The Siege of Tobruk lasted from April to December 1941, when German and Italian forces under Erwin Rommel surrounded the Libyan port, held at first mainly by the 9th Australian Division under Leslie Morshead. From August 1941 the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade under General Stanisław Kopański, with a Czechoslovak battalion and British troops, was shipped in to relieve the Australians. The garrison held for about eight months until the British Crusader offensive broke the siege, and the Polish soldiers proudly shared the name the Rats of Tobruk.1
In the summer of 1941 a desert fortress on the coast of Libya was holding out against Erwin Rommel. Its defenders lived underground like the rats an enemy broadcaster called them, drank a meager, heavily chlorinated water ration (by one Polish account about four liters a day, with seawater for washing) and were supplied only by ships that ran in at night under the bombs. Into it, by night convoys, came a brigade of Polish soldiers who had escaped their occupied country and traveled half the world to fight: the Carpathian Brigade.2
The fortress in the desert
Tobruk mattered because of its harbor, the only natural one in Libya, on the coast road between Tripoli and Egypt. The British took it from the Italians on 22 January 1941, with some 25,000 prisoners. But in February the first units of Rommel's Afrika Korps landed at Tripoli, while British and Australian forces were drawn off to Greece. The German and Italian counteroffensive drove the thinned British forces back across Cyrenaica so fast that the Australians called the race the Benghazi Handicap. By 8 April the Axis vanguard was at Derna, and on 10 and 11 April Tobruk was surrounded.3
For Rommel the port was a thorn. As long as it held, most of his supplies had to be hauled some 1,500 kilometers overland from Tripoli, and the troops needed to contain it were lost to his advance on Egypt. For the British it was a shield for Egypt and the Suez Canal.4
No Dunkirk here
About 24,000 Allied troops were shut in, around 14,000 of them Australians of the 9th Division and the 18th Brigade of the 7th, with British tanks and artillery and Indian troops. Their commander, Major General Leslie Morshead, told his brigadiers there would be no Dunkirk at Tobruk, and that if they had to get out, they would fight their way out. His orders were simple: give up no ground, own no man's land by aggressive patrolling, keep digging, and defend in depth.5
The defense rested on three lines. The outer Red Line, the old Italian perimeter of strongpoints and wire, curved for 28 miles around the town. About two miles inside it ran the Blue Line, and closer to the harbor the Green Line. On the night of 11 April the sappers laid 5,000 mines. Captured Italian guns were handed to cooks, clerks and orderlies, who became the famous bush artillery.6
Rommel attacked in April and again at the start of May, and broke through the Red Line more than once. In May his troops seized a permanent bulge in the perimeter, about 5.5 kilometers wide and 4 deep, known as the Salient, around the hill of Ras el Medauar. An Australian counterattack on 3 May failed to cut it out, and it was never eliminated, only reduced, until December. Rommel himself admitted that the Australians were without question an elite formation.7
The Tobruk ferry
Everything the garrison needed came by sea. British and Australian destroyers and small ships, the Tobruk ferry, ran in at night, unloaded around midnight and sailed out again with the wounded before dawn. HMAS Vendetta alone made 39 runs between May and August. The cost was heavy: by the Anzac Portal's count 26 naval ships and some merchant ships were sunk, among them the Australian destroyer Waterhen, which went down on 30 June after an attack by German dive bombers.8
Two attempts to break the siege from Egypt, Operation Brevity on 15 May and Operation Battleaxe on 15 June, both failed. Tobruk would have to hold out on its own.9
The Rats of Tobruk
The defenders lived in dugouts, caves and trenches covered with sheet iron, because on the perimeter a man could not show himself in daylight. Water was scarce and heavily chlorinated: by one Polish account each soldier got about four liters a day, with seawater for washing. Dysentery, desert sores, flies and fleas were everywhere, dust storms filled guns with sand, and the shelling and bombing never stopped.10
It was this underground life that the pro-Nazi broadcaster William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, mocked on German radio, deriding the defenders as rats. The Australians took the insult as a compliment, called themselves the Rats of Tobruk and even made an unofficial medal to prove it.11
From Syria to Africa
The brigade that would share that name had been born far away. In April 1940 the Polish army in France began forming a rifle brigade at Homs in French-ruled Syria, from Poles who had escaped through Romania and Hungary. Colonel Stanisław Kopański took command on 2 April 1940. When France capitulated in June, the Poles refused to obey the Vichy government and crossed into British Palestine, and in October 1940 Kopański was promoted to brigadier general.12
Re-equipped on British lines at Latrun, the unit was named the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade on 12 January 1941. A quarter of its soldiers had finished secondary school or more. It had about 4,000 men, short of its establishment of some 5,200.13
Into Tobruk
By July 1941 the Australian commander in the Middle East, General Thomas Blamey, was pressing for his exhausted men to be relieved, against the objections of Winston Churchill. Between 19 and 29 August the Carpathian Brigade was carried into Tobruk from Alexandria by night, in seven convoys of destroyers; the Czechoslovak 11th Battalion followed in October and was placed under Polish command. Half the Australian garrison left in August and the rest in September and October, replaced by Polish, Czechoslovak and British troops. One Australian battalion, the 2/13th, could not be taken out and stayed for the whole siege.14
The salient
According to the IPN's account the Poles took over the whole western sector, including the Salient, which they called Wyłom, the Breach, while two of their battalions held part of the southern sector (another IPN article says the brigade was given the eastern sector). In the Salient the German and Italian lines lay only about 80 meters away, against one to three kilometers elsewhere. The Carpathian Lancers under Major Władysław Bobiński held it for ten weeks under constant fire. The Poles raided and patrolled at night like the Australians before them, and in the night of 11 to 12 October the Carpathian Lancers carried out the brigade's first big successful raid.15
On 13 November the Polish commander in chief, General Władysław Sikorski, came to Tobruk. He handed out promotions and decorations, visited the Salient, and gave Kopański the plan to expand the brigade into a division.16
Breaking the siege
On 18 November 1941 the British Eighth Army opened Operation Crusader to relieve Tobruk, and on 23 November the garrison struck out of the fortress to meet it, with the Australians of the 2/13th Battalion fighting at Ed Duda.17
In the night of 9 to 10 December the Poles attacked the hill of Ras el Medauar, and at 5:30 in the morning Captain Adam Zieliński planted the Polish flag on its summit. The same night the Carpathian Lancers took Acroma and its airfield and linked up with the Eighth Army. The siege was over. The Anzac Portal dates its end to 7 December, the Australian War Memorial and Polish historians to 10 December; it had lasted about eight months, against the two the Allies had first planned for.18 › 10 April in military history, 1941
The price had been high. Between 8 April and 25 October the 9th Australian Division lost 749 killed, 1,996 wounded and 604 prisoners. The Polish brigade lost 127 killed and 467 wounded during the siege, by one IPN count, or 152 killed for its whole time in the desert by another. The Axis lost about 12,000 men in their attempts to take the fortress.19
After Tobruk
The Carpathians went straight on to the Gazala line, where between 15 and 17 December they took 59 officers and 1,634 men prisoner. In March 1942 the brigade left the front, and it became the core of the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division in General Anders' Polish II Corps, which would storm Monte Cassino in 1944. Tobruk itself fell to Rommel in June 1942, with some 33,000 Allied prisoners, and was retaken for good after El Alamein in November.20 › El Alamein, 1942
The Australians shared their most honored title with the Poles, who were known from then on as Rats of Tobruk too, and the bond outlived the war. In 1947 and 1948 Australian Tobruk veterans helped sponsor the migration of 1,500 Polish soldiers who could not go home to a Soviet-ruled Poland. In Australia more than 50 memorials honor the Rats of Tobruk, among them the national memorial in Canberra dedicated in 1983. For more on the Polish soldiers who fought in exile, see Władysław Anders and the World War II era page.21 › Battle of Cape Bon, 1941
