Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Aerial photograph of the port of Tobruk during the 1941 siege. The small port of Tobruk in Italian Cyrenaica had been fortified by the Italians from 1935. Behind two old outlying forts, they constructed a novel fortification, consisting of a double line of concrete-lined trenches 54 km (34 mi) long, connecting 128 weapons pits protected by concealed anti-tank ditches but the fortifications ...
Operation Battleaxe (15–17 June 1941) was a British Army offensive during the Second World War to raise the Siege of Tobruk and re-capture eastern Cyrenaica from German and Italian forces. [ h ] It was the first time during the war that a significant German force fought on the defensive.
Operation Agreement was a ground and amphibious operation carried out by British, Rhodesian and New Zealand forces on Axis-held Tobruk from 13 to 14 September 1942, during the Second World War. A Special Interrogation Group party, fluent in German, took part in missions behind enemy lines.
21 June: Axis capture of Tobruk; 28 June: Mersa Matruh, Egypt, falls to the Axis; 29 June: U.S. reports from Egypt of British military operations stop using the compromised "Black Code" which the Axis were reading; 30 June: Axis forces reach El Alamein and attack the Allied defences, the First Battle of El Alamein begins
By late May, the Axis forces comprised 90,000 men, 560 tanks and 542 aircraft. [13] [14] On 26 May, Comando Supremo ordered Bastico and Rommel to launch the offensive, defeat the British armoured forces and capture Tobruk. [21] [page needed]
After surrounding Tobruk, the WDF had exhausted the ample Italian supplies captured at Capuzzo and Sollum; O'Connor directed that the supplies flowing through the port of Sollum (350 long tons (356 t) per day in early January and 500 long tons (508 t) daily late in the month) to the 10th and 11th Field Depots he had set up about 43 mi (70 km ...
Their long-range harassing fire made up for the shortage of medium artillery. After Tobruk was relieved in November 1941, 51 HAA Rgt and 235 HAA Bty were withdrawn to Palestine for rest and reorganisation. [46] [47] [48] 235 Bty's casualties by the end of August were 5 killed and 13 wounded, and a further 5 were killed in September and October.
51st (London) Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment was a volunteer air defence unit of Britain's Territorial Army from 1922 until 1955. During World War II it served in Norway, The Blitz, North Africa (when detachments defended Crete and Tobruk), and finally in Italy until the end of the war in Europe, by which time a proportion of the regiment's personnel were African soldiers, and the guns were ...