German attack at Easter, had failed to take these precautions. Moreover, he was so confident that he drove in through the gap behind the tanks in a staff car; it was knocked out by an anti-tank shell and he was killed.
Warned by this set-back, Rommel now prepared for a thorough-going attack on the Fortress. This time there would be no mistake. Meanwhile, his German forces recovered from the Easter Battle and dealt with the threat from the frontier. He left it largely to the Italians to maintain the pressure on Tobruk.
Thwarted in the south, the enemy turned his attention to the western sector of the perimeter, which was being held by Tovell’s 26th Brigade, with the 2/24th Battalion on the right; the 2/48th on the left and the 2/23rd in reserve. Prisoners’ statements and captured diaries suggest that the Germans had intended the Italians to attack in the west on the Easter Monday while they made the main assault from the south. This plan went astray, apparently because the German operation order did not reach the Italian H.Q. in time to be translated and acted upon. There was no attack in the west on the 14th, but next day the Italians tried to make amends.
During the morning of April 15th several hundred infantry approached the 2/48th’s front, but when the 51st Field Regiment began to shell them some fled and others took refuge in a wadi about three-quarters of a mile west of the perimeter. While the gunners encouraged the refugees to lie low, a patrol of 22 men of the 2/48th, led by Lieutenant Claude Jenkins, rounded up an Italian officer and 74 men.
Meanwhile another force – estimated at more than a battalion – had approached the wire farther north where the 2/48th linked up with the 2/24th. Advancing bunched together, they provided a perfect target for the British gunners and later patrols found evidence that the gunners had made the most of their chance. The Italians were held up for about an hour, but then the guns had to stop firing through lack of ammunition; the Italians rallied and came on. Several hundred got through the wire between two posts which were nearly a mile apart, but fire soon pinned them down. Patrols gathered in 111 Italians, and the bodies of 30 victims of mortar fire were found in a nearby wadi next morning.
In spite of these costly rebuffs, the Italians continued to probe the front next day, April 16th, but their attacks were ill-planned and half-hearted, and merely yielded another big bag of prisoners. The day’s round-up began early, when a small patrol from the 2/24th went out along the Derna road and brought six Italian officers and 63 men back for breakfast. A little later Lieutenant A. Wardle and 26 men of the 2/48th found 98 Italians in a wadi a mile outside the perimeter. They shot one and the others surrendered, the day’s biggest haul was yet to come.
Late in the afternoon another patrol reported that an enemy battalion had advanced down the road from Acroma and was deploying for attack a mile and a half west of the perimeter. As the British gunners got on to them, the Italians scattered in confusion. It was then seen that they were being followed, or possibly driven into action, by twelve tanks. The gunners soon dispersed these and put down a barrage behind the Italian infantry to stop them from withdrawing, while three carriers under Lieutenant O. H. Isaksson went out to reconnoitre.
In one carrier was Private R. G. Daniells, who told me later that they were sent merely to ‘see what the Ities were up to’. He said:
As we drove out they put up a few shots, but we kept our Brens and anti-tank rifles spraying them. When we got near they stopped firing. One carrier went round each flank and one ran straight through the middle of them. We fired over their heads; they dropped their rifles and machine guns, waved white handkerchiefs, and put up their hands. As we drove through, they began marching towards our wire, leaving all their gear on the ground. When we got to the back of the mob we turned our carriers and drove the Ities in like sheep. The first of them had just reached the perimeter when some tanks came up behind and had a go at us with H.E. They landed a few in the middle of the prisoners, who bolted inside the wire.
It seems certain that the tanks were German and that the crews were deliberately showing contempt for their allies. They were soon driven off, however, by the 25-pounders. About 570 prisoners were brought in by the carriers and another 150 were rounded up by Lieutenant A. E. Brocksopp and 15 men. The 2/48th’s total for the day was 26 officers and 777 men captured, at a cost of one man killed and one wounded. The prisoners turned out to be almost the entire 1st Battalion of the 62nd Trento Regiment, including their colonel. He was so delighted with his reception and so infuriated at having been fired on by German tanks that he helped Tobruk H.Q. draft a leaflet appealing to other Italians to follow his example.
The leaflet, which was scattered next day over enemy lines by the R.A.F., read:
SOLDIERS OF ITALY!
For you and your companions the day of peace and happiness is close at hand. In all Africa your comrades have given up the battle. In Abyssinia the war is over; the Ambassador from the Duke D’Aosta has already made preliminary peace terms with British G. H. Q.
Yesterday thousands of your countrymen were taken prisoner at Tobruk. It is quite useless to make any further sacrifices of this kind. All Italian soldiers who have been captured by the British have been treated in the finest manner.
So make an end of this before your losses become considerably larger.
The Italians made no general response to this appeal, but the tally of prisoners continued to mount, even though their next attack on April 17th was much better planned. Their objective was an important rise across which the western perimeter defences ran. It was known as Hill 209 or Ras El Medauuar, and was the most valuable feature in this sector. It rose in a gentle slope only a hundred feet above the surrounding desert, but it commanded that for several miles.
The enemy attack opened late in the morning with heavy machine-gun and mortar fire from well-concealed positions, into which small parties of Italians had smuggled themselves during the night. Then enemy artillery plastered Hill 209, and tanks and troop-carrying vehicles appeared from behind another rise, named Carrier Hill, half a mile west of 209.
British artillery shelled them, but about a battalion debussed and moved towards the perimeter led by twelve tanks. Several of these were German, but the rest were Italian mediums and lights. They headed for the positions on 209, held by Lieutenant D. Bryant’s platoon. His story of the action was this:
The tanks came on through the shelling and forced their way over a broken down part of the wire. One Italian ‘light’ blew up on the minefield, and two more were knocked out by our anti-tank rifles before they got very far. The rest continued on and we couldn’t stop them. One party of four or five tanks shot up our sangars on 209 and over-ran the 51st Regiment’s O.P., wounding its C.O. (Colonel Douglas). Then a medium tank went for one of the concrete posts, crashed through the wire and fell into the circular anti-tank ditch. Before the troops could deal with it, the tank reversed and cleared out trailing a coil of concertina wire.
While some weapons were turned against the tanks, others kept the Italian infantry pinned down half a mile outside the wire. When these tanks found they could not subdue the posts and that their infantry could not advance, they withdrew. The remainder had careered on eastwards to the 2/48th’s reserve company position a mile inside. There was no minefield to stop them and they charged through the flimsy barbed wire and over the shallow weapon-pits and trenches, where one man even had the epaulette torn from his shoulder by a tank track.
The troops fired everything they had but only knocked out a single light tank. The rest pushed on another mile until they came to a stone wall the Italians had built as a tank obstacle. By this time the gunners were pasting them heavily; they turned back to the perimeter, but another was disabled on the way out and its crew captured. Under cross-examination these prisoners admitted that they had been sent to capture and hold 209, confident, in spite of the Easter Battle, that once the tanks got through the wire the defending infantry would surrender. Warned by enemy interest in this sector, Morshead had already ordered engineers to lay a minefield two miles long inside the perimeter and parallel with it, half a mile behind Hill 209. Work on this and the Blue Line positions a mile farther in was now intensified.
For the next four days there was a lull in enemy activity except in the air. Formations of up to forty dive-bombers attacked the harbour and ack-ack guns at least once a day. The gunners brought down four on April 19th and hit back so vigorously that eight new ‘I’ tanks were safely unloaded on the 21st. But these were nothing compared with what Rommel gained by the arrival outside Tobruk of the rest of his 15th Armoured Division.
During the lull in ground fighting, the enemy brought up a number of artillery batteries and began building a chain of defensive positions several thousand yards outside the western perimeter extending from north of the Derna road to south of Carrier Hill. Behind this hill Australian patrols discovered a number of field guns, tanks and infantry.
When the Italians originally built the perimeter fortifications they did not take in this hill. That oversight weakened the western defences considerably, for behind it an enemy could mass unobserved for an attack on 209. Unfortunately the garrison had not enough men or weapons to hold Carrier Hill, but Tovell determined to clear the area beyond it, and simultaneously to raid enemy positions astride the Derna road. He wanted to destroy several batteries that were harassing the forward posts and to keep up the ascendancy that the offensive defence of the Easter Battle and subsequent patrol clashes had won. On April 22nd, therefore, the 2/48th and 2/23rd Battalions carried out two bold daylight raids.
The raid on Carrier Hill was made by ninety men of the 2/48th, supported by three ‘I’ tanks of the 7th R.T.R. and with mobile antitank guns and carriers to protect the flanks. The plan was for the tanks and infantry to sweep round Carrier Hill, attack the Italians from the rear, and drive them back to the perimeter. The raid was led by a short, slight, red-headed Adelaide school-teacher, Captain Bill Forbes. His men had already gained useful experience in the patrols that had mopped up so many Italians the week before; this time the prize was bigger.
At dawn on the 22nd, Forbe’s raiding party moved out more than a mile westward, skirting the southern slope of Carrier Hill. Overhead a Lysander cruised about to drown the noise of the tanks. They were intended to lead the infantry but they went so fast that they were soon lost in the morning mist. Forbes did not see them again until the raid was over. This did not worry the Diggers. Forbes led them west of Carrier Hill and then swung north moving along a shallow wadi, while the carriers covered his left flank. One of Forbe’s platoon commanders, Lieutenant D. G. Kimber, describing the raid, said:
The enemy hadn’t spotted us at this stage and his guns were still shelling 209 as we came up behind them. To our left was a transport park, and the carriers dealt with that while we went on. We came over a slight rise, marching spread out in line abreast with Forbes well in front. We were about 500 yards from the Italians when they saw us. As they opened up with mortars, M.Gs and anti-tank guns, Forbes waved to us to keep going. Their fire was heavy but it was all over the place. By coming at them from the rear we’d surprised them and in their panic they shot wildly. Then the carriers came up on our left and drove straight into the Italian positions with every gun going.
Leading them was Sergeant L. W. C. Batty, whose carrier overran one gun-position and went on to deal with another, but was stopped by an anti-tank shell. Batty was wounded, but his gunner, R. G. Daniells, kept nearby Italians quiet. When he was hit, the driver, J. L. Spavin, engaged them until the infantry arrived. To continue Kimber’s account:
We covered the last few hundred yards firing our Brens and rifles from the hip. By the time we were fifty yards from their nearest sangars every Italian was well out of sight and not one weapon was firing on my platoon. In the first sangar I came to there were three Dagoes – with their heads buried in a corner and their tails sticking up in the air. After that it was just a matter of gathering up prisoners and dropping hand grenades in the breeches of the guns we couldn’t move.
They brought back 16 Italian officers and 354 men; a number of anti-tank and machine-guns; several vehicles and motor-bikes. Having been ordered to return within two hours, Forbes could not stay to collect or even complete the destruction of all the booty. Sights and instruments, however, were removed from guns that had to be left and these were soon being used by the hitherto ‘sightless’ Bush Artillery. Primarily because of Forbes’s bold handling of the raid, the Australian casualties were slight – two killed and seven wounded.
The troops who attacked on the Derna road, however, had a harder fight and far heavier casualties. Here the 2/23rd sent out two raiding parties – each of two officers and forty-four other ranks. The enemy held a strong position astride the road, and the plan was for one party to outflank this position north of the road while the other worked round it on the south side. Then both were to turn in towards the road, join forces and roll up the position from the rear.
The northern party under Captain Rupert Rattray advanced at dawn up a wadi that led westward from the perimeter. They struck no opposition in the first mile, but then came under intense machine-gun fire from enemy sangars at the head of the wadi. They moved for cover into a small side wadi on the right, but the enemy immediately searched this with mortar-bombs and shells. Rattray said later:
We couldn’t stay there and we couldn’t attack straight up the main wadi, so we decided to move against them across the top of the plateau. When they saw us come over the skyline, they turned their guns on us, but while one section gave covering fire, the other dashed in with the bayonet, pitching hand grenades ahead of them. As they got to the sangars the Italians brought out white handkerchiefs. We took nineteen prisoners and about as many more were killed by grenades and M.G. fire. Meantime the reserve section had collected another twenty-one prisoners at the head of the side wadi.
We had intended to push southwards from here along the enemy line, but now we were coming under heavy fire from both flanks and the ground ahead was bare and flat. It would have meant throwing away good lives to go on, so we came back with our forty prisoners.
The fight was long and bitter, south of the road, where the Italians had one A.A. anti-tank battery with two batteries of field guns behind it. All were well protected by machine-gun posts. The enemy, however, held his fire until Lieutenant R. W. James and the two leading sections were less than 500 yards away. Then ack-ack guns, mortars and artillery caught James and his men on a forward slope and kept them there. Seeing their acute danger, the patrol leader, Lieutenant J. A. Hutchinson, hurried the other two sections round to take the Italians in the flank and split their fire. He led his troops forward in short rushes, and four carriers came up to support them.
At last his leading troops got near enough to charge and – to quote Hutchinson himself:
The combined effect of the bayonet, grenades and carriers was too much for the Italians. They ran out of their stone sangars with their hands up, and I don’t think they stopped until they reached the perimeter 3000 yards away.
This gave us our first objective – the ack-ack battery. But most of James’s two sections had been either killed or wounded and the rest of us now came under point-blank fire from artillery batteries and infantry 300 yards farther west. These guns were our second objective and, although we now had less than half our original strength, we decided to push on in the hope of linking up with Rattray’s patrol. Working forward along a wadi, we got to within fifty yards of the nearest gun-position. With Lance-Corporal W. Crummey, I made a dash for the gun and the crew abandoned it, but Crummey was hit and fell. A grenade he was holding ready to throw exploded, killing him and wounding me in the leg so badly that I could not move.
Sergeant J. W. Barnard and the ten men Hutchinson had left in the wadi tried to get forward to the next gun-position with supporting fire from four carriers. But Barnard was already badly wounded, two of the carriers were hit and set ablaze and any further advance became impossible in the face of the scorching fire the enemy was putting down. Thinking Hutchinson had been killed, Barnard decided to withdraw protected by his remaining carriers. When they too were hit, the crews dismounted and gave covering fire with their Brens from the ground.1 Withdrawal was not easy. The enemy fire grew more intense and the ground offered no cover to the retiring troops. Nevertheless Bren carriers made several trips from the perimeter forward to pick up wounded. They also brought back captured weapons and Barnard’s party destroyed those they could not take with them.
Of Hutchinson’s patrol 80 per cent had become casualties by the time they reached the perimeter after a 4-hour fight. The losses for the two parties were – one killed, twenty-three missing (most of them in fact killed), twenty-two wounded. But even though it was costly and had not succeeded in cleaning up the entire enemy position, the raid was justly described by Morshead as ‘an epic worthy of the finest traditions of the A.I.F.’. Eighty-seven prisoners had been taken and as many more killed or wounded. One prisoner, captured later, stated that out of his company of more than a hundred only ten were left after the battle. Shaken by the strength and daring of the Australian attack, the enemy at once reinforced the Derna road positions.
Two days after this the Italians made a belated attempt to restore their confidence. At dawn Kimber’s platoon on Hill 209 came under fire from a force that had established itself in the wire between two perimeter posts. According to Kimber, there was a fierce machine-gun duel for about a quarter of an hour; ‘then their white flags came up; we sent out a patrol, gathered in 107 Italians and buried nearly 40.’ Later that morning German infantry appeared on the western sector for the first time. Machine-gun fire stopped them 300 yards from the wire and a 2/48th patrol chased them back. Several were killed and seven captured. One of these was an officer, who knew enough English to proclaim with vehemence, ‘–––Hitler!’
This brought the total of prisoners captured on the 26th Brigade’s front in ten days to more than 1700.2 But so many were a decided embarrassment to the garrison, whose water ration at this time was half a gallon per man per day – eight cupfuls for all purposes. Nevertheless these patrol successes were encouraging. They gave the troops experience and confidence, and delayed the enemy preparations for attack. Lest success should make them over-confident, however, Morshead warned all units to ‘remember that continued vigilance is necessary and that most of our patrol successes have been against the Italians’.
Behind this slightly comic facade provided by Il Duce’s heroes, Rommel had been preparing for an all-out attack. Reconnaissance aircraft reported continuous movement along the road from Derna and heavy concentrations of enemy tanks, guns and vehicles around Acroma, five miles west of Hill 209.
The R.A.F., operating from bases inside Egypt, did its best to hinder enemy preparations by bombing and strafing. Although few aircraft were available these raids caused the Germans some concern, as is shown by these extracts from Schorm’s diary. For April 16th he wrote: ‘The airmen get on our nerves. Ten raids or more a day. No A.A., no fighter planes to meet them. We remain on the alert. At night two raids.’ For April 17th: ‘The day begins with the usual bombing and shelling. . . . No German troops up to the present have had such a drubbing as we.’
By this time Schorm, who had already fought through the campaigns in Poland and Western Europe, had changed his ideas about the nature of war. In his diary for the 16th he wrote:
The war in Africa is quite different from the war in Europe. It is absolutely individual. Here there are not masses of men and material. Nobody and nothing can be concealed. Whether in battle between opposing land forces or between those of the air or between both it is the same sort of fight, face to face; each side thrusts and counter-thrusts. If the struggle were not so brutal, so entirely without rules, one would be inclined to think of the romantic idea of a knight’s tourney.
Meanwhile Rommel’s preparations went on, and in anticipation for a new assault Morshead’s troops worked day and night to strengthen the defences. By the end of the month captured weapons had been liberally issued to the forward posts; existing minefields had been strengthened and new ones laid; gun-positions had been camouflaged and stocked with ample reserve ammunition; new signal lines and reconditioned Italian phones had given forward posts the means of communication they had lacked. Telegraph poles, which lined the four main Tobruk roads providing prominent finger-posts on a featureless horizon, were cut down so that if enemy tanks should break through they could not be guided by them. The garrison had eight new ‘I’ tanks, but this gain was more than cancelled out by the unavoidable withdrawal on April 26th of the remaining R.A.F. fighters.
In the previous three weeks No. 73 Squadron had lost twenty-seven of its thirty-two Hurricanes, and it would have been suicidal to leave the remaining five in Tobruk. At this time the total British fighter strength in the Western Desert – from Tobruk to Alexandria – was thirteen Hurricanes! All available fighters had been sent to Greece in a desperate attempt to check the German attacks on the roads along which the British and Anzac forces were now fighting their bitter rearguard action. No reinforcements for Libya could be quickly obtained. In a last-minute effort to get Hurricanes from Britain several attempts were made to fly them out, using Gibraltar and Malta as intermediate stopping places. This proved costly. Some lost their way; some were shot down; some crashed in the sea when they ran out of petrol. I was at a fighter drome in the desert in May, when one group of these fighters came in, and pilots told me that of thirty-two that had left Britain only fifteen reached the desert. Because of this critical shortage of fighters, the Germans had complete air supremacy over Tobruk and the frontier from mid-April to mid-May, and British air strength in the Western Desert then was lower than it had been at any time during the war.
While they were in Tobruk, No. 73 Squadron, led by Squadron-Leader Peter Wykeham Barnes, fought an almost continuous battle at odds of anything up to ten to one. They seldom had half a dozen aircraft serviceable, and against this handful of Hurricanes the Germans could send as many as thirty ME 109s at any time. From any one of six airfields within twenty-five miles of Tobruk they could launch attacks almost before the Hurricanes were off the ground, and there were never enough British planes to maintain a standing patrol.
The pilots were in action several times a day. As soon as a plane landed, ground personnel refuelled and rearmed it and another pilot took it over. Pilots were shot down, bailed out, and went up to fight again next day. Wykeham Barnes was brought down twice. The second time he landed outside the perimeter but managed to get back safely. Because of their superior numbers the Germans were able to continue fighting until the Hurricanes were out of ammunition and almost out of petrol. Then, as the British pilots made a last-minute dash for the Tobruk drome, German fighters would follow them in for the kill as they landed. They were equally in danger when taking off.
In their final battles, however, they took heavy toll of the enemy. On April 23rd they destroyed four German planes for the loss of two. Next day three Hurricanes brought down eight Germans before they were inevitably overwhelmed. Although the fighters were then withdrawn the R.A.F. maintained, throughout most of the siege, one or two Hurricanes inside Tobruk by housing them in underground hangars. The pilots made daily reconnaissance of enemy positions and brought back valuable information, even though they could stay only long enough for a ‘quick look’.
Having driven out the Hurricanes, the Luftwaffe was able to turn its full fury against the anti-aircraft guns and in the last four days of April its attacks reached a new intensity. On the 27th more than fifty dive-bombers concentrated on the town and the main A.A. positions. Four of the sixteen heavy guns attacked were damaged, but none was knocked out. The gunners found that if they fought the Stukas all the way down, they were comparatively safe.3
Next day the harbour and the ack-ack guns were dive-bombed by nine planes in the morning and thirty-five in the afternoon, and another heavy raid was made on the field gun-positions near Pilastrino that evening. On the 29th the sky throbbed with enemy planes almost all day. They concentrated most of their fury on the forward posts near Hill 209 and on the gun-positions west of Pilastrino. In five raids more than 150 aircraft blitzed these areas, while Stukas bombed the harbour again and sank a small merchantman laden with outgoing mail.
In spite of the ferocity of these attacks the ack-ack gunners fought staunchly back. In the last three weeks of April, 677 aircraft took part in 52 raids on the harbour and ack-ack defences, and several hundred more attacked the field guns and perimeter posts. But the guns were never silenced and by the end of the month, in addition to some 30 planes brought down by the R.A.F., the ack-ack had certainly destroyed 37, probably destroyed 16, and damaged 43. Disregarding this evidence of the gunners’ invincible spirit and good shooting, Rommel apparently considered that by April 30th the garrison had been softened up enough for him to attack again.
For the Germans this was the time to strike. The British and Anzac Expeditionary Force had been unceremoniously driven from Greece. Admittedly most of the troops had escaped, but they had lost all weapons except their personal arms. The survivors were either stranded in Crete or back in Egypt somewhat disorganized. The tanks and aircraft, which might have given the British effective striking power in the Western Desert, had all been lost in Greece, where the Germans were now mounting forces for another major thrust.
By April 26th Rommel had re-established himself on the frontier by re-capturing Sollum and Halfaya, from which he could effectively check any British diversion designed to help Tobruk. He could now give undivided attention to crushing its ‘impudent’ resistance. He could employ twice the tanks and aircraft he had used on April 14th; he now had two German armoured divisions instead of one, and three Italian divisions as well. R.A.F. reconnaissance planes brought back daily reports of greater and still greater German concentrations around Acroma. It was clear that Tobruk’s hour had come. On one of the last days of the month, an enemy plane was shot down over the Fortress; in it was a map marked with a red arrow, which ran from Acroma through Hill 209 to the very heart of Tobruk.
_____________
1 After Barnard’s party had withdrawn Hutchinson tried to hobble back, but was taken prisoner. Nearly a year later, however, he was released in an exchange of prisoners of war.
2 During eighteen days in the line at this time, the 2/48th Battalion alone captured 1375 prisoners, for the loss of 15 men killed and 20 wounded.
3 See Chapter 18.