Operation Sonnenblume

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Sonnenblume, which translates to Operation Sunflower, began in February 1941 with a question no British commander had seriously asked: what if the Germans moved before anyone expected them to?

  The Italian 10th Army had just been shattered. From December 1940 to February 1941, the British Western Desert Force, fielding roughly 30,000 men, had routed a force of about 150,000 Italian and Libyan troops, capturing 138,000 prisoners, hundreds of tanks, and more than a thousand guns and aircraft, while suffering only 1,900 casualties. It was one of the most lopsided victories in the desert war.

  With Libya's eastern province of Cyrenaica seemingly secured, the British War Cabinet made a fateful decision: strip the force holding it to a minimum and send the best units to Greece. What followed would become, in the words of the British official historian writing in 1956, a triumph for Rommel, an operational success that undid months of hard-won British gains in a matter of days.

  How did a small blocking detachment, ordered only to defend Tripoli, end up driving British and Commonwealth forces all the way back to the Egyptian frontier? And why, despite signals intelligence from the Enigma machine pointing directly at the threat, did British commanders refuse to believe it was coming?

• 2. A Desert Stripped Bare

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  By February 1941, the British position in Cyrenaica looked solid on paper but was hollow in practice. The 6th Australian Division was up to strength, but the vehicles of the 7th Armoured Division were worn out from Operation Compass. Two armoured regiments had also been worn out in the later stages of that campaign. The divisional commander had died suddenly and been replaced by Major-General Michael Gambier-Parry.

  The most experienced, best-trained, and best-equipped units were diverted to Greece in Operation Lustre in March and April 1941. The 2nd New Zealand Division had only two brigades available. The 7th Australian Division and the 9th Australian Division were poorly equipped and still training. A Polish Brigade Group was short of equipment.

  The 3rd Armoured Brigade, left to hold the desert flank, was a brigade in name only. By the time fighting began, it had been reduced to 12 cruiser tanks, 20 light tanks, and 20 captured Italian tanks. When Lieutenant-General Philip Neame took over Cyrenaica Command in February, he predicted that many of the tanks would break down as soon as they moved. He also discovered that his headquarters had to rely on the local telephone system, staffed by Italian operators.

  The supply situation compounded everything. Lack of transport made it impossible to supply a garrison west of El Agheila, the most favorable position for a defensive line. The 2nd Armoured Division was restricted to movement between supply dumps, reducing its already limited mobility. Neame asked for a proper armoured division, two infantry divisions, and adequate air support. Wavell replied that there was little to send and nothing before April.

• 3. Rommel Arrives

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  Generalmajor Erwin Rommel arrived in Libya on the 12th of February 1941, promoted to Generalleutnant and appointed to command the new Deutsches Afrikakorps. His orders from Generalfeldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch were to defend Tripoli and Tripolitania, albeit using aggressive tactics. That last clause was the one that would matter.

  The first units of the DAK had arrived at the Libyan port of Tripoli on the 14th of February, among them Aufklarungsbataillon 3 and Panzerjagerabteilung 39 from the 5th Light Afrika Division. These advance units were sent immediately to the front line east of Sirte. The first German troops reached Sirte on the 15th of February. By the 18th they had advanced to Nofilia. On the 24th of February, a German raiding party ambushed a British patrol near El Agheila.

  Panzer Regiment 5 of the 5th Light Afrika Division arrived in North Africa in two convoys from the 8th to the 10th of March. The regiment brought 155 tanks, including Panzer I, II, III, and IV models, along with command vehicles. The tanks were still painted dark grey in the RAL 7021 dunkelgrau color and carried the 3rd Panzer Division emblem of an inverted Y with two strikes. They had been modified after the Battle of France, with extra armor plates bolted on, better engine cooling through faster radiator fans, and holes cut in engine hatch covers to manage the desert heat.

  The OKW had intended Sonnenblume to stabilize the situation, nothing more. On a visit to Berlin, Rommel was told not to expect reinforcements even after a limited advance from Tripoli, 270 miles along the Gulf of Sirte to Sirte and then another 92 miles on to Nofilia. The gap between those orders and what Rommel actually did is where the story of Sonnenblume takes its decisive turn.

• 4. The Axis Advance

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  On the 24th of March, Rommel moved against the British 3rd Armoured Brigade south-east of Mersa Brega, where the 2nd Support Group held an 8-mile front. The Australians were 150 miles to the north, minus a brigade left at Tobruk, deficient in equipment and out of contact with the 2nd Armoured Division.

  The Axis captured El Agheila that same day. On the 31st of March, they attacked Mersa Brega. The understrength 3rd Armoured Brigade failed to counter-attack and began retreating toward Benghazi the next day. As the brigade moved, its worn-out tanks began to break down exactly as Neame had predicted.

  On the 1st of April, Rommel sent two columns to capture Mersa Brega. Panzer Regiment 5, Machine-Gun Battalion 8, Reconnaissance Unit 3, and anti-tank guns advanced along the Via Balbia while Machine-Gun Battalion 2 made an outflanking move through the desert to the south. The British withdrew, and Rommel began splitting his forces into small columns to harry the retreat.

  By the 3rd of April, air reconnaissance revealed the British were still retiring. Rommel ordered Reconnaissance Unit 3 toward Benghazi, and during the evening pushed them further on toward Mechili. He formed arriving units into columns, sending Group Schwerin to Tmimi and Gruppe Fabris, composed of motorcyclists and Ariete divisional artillery, toward Mechili. General Streich of the 5th Light Afrika Division was ordered directly on to Tobruk. The advance was faster than Rommel's supply lines could comfortably support. Group Schwerin ran out of fuel and stranded near Ben Gania by late on the 4th of April, with Italian contingents trailing behind.

• 5. Mechili and the Captures

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  By the 6th of April, the Ariete Division had reached Mechili. Gambier-Parry held the position with the 2nd Armoured Division headquarters, most of the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade, M Battery 1st Royal Horse Artillery, part of the 2/3rd Australian Anti-tank Regiment, and elements of other units. The Germans tried twice to bluff Gambier-Parry into surrender, but he had received orders from CYRCOM to break out and retreat to El Adem.

  Gambier-Parry decided to attack at dawn. On the 8th of April, A Squadron of the 18th Cavalry broke through and turned to attack Italian artillery, and some Indian troops of the 11th Prince Albert Victor's Own Cavalry got away. But the garrison had fired most of its small arms ammunition at the vision slits of German tanks. The German tanks had hung back in fear of mines. When Italian infantry attacked, there was little ammunition left to resist them.

  Gambier-Parry and between 2,700 and 3,000 British, Indian, and Australian troops surrendered to Major-General Pietro Zaglio, commander of the Pavia Division. The losses at Mechili alone accounted for the majority of the 3,000 British men lost during Sonnenblume.

  The most consequential captures happened off the battlefield. During the withdrawal, Lieutenant-Generals Philip Neame and Richard O'Connor, along with Brigadier Combe, had left Maraua at 8:00 p.m. and taken a desert track at Giovanni Berta. They took a wrong turning north toward Derna instead of east to Tmimi and drove directly into Gruppe Ponath near Martuba. Neame, O'Connor, Rimington, and Combe were all captured. Brigadier John Harding arrived at the CYRCOM headquarters at Tmimi early on the 7th of April to find no sign of either general.

• 6. Tobruk Holds

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  Rommel had hoped to pursue CYRCOM across Egypt and take Alexandria. Overstretched supply lines, opposition from OKW, and the British defence of Tobruk made this impossible.

  On the 10th of April, Rommel made the Suez Canal the objective of the DAK and ordered that no breakout from Tobruk be permitted. The port was invested the next day, but the rush ended with the 5th Light Afrika Division on the east side, Group Prittwitz to the south (Prittwitz himself having been killed), and the Brescia Division to the west. The garrison amounted to about 25,000 British and Australian troops, well stocked with supplies and linked to Egypt by the Navy.

  From the 11th to the 12th of April, Panzer Regiment 5 probed the defences of the 20th Australian Brigade near the El Adem road and was repulsed by artillery fire. The planned attack by the 5th Light Afrika Division on the night of 13/the 14th of April got over the anti-tank ditch briefly, with Panzer Regiment 5 driving through and turning north, ready to split for the harbour and to cut off the garrison. The advance was stopped. The Italians had been slow to provide blueprints for the port fortifications.

  On the 2nd of May, Rommel accepted that the Axis force was not sufficient to capture Tobruk. General Friedrich Paulus, a deputy Chief of the General Staff, was sent to Africa to report on the situation. His report dwelt on exhaustion and dire supply conditions facing the Axis at Tobruk and the frontier. The British received an Ultra decrypt of the Paulus report, but the intelligence was mishandled, encouraging the premature attack of Operation Brevity on the 15th of May.

• 7. Why Sonnenblume Succeeded

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  In 1949, Wavell wrote: "I had certainly not budgeted for Rommel after my experience of the Italians. I should have been more prudent."

  The British official historian Ian Playfair noted in 1956 that British assumptions about the time needed for an Axis counter-offensive were not unrealistic in themselves. They were confounded by Rommel's boldness and by the state of the 3rd Armoured Brigade, which was a brigade in name only. When the DAK attacked, no armoured force was capable of counter-attacking or cutting Axis communications.

  In 1993, Harold Raugh identified the diversion of British units to Greece as the main reason for Sonnenblume's success, alongside the transfer of units to Egypt to refit, the appointment by Wavell of commanders who failed to perform, and Wavell's failure to properly study the terrain. Wavell also relied on maps that were later found to be inaccurate when he arrived to see the situation for himself.

  The intelligence failure compounded all of this. Decrypts from the German Enigma coding machine and reports from MI14 had provided copious warnings about Rommel's potential. The warnings were not acted on. Wavell, the War Office, and Churchill all underestimated what the DAK could do. Rommel understood something they did not: that audacity in the desert, applied before the enemy could consolidate, could unravel months of campaign gains in under two weeks.

  The British Mobile Force columns at Halfaya, Sofafi, Buq Buq, and Sidi Barrani eventually began harassing German positions around Capuzzo and Sollum, and the siege of Tobruk would grind on for months, keeping the Axis frontier position unstable and preventing any push into Egypt.