Battle of Mersa Matruh, 1942: Rommel's last victory over the Eighth Army

In the last week of June 1942 the coast road of western Egypt was choked with traffic, all of it heading east. Guns, trucks, ambulances and tanks ran together in a stream that soldiers coming the other way never forgot, the remains of an army that had just lost a great battle and its most famous fortress. At Mersa Matruh, a small port halfway between the Libyan frontier and Alexandria, the British meant to turn and fight. They had less time than they thought.¹

Background: Gazala and Tobruk

The disaster had begun in Libya. On 26 May 1942 Rommel attacked the British line at Gazala, west of Tobruk. After two weeks of heavy fighting the British armor was destroyed in a few days of mid-June, and the battlefield and its wrecked tanks passed into Axis hands. The Eighth Army fell back toward Egypt.²

On 20 and 21 June Rommel took Tobruk, the port that had held out through a long siege the year before, in a single day of fighting. Churchill told the Commons the garrison was about 25,000 strong; the New Zealand official history speaks of 30,000 men. With Tobruk gone, the frontier could not be held either. General Neil Ritchie, commanding the Eighth Army, asked to retire to Mersa Matruh to gain time, and Auchinleck, the commander-in-chief in the Middle East, agreed on 23 June, as he later wrote, with the greatest reluctance.³ › Siege of Tobruk, 1941

A position no one wanted to hold

The withdrawal put, in Churchill's words, 125 miles of waterless desert between the Eighth Army and its enemy, and most authorities expected it to win ten days or a fortnight. Rommel pursued at once. His army had suffered heavily, but it pressed on into Egypt while the British were still disorganized, and on 26 June, the fifth day, it was in front of the new position.⁴

Mersa Matruh was an old fortress. A fortified perimeter, built before Auchinleck reached the Middle East, ringed the town, with a newer covering position to the west, and the New Zealanders who dug in there found old trenches, rotting sandbags and gun pits half buried in sand. Minefields ran south from the coast, and a detached strongpoint stood on high ground at Sidi Hamza, about twenty miles south. Between the two groups of minefields lay a gap that the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade was ordered to close, six miles wide in Auchinleck's account and eight in Rickard's.⁵

Armies and commanders

The British held the position with two corps. X Corps, with the 10th Indian and 50th Divisions, held Matruh itself and the ground north of the coastal escarpment. XIII Corps under General William Gott held the desert to the south, with the 1st Armoured Division and the New Zealand Division, which had just raced down from Syria and was sent to the escarpment at Minqar Qaim, about 25 miles south of the town. Churchill singled it out in the Commons as a reinforcement the enemy knew all about.⁶

On the evening of 25 June Auchinleck relieved Ritchie and took direct command of the Eighth Army himself. He reversed the plan to make a final stand. The army was to stay mobile and stop the enemy somewhere between Matruh, El Alamein and the Qattara Depression, and in no circumstances was any part of it to be shut up in Matruh. The infantry divisions were reorganized into battle groups built around their field guns, and XXX Corps went back to prepare the El Alamein position. In the words of the New Zealand official history, the fight at Matruh became a delaying action to cover the retreat.⁷

Rommel's army was much weaker than the one that had won at Gazala. Rickard counts about 60 German and 44 Italian tanks and only some 3,400 German infantry; Churchill, speaking a week later, put the German armor that broke the British line at 100 to 150 tanks. Rommel's plan was to outflank the position from the south and cut the coast road east of Matruh, trapping X Corps against the sea.⁸

The battle in phases

26 June: the minefield gap. The Axis attack began on the afternoon of 26 June. By evening German troops had broken through the gap in the minefields south of the Charing Cross road junction and pushed back the Indian columns trying to hold it.⁹

27 June: Minqar Qaim. The next day the 21st Panzer Division swept past the New Zealanders and swung round to attack them from the east, while the 15th Panzer and the Italian armor were held by the 1st Armoured Division. The New Zealand gunners kept the tanks off all day. Their commander, General Bernard Freyberg, was badly wounded by a shell splinter, and Brigadier Inglis took over the division.¹⁰

By evening the 90th Light Division had reached the coast road east of Matruh. Gott, finding the enemy between his corps and X Corps, ordered XIII Corps to withdraw toward Fuka. Auchinleck told X Corps to conform, but by his own account it was short of vehicles and the road behind it was already cut. Rickard calls the British handling of the battle botched: in his account Auchinleck misread the danger to XIII Corps and sent X Corps to attack south that evening, and his order to retreat did not reach it until 4:30 the next morning.¹¹

Night of 27 to 28 June: the New Zealand breakout. Surrounded on their escarpment, the New Zealanders dumped everything but their weapons and broke out in the dark. The 4th Brigade, with the Maori Battalion, attacked to clear a path; the rest of the division followed packed onto every vehicle that would move, ran into a laager of German tanks and drove straight through it under a storm of tracer, then headed east for the Alamein line. Rickard notes that the breakout cost the 21st Panzer Division's infantry heavily.¹²

28 to 29 June: X Corps fights its way out. X Corps was now cut off in Matruh, defending a long perimeter against most of Rommel's force. The 50th and 10th Indian Divisions broke out on the night of 28 June, in columns heading south into the desert and then east. Much ammunition and equipment had to be left behind. Before they left, the engineers blew up the stores, and the New Zealanders to the south watched a great mushroom of black smoke rise from the coast.¹³

Turning point: the race to El Alamein

Mersa Matruh was lost, but the Eighth Army was not. The battle the regimental records describe ended only when the retreating corps reached the El Alamein line, held by XXX Corps, where the sea and the Qattara Depression left no open flank to turn. Rickard calls it Rommel's last victory over the Eighth Army. His army was nearly spent, and his first attacks on the Alamein position in early July were beaten off.¹⁴ › Battle of El Alamein, 1942

Those were anxious days in Cairo and London. Rickard notes a short-lived panic in Egypt, and for a while, in the National Army Museum's words, it seemed that Rommel might link up with the German armies advancing in the Caucasus and overrun the whole Middle East. On 1 and 2 July, as the Alamein line held, Churchill had to defend his conduct of the war in the House of Commons against a motion of censure prompted by the fall of Tobruk, and the motion failed.¹⁵

Aftermath

Auchinleck's decision not to stand at Matruh saved much of the army, but the confused withdrawal cost it dearly in men and equipment. The New Zealand Division went straight into the July fighting on the Alamein line, where its battalions suffered heavily again. By August Churchill had lost faith in Auchinleck. He was replaced by General Harold Alexander as commander-in-chief, and command of the Eighth Army, first offered to Gott, passed to Bernard Montgomery after Gott was killed.¹⁶

Rommel never got further east than El Alamein. In November, after Montgomery's victory there, the Eighth Army came back west along the same coast road in pursuit of the beaten Axis army.¹⁷

Legacy and memory

The battle left different memories for each army in it. For the British regiments, Mersa Matruh is a battle honour won in defeat: the official description recorded by the Queen's Royal Hussars Museum says simply that the enemy broke through between X and XIII Corps, cut off X Corps in Mersa Matruh, and that the position was not stabilized until the El Alamein line was reached. For New Zealand, the night breakout from Minqar Qaim became a story of its own, told at length in the country's official war history.¹⁸

For historians it is a study in how an army can unravel. Auchinleck's own despatch, published in 1948, defends the decision to keep the army mobile rather than be trapped. Rickard blames muddled orders that sent two corps in different directions on the same night. Both agree that the army that reached El Alamein in the first days of July was battered but intact, and that it held.¹⁹