North Africa 1941: supply and the coast road
In 1941 the front in Libya moved from El Agheila to the Egyptian border and, by the end of the year, back to El Agheila. Below are the main dates, then what supplying an army along that coast involved, mostly from the Axis side.
Dates
- 24 March: the Axis takes El Agheila, on the edge of Cyrenaica. On 31 March it attacks Mersa Brega.
- 3–4 April: German reconnaissance troops enter Benghazi.
- 8 April: most of the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade surrenders at Mechili. German units reach Derna.
- 10–11 April: Tobruk is surrounded. The siege lasts until 27 November.
- Mid-April: the Axis reaches Bardia and Sollum on the frontier and gets little further.
- 15–16 May and 15–17 June: two British counter-attacks, Brevity and Battleaxe, fail.
- 18 November: Operation Crusader begins. Tobruk is relieved, and from 4 December the Axis falls back, reaching El Agheila again around the turn of the year.
The coast road
Axis supplies crossed the Mediterranean, most of them to Tripoli, and went on by road. There was no railway to speak of. From Tripoli to Benghazi was about 970 km; with the front on the Egyptian border, the road haul came to some 1,800 km.
Martin van Creveld worked through the numbers in Supplying War. Moving the supplies of one German motorised division 480 km took 1,170 two-ton lorries. The lorries themselves burned 30 to 50 percent of the fuel that was delivered, and the Italians had about 7,000 of them for 225,000 men.
Tobruk
Tobruk is a harbour roughly 150 km from the frontier, and the British held it. They supplied the garrison by sea for 231 days, and it kept Axis divisions busy around it, right on the road the Axis supplies had to use. With Tobruk in Axis hands the haul to the front would have been hundreds of kilometres shorter, although, as the Wikipedia account notes, the Axis did not have the ships to make much use of the port.
Where the offensive stopped
According to the Wikipedia account of Operation Sonnenblume, by mid-April supply made it impossible for the Axis to get much past the frontier wire, and on 2 May Rommel accepted that he could not take Tobruk with the forces he had. In Clausewitz’s terms the attack had reached its culminating point and turned into a defence, a very long way from its port.
In November the British Crusader offensive hit an Axis army whose deliveries had been cut, and the retreat took it back across Cyrenaica toward its ports. How much of the Axis shortage came from ships sunk at sea and how much from the distances on land is still argued over. Van Creveld put it on the distances; others have questioned some of his figures for the capacity of the ports.
The campaign in the game
The North Africa campaign in Culminating Point starts on 24 March 1941, on a map of the coast from Tripolitania to Egypt, and you can play either side. You look after the depots, trucks, roads and ports, and the commanders move the divisions.
Sources
- Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 182–190, as cited in Siege of Tobruk (Wikipedia).
- Operation Sonnenblume and Siege of Tobruk (Wikipedia), for the dates and the sources they cite.