Jan 27 2008
Siege of Tobruk
In December 1941 the Australian garrison at Tobruk was besieged by the crack Afrika Korps for 240 days.
The deep harbour port of Tobruk, the last stop on an ancient caravan route was once an early Greek colony, and then accommodated the Roman Legion which guarded the frontier of Cyrenaica.
It’s seen plenty of battle and bloodshed over the centuries. In 1941 the Allied forces, made up mainly of the Australian 9th Division, captured the then Italian garrison, and in April 1941, Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel attacked with his elite Afrika Korps.
For most of the siege, Tobruk was defended by the 9th Division under Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead who had been instructed to hold the fortress for eight weeks. The Australians held it for over eight months.
In the heat and blinding sandstorms of a North African summer, they held out against constant ground attacks and the most intensive bombing barrages in military history.
The siege of Tobruk was the first time the Allies had succeeded in defeating a German army operation in World War II. Despite the ingenuity of Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’ and the bravery of his Afrika Korps, the outnumbered and outgunned garrison held the port.
The part of the story that sometimes gets lost in the bigger saga of the Siege is the fact that Australians helped capture Tobruk in the first place. They evicted Mussolini’s “famous” defenders with little trouble.
The Desert Rats
It was during this epic siege that ‘Lord Haw Haw’, the German propaganda broadcaster coined the phrase ‘Desert Rats’.
It was intended it as the worst of insults, but the Australians at Tobruk took a perverse pride in the name. They still do.
Recommended Reading
Frank Harrison, a British signal-man in the fortress during the siege, provides an indepth view in Tobruk: The Birth of a Legend (amazon)
(photo top left : Desert Rat, an Australian Digger : Australian War Museum)
German War Propaganda : The Siege of Tobruk - 1941
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