Battle of Gazala
The Battle of Gazala lasted less than four weeks, from the 26th of May to the 21st of June 1942, yet it handed Erwin Rommel the greatest victory of his career. A port city fell in a single day. An entire garrison of 33,000 men was captured. And Churchill called it one of the heaviest blows he could recall during the war. How did the British Eighth Army, with more men and more tanks than its opponent, end up in such a catastrophic collapse? The answers lie in the desert west of Tobruk, in a chain of defensive boxes, hidden minefields, and a series of command decisions that unravelled one by one.
After Operation Crusader pushed the Axis forces back to El Agheila in late 1941, the Eighth Army had advanced roughly 800 km and stretched its supply lines to the point of fragility. GHQ in Cairo underestimated Axis strength badly. In January 1942, Auchinleck estimated enemy fighting strength at around 35,000 men; the real figure was closer to 80,000. On the 21st of January, Rommel sent out three armoured columns on what was officially a tactical reconnaissance. Finding only the thinnest of covering forces, he turned the reconnaissance into a full offensive on the spot. He recaptured Benghazi on the 28th of January and Timimi on the 3rd of February. By the 6th of February, Allied forces had fallen back to the very line they would defend for months: from Gazala on the coast, 48 km west of Tobruk, to an old Ottoman fortress at Bir Hakeim 80 km inland to the south.
The Gazala Line was not a continuous fortified wall. It was a series of brigade-sized defensive boxes spaced across the desert, separated by minefields and wire, linked by regular patrols. The Free French Brigade under Marie-Pierre Koenig held the southernmost box at Bir Hakeim, 13 miles south of the 150th Infantry Brigade. The northern end, closest to the coast road, held the greatest concentration of troops. The south was comparatively thin. This asymmetry was deliberate: the planners reasoned that the deeper minefields would make any flanking attack around the south hard to supply. That assumption would be tested sooner than expected.
Behind the main line, several more boxes covered key road junctions and supply routes. The Knightsbridge box sat 19 km south of Acroma. The El Adem box blocked approaches south of Tobruk. Work on two further boxes south-east of Bir Hakeim and at Bir el Gubi did not even begin until the 25th of May, the day before the Axis offensive opened.
At 14:00 on the 26th of May, X Corps and XXI Corps launched an artillery-supported attack on the central Gazala positions. This was the decoy. While that assault drew British attention northward, the bulk of the German armoured force spent the daylight hours making conspicuous movements, then turned south after nightfall in a sweeping flanking arc around the bottom of the Allied line.
In the early hours of the 27th of May, Rommel personally led Panzerarmee Afrika, including the Deutsches Afrika Korps and the 90th Light Afrika Division, around the southern end of the Allied line. The Italian 132nd Armoured Division Ariete was assigned to neutralise Bir Hakeim. The 21st and 15th Panzer Divisions were to swing north behind the entire Eighth Army, destroy the Allied armour, and cut off the infantry on the Gazala line. A kampfgruppe from the 90th Light was to race to El Adem and sever the supply line from Tobruk.
The plan ran into trouble almost immediately. The Ariete Division was held up for about an hour by the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade, dug in roughly 6 km south-east of Bir Hakeim at Rugbet el Atasc. The Indians lost around 440 killed and wounded and about 1,000 prisoners, but the engagement cost the Ariete 23 tanks. Among the prisoners was Admiral Sir Walter Cowan. Further east, the 15th Panzer Division engaged the 4th Armoured Brigade and received a shock: the new American M3 Grant tanks, recently supplied under Lend-Lease, carried 75 mm guns whose range and power the Germans had not anticipated. By noon the Axis armoured units had advanced more than 25 miles north but had been stopped by the 1st Armoured Division in costly fighting.
On the far right of the advance, the 90th Light Division dispersed the forward headquarters of the 7th Armoured Division near Bir Beuid. The divisional commander, Frank Messervy, was captured but pretended to be a batman and escaped. The loss of his command for the following two days was described later as an inexcusable lapse in security.
By the 30th of May, Rommel faced a crisis of his own making. Bir Hakeim had not fallen, the French garrison was holding firm, and the Panzerarmee was trapped between the Allied minefields to its west and the Eighth Army to its north and east. Rommel pulled the Afrika Korps back against the western edge of the minefields and formed a defensive position the British called the Cauldron. Italian engineers worked through the minefield north of Bir Hakeim to open a supply corridor from the west, while the Sidi Muftah box, held by the 150th Infantry Brigade, was surrounded and destroyed after what Rommel himself described as the toughest British resistance imaginable. He personally led panzer grenadiers forward in the attack during the fighting of the 31st of May.
The Eighth Army attempted to finish off the surrounded Panzerarmee in Operation Aberdeen on the 5th of June. The plan required an artillery bombardment to destroy the Axis anti-tank screen, but an error in plotting its position caused the shells to fall too far east. When the 22nd Armoured Brigade advanced, it drove straight into massed anti-tank fire. The 32nd Army Tank Brigade, attacking from the north at dawn, lost fifty of seventy tanks. By early afternoon, Rommel had split his forces and sent the 15th Panzer Division northward against the Knightsbridge box while the Ariete and 21st Panzer drove east toward Bir el Hatmat, dispersing the tactical headquarters of two British divisions and overrunning three Indian infantry battalions together with four artillery regiments whose armoured support had already been driven from the field.
The 1st Free French Brigade held Bir Hakeim under Brigadier Marie-Pierre Koenig for a full ten days after the main Axis flanking move began. On the 27th of May, the IX Tank Battalion of the Ariete Division advanced alone at full speed, stumbled into the French positions, and launched a hasty assault. The attack was costly and failed against the French 75 mm guns and minefields. The fighting record quoted in Rommel's own words admitted that Axis attacks repeatedly bogged down in the excellent French fortifications and that during the first ten days the British had remained remarkably calm elsewhere while the French held on.
On the night of the 1st to the 2nd of June, the 90th Light and Trieste divisions were sent south to renew the assault on Bir Hakeim. Reinforced with an additional kampfgruppe, the Axis attacked again on the 9th of June and overran the defences by the following day. General Ritchie ordered the remaining troops to evacuate under cover of darkness. Moving through gaps in the encircling line and under fire through the night, many of the French soldiers managed to reach a rendezvous point some 8 km to the west, where the 7th Motor Brigade had transport waiting. Of the original garrison of roughly 3,600, about 2,700 troops including 200 wounded escaped. Around 500, many of them wounded, were captured when the 90th Light Division occupied the position on the 11th of June.
On the 11th of June, Rommel pushed the 15th Panzer Division and the 90th Light toward El Adem. By the 12th of June, the Knightsbridge box was coming under sustained pressure. The 29th Indian Infantry Brigade repulsed an attack on the El Adem box that day, but the 2nd and 4th Armoured Brigades to their left were pushed back 6 km by the 15th Panzer Division and were forced to leave their damaged tanks on the battlefield.
On the 13th of June, the 21st Panzer Division advanced against the 22nd Armoured Brigade. The Afrika Korps combined tanks with anti-tank guns and moved on intelligence drawn from Allied radio intercepts. By the end of that single day, the Eighth Army's tank strength had been reduced from around 300 to about seventy. The commanding officer of the Guards Brigade defending Knightsbridge, Thomas Bevan, had been killed the previous day. The box was virtually surrounded by nightfall and was abandoned that night. The 13th of June entered Eighth Army memory as Black Saturday.
On the same day, in the middle of a sandstorm, the 21st Panzer Division attacked Rigel Ridge. A battery of South African anti-tank gunners from the 2nd Field Regiment, Natal Field Artillery, along with a battery of the 11th HAC Regiment RHA, stayed in position and fired until their guns were destroyed, covering the withdrawal of other Allied formations. The last gun was manned by Lieutenant Ashley and a single signaller. About half the gun detachments were killed or wounded. When the battery fell silent, the Axis tanks approached cautiously and took the surviving gunners prisoner.
On the 14th of June, Auchinleck authorised a withdrawal from the Gazala Line. The 1st South African Division managed to retreat along the coast road largely intact. The two remaining brigades of the 50th Northumbrian Division could not use the road and could not go east because of Axis tanks, so they attacked south-west through the lines of the Italian divisions Brescia and Pavia, turned south into the open desert, and eventually worked their way east to safety. By the evening of the 15th of June, the box at Point 650 had been overrun. The boxes at El Adem and Sidi Rezegh were evacuated on the 17th of June, ending any possibility of preventing the encirclement of Tobruk.
In February 1942, commanders in Cairo had agreed that Tobruk should not stand another siege. Auchinleck had told Ritchie he did not intend to hold it at all costs. Yet an immense store of supplies had been accumulated around the port for a planned Allied offensive, and the fortress was garrisoned mainly by the inexperienced troops of the 2nd South African Division under Major-General Hendrik Klopper, along with the 201st Guards Brigade, the 11th Indian Infantry Brigade, and the 32nd Army Tank Brigade.
Panzerarmee Afrika penetrated a weak spot on the eastern defensive perimeter. The port fell within twenty-four hours. The garrison of 33,000 men was captured, many of those on the western perimeter never having been engaged. Over 1,000 vehicles in working order, 5,000 long tons of food, and 1,400 long tons of petrol were taken. It was the largest single capitulation of British Empire forces since the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Churchill later wrote that it was one of the heaviest blows he could recall during the war and that it had damaged the reputation of British arms. A Court of Inquiry later found Klopper largely blameless, ascribing the defeat to failures of the higher command, though the findings were kept secret until after the war.
Hitler promoted Rommel to field marshal after Tobruk, making him the youngest German officer ever to reach that rank. Rommel remarked that he would have preferred another panzer division. Auchinleck dismissed Ritchie on the 25th of June and took personal command of the Eighth Army for the First Battle of El Alamein, where the Axis advance was finally checked. In August, Lieutenant-General William Gott replaced Auchinleck as Eighth Army commander, but Gott was killed when his aircraft was shot down and Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery was appointed in his place.
The human and material cost was staggering. The Eighth Army suffered around 50,000 casualties, including approximately 35,000 prisoners taken at Tobruk. German losses amounted to roughly 3,360, about 15 percent of their force. Italian casualties included 3,000 men, 125 tanks, 44 armoured cars, and 39 guns. By the 1st of July, the Eighth Army was back at El Alamein with just 137 serviceable tanks; another 902 were waiting to be repaired. Nearly 800,000 rounds of artillery ammunition and close to 13 million rounds of small-arms ammunition had been lost, along with seven field artillery regiments and 6,000 lorries.
The historian James Holland, writing in 2017, quoted Rommel's words to a captured British officer: what difference does it make if you have two tanks to my one, when you spread them out and let me smash them in detail? That line, Holland argued, captured the central failure: the Eighth Army had entered the battle with 843 tanks to the Axis 560, and had lost.
The Axis advance into Egypt brought an unintended consequence for their own side. The planned assault on Malta, Operation Herkules, was postponed to support the push toward the Suez Canal. Malta revived as a base for attacks on Axis supply convoys to Libya, a factor that would weigh heavily on every battle the Axis fought at El Alamein.
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Common questions
When was the Battle of Gazala fought?
The Battle of Gazala was fought from the 26th of May to the 21st of June 1942, during the Western Desert Campaign of the Second World War. It took place near the village of Gazala, west of the port of Tobruk in Libya.
Who commanded the opposing forces at the Battle of Gazala?
Panzerarmee Afrika was commanded by Generaloberst Erwin Rommel, with the Deutsches Afrika Korps under Generalleutnant Walter Nehring. The British Eighth Army was commanded by General Neil Ritchie, under the overall authority of General Sir Claude Auchinleck as Commander-in-Chief Middle East.
What was the Gazala Line and how was it defended?
The Gazala Line was a series of brigade-sized defensive boxes stretching from the coast at Gazala, 48 km west of Tobruk, to the old Ottoman fortress at Bir Hakeim 80 km inland to the south. The boxes were separated by minefields and wire and connected by patrols. The Allies had 110,000 men, 843 tanks, and 604 aircraft along the line and in reserve.
Why did the Free French hold Bir Hakeim so long during the Battle of Gazala?
The 1st Free French Brigade under Brigadier Marie-Pierre Koenig defended Bir Hakeim for roughly ten days after the Axis flanking move began, repelling multiple attacks using 75 mm guns and extensive minefields. Rommel's own account acknowledged that Axis attacks repeatedly bogged down in the French fortifications. The position was not overrun until the 10th of June 1942.
How did Tobruk fall during the Battle of Gazala?
Panzerarmee Afrika penetrated a weak spot on the eastern defensive perimeter of Tobruk and took the port within twenty-four hours. The garrison of 33,000 men was captured along with over 1,000 vehicles in working order, 5,000 long tons of food, and 1,400 long tons of petrol. It was the largest capitulation of British Empire forces since the fall of Singapore in February 1942.
What were the casualties at the Battle of Gazala?
The Eighth Army suffered around 50,000 casualties, including approximately 35,000 prisoners taken at Tobruk. German losses were roughly 3,360 men, about 15 percent of their force. Italian casualties included 3,000 men and 125 tanks. It was estimated that there were 1,188 tank casualties on the Allied side across 17 days of fighting.
What happened to Rommel after the Battle of Gazala?
Hitler promoted Rommel to the rank of field marshal following the capture of Tobruk, making him the youngest German officer ever to achieve that rank. Rommel reportedly remarked that he would have preferred another panzer division. The Battle of Gazala is considered the greatest victory of his career.