Three Kings (Kirov Series) (10 page)

The
Italians began to surrender en masse, causing a snarl as groups of 2000 men
might be herded off by no more than a platoon of British soldiers to watch
them. The fight had simply gone out of them. They were conscripts, sent by
Mussolini to conquer Egypt, but had little real stomach for combat once cut off
and with no sign of relief anywhere apparent.

“O’Connor’s
Raid” had been a resounding success, yet it was not over in spite of an
unexpected setback when General Wavell radioed to inform O’Connor that the 4th
Indian Division must now be withdrawn for duty in the Sudan.

O’Connor
was surprised by the news, as he had not been told about this in advance, and
it was most disconcerting. He would get the 6th Australian Division as a
replacement, but not for some days, which meant he would have no infantry
support. Any other commander would have stopped his offensive there and then,
but O’Connor was determined to exploit his initial successes, and decided to
press forward with 7th Armored Division alone. He would soon turn the Italian retreat
into a rout of historic proportions, a debacle in the desert not replicated
again until the 1st Gulf War when half a million Coalition troops routed the
armies of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait.

But
O’Connor did not have half a million men. He had begun his offensive with no
more than 30,000 against a force of 150,000 Italians. He had destroyed 73
Italian tanks, 237 artillery pieces and bagged over 38,000 prisoners in the
first round of fighting. In doing so he had taken only 70 casualties. Now his
numbers were cut in half, but rather than consolidating his gains, he did the
unexpected and attacked.

The
Italians had retreated up the road toward their bastion at the small port of
Bardia. A rocky escarpment angled in towards the town from the desert, stretching
some thirty kilometers to the southeast, creating a kind of stone funnel that
any force advancing up the coast had to enter. As they moved forward to the
west, the attacker would be compressed by this escarpment, which had only one
natural opening at a place called
Halfaya
Pass.

To cork
this bottleneck, Graziani had rallied a small armored force to defend the pass.
The British 3rd Hussars were now in the lead, but they were mainly equipped
with the light Mark VI machine gun
tankettes
, and ran
into heavy Italian artillery fire when they reached the town of Bug
Bug
about half way to the pass.

“We’ll
meet fire with fire,” said O’Connor as he sized up the situation. “Bring up the
division artillery. And get word to the sea bombardment force that they are to
keep as much fire as possible on that road.”

Terror
was still raining down heavy rounds on the retreating
columns of Italian infantry and trucks, raising havoc as they hastened to the
safety of their fortified ports at Bardia and Tobruk further west up the coast.
Using the superior firepower of his 25 pounder artillery, O’Connor was able to
blast his way forward, eventually taking
Halfaya
Pass
and pushing on through
Sollum
, Now, confronted by an
anti-tank ditch and miles of wire and bunkers outside Bardia, he was forced to
wait for the Australian infantry. If he took Bardia, he knew the psychological
shock of that loss would likely send his enemy on a headlong retreat to
Benghazi far to the west.

Lieutenant
General
Annibale
Bergonzoli's
XXIII Corps was digging in, occupying the strong defenses of Bardia with all
the troops he could gather as they retreated up the coast, still harassed by
British naval gunfire. Mussolini knew the man personally, calling him
Barba
Elettrica
, “Old Electric
Beard,” because his whiskers and handlebar mustache jutted so wildly from his
face. He sent him a message urging him to hold Bardia at all costs.
Bergonzoli’s
reply was brave and confident: “We are here in
Bardia, and here we will stay.” He would soon command a force of 40,000 men
there, making ready behind a double line of fortified concrete positions.

The
task of taking the place with such a small force at his disposal seemed
impossible, but O’Connor had no hesitation. He knew that it would need a
combined assault by infantry, tanks and artillery to do the job, and he
gathered all his remaining Matildas in the 7th RTR and planned to use them as
an armored battering ram against the enemy line.

The
engineer sappers of the Australian 16th Brigade finally came up in their
trucks, inexperienced, but determined, tough men of the Australian bush who
were accustomed to harsh desert conditions. They began unloading equipment,
only to find that cases of much needed wire cutters were nowhere to be found.
Orders were sent back to find them, and the infantry began to dig in to set up
positions for their 3-inch mortar teams when it was discovered that none of the
mortars had sites!

“How
are we supposed to fire the damn things if we can’t sight and register on the
targets?” A gritty Sergeant put a plain enough point on the dilemma, and a
young Lieutenant scratched his head, then found the nearest jeep he could get
his hands on and started back down the road to look for the missing mortar
sights. He would have to go all the way to Cairo to find them, where the crates
sat in a warehouse, overlooked in the hasty forward movement of the brigades.

O’Connor
took advantage of the time to finalize his attack plan and call for both air
and naval support. That night Bardia would be visited by Wellington bombers of
the R.A.F., which put in a strong attack to soften the enemy defenses, dumping
all of 20,000 pounds of bombs. As the night wore on, the Royal Navy put in the
second act, with the monitor
Terror
returning to pound the port defenses
in the dark hours before the assault. At one point an old British river
gunboat, the
Aphis
, had slipped into the bay off Bardia, right into the
harbor itself, and it was firing away at anything that moved on the shore, with
an impertinent and daring display of bravery.

“Look
there,” O’Connor pointed. “If the Navy can get inside the enemy’s camp like
that, then we’ll scratch our way in too!”

General
Iven
Mackay of the Australian 6th Division was
already looking over the ground. Selecting points that seemed suitable for an
assault. As dawn came the looming shapes of the big engineers moved like grey
shadows over the lunar landscape. These were big, muscular men, and their
appearance intimidated the defenders when they saw how doggedly they came
forward, moving up to prepare the way for the assault even under sporadic
machine gun fire from the bunkers. O’Connor countered this by ordering a heavy
covering artillery barrage to suppress the enemy guns. Then the shovels and
wire cutters went to work, the aim being to fill in a section of the anti-tank
ditch for the Matildas. Bangalore torpedoes were pushed under the wire to blow
gaps and detonate hidden mines, difficult and grueling work under enemy fire,
but the Aussies persisted.

It was
not long before O’Connor could order up his battering ram, the tanks of the 7th
RTR that had led his assault many days ago against the Italian encampments. The
men were tired, some near exhaustion as they pushed along the narrow road,
nerves jangled by the grating clatter of the tank treads. The Australian
infantry had punched through the outer defenses, like ghoulish specters, their
rifles and bayonets a frightening shock to the inexperienced
Blackshirt
militias on the front line. The Italians wanted
nothing to do with these brawny, hard looking men, and began to surrender in
droves.

Yet it
was not all so one sided. In places the Italians fought hard, a stubborn
sergeant holding his men together in a concrete bunker and refusing to give in
until the Australian infantry had to work their way up and hurl in grenades. As
the first prisoners were led to the rear, O’Connor was surprised to learn what
he was up against. The Italians quickly told the interrogators that the port
was defended by all of 40,000 men with a brigade of tanks in reserve. It was twice
the size O’Connor had estimated, and now his 23 Matildas seemed a small force
to consider challenging such a weighty garrison.

“40,000
men sir! Do you think the buggers are giving us a load of crap?” A staff
officer had come in with the report, and O’Connor took the information in,
thinking.

“We
shall soon see.” O’Connor smiled, his short white hair catching the morning
sunlight at the edge of his officer’s cap.

“You
mean to continue the attack?”

“What
else? The enemy line stretches out for twenty kilometers to the east. They may
have 40,000 men, but they can’t all be in one place at the same time, can they?
We’ll hit them, just as we planned. See to the orders, Lieutenant.”

“Sir!”
The man clicked his heels and was off, and soon the Matildas were pushing
forward towards the gap that had been forced by the Australian infantry. When
the tanks pushed through, they made short work of the pill boxes, blasting at
them with their 2 pounder guns. When one post fell, the next bunker adjacent to
it decided the wiser thing was to surrender, and the infection soon rippled
back from the point of the assault.

The big
Australian infantry rushed forward with the Matildas, Bren gun teams having to
fire no more than a few hostile bursts before whole trench lines of Italian
infantry would emerge, hands in the air, white flags waving. One Bren team came
upon a line of L3 machine gun tanks, twelve in all, their motors revving up as
though they were making ready to charge into the battle. More on instinct than
anything else, the gunner fired at the closest
tankettes
,
and was astonished when the whole line of twelve gave up and surrendered after
a single burst.

Once
the British tanks were ‘inside the wire,’ it had the effect of piercing a
balloon. The entire defensive position began to collapse. It was not that the
British and Australians were that much better at the art of war, but only that
they were that much more determined to prevail. They had the will to win
forward, and the Italians did not, preferring a quick surrender and a safe walk
to the rear areas, and out of this damnable desert war.

Bardia
fell that very same day, and the shock of its sudden capture by a force a third
the size of the garrison rippled across Cyrenaica, sending columns of Italian
Colonial infantry streaming west towards Benghazi. Old Electric Beard had been
given a close shave, and now it was on to Tobruk, the first real prize O’Connor
had in mind. It would offer a great natural harbor to supply his forward move
from that point, but by the time he got there the 7th RTR was down to only
eighteen Matildas.

Several
tanks had broken down, others had simply run out of fuel and ammunition, still
others had run over a mine or slipped a metal tread and were stuck in the sand,
no more than metal bunkers now. Yet O’Connor would not stop. He was out among
the men, urging them on, commandeering any truck that seemed idle and stuffing
it full of riflemen before he rapped his riding crop on the hood and pointed
out the direction he wanted it to go. His energy seemed boundless, and he moved
so quickly that he seemed to be everywhere at once.

The
tired Aussies took heart to see this, and they shouldered their rifles and
slogged on. They would use the same formula to take Tobruk: engineers,
artillery, and those eighteen Matildas. A good bayonet with some guts behind it
often resulted in surprising results. They would take another 25,000 Italian
prisoners in the valuable port, including Admiral
Massmiliano
Vietina
, the commander of the garrison. 208 guns,
numerous enemy tanks and trucks were also taken, and many were used to flesh
out the thinning ranks of the British 7th Armored division. In all, the British
force had ended up capturing 130,000 Italians, losing only 500 men in the
process, with 1373 wounded and 55 missing.

It was
a triumph of will, determination, and the skill of all who fought that action.
But it would not end with Tobruk. O’Connor radioed back to Wavell that he had
both ports, and was given a hearty congratulations.

“Best to
stand on that ground now and consolidate,” said Wavell. “Your men will be
tired, and it will take days to get food and petrol up to the front.”

Everything
he said was true, but O’Connor felt that if he could find a way to press on
now, he might drive the Italians from Cyrenaica while he had them on the run.
Yet his division was in no shape to move. It was scattered all over the desert,
with seventy percent of its tanks and vehicles stalled, broken down, or out of
fuel. Yet there was still that thirty percent, and he set out now to find it.

Chapter 9

The
Italians were beaten. Graziani made one last call on his
gilded, monogrammed telephone, sending a frantic message to Mussolini saying
that all of Cyrenaica would soon be lost. Electric Beard
Bergonzoli
was howling about the need for Germany to attack with its entire air force. He
was hastily evacuating the last of his Colonial troops from
Derna
on the north coast, even as the Australians pushed on up that road. As the
Italians left, the Arabs drifted into town in their long desert robes, like
phantoms emerging from the desert, and they began to loot the place, dragging
away anything of value the Italians left behind.