Word: tobruk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...will have to begin soon. South of Kharkov, Bock had plowed deep into the Russian lines. In Egypt the British faced Rommel with scanty forces and equipment; their loss at Tobruk (Axis version) was 33,000 prisoners, more than 100 tanks. In Rommel's sudden victory Germany could see the start of a great pincer operation...
...British it was utter, humiliating defeat. Tobruk, the same battle-scarred port that last year held out for eight months against Axis besiegers, succumbed to one day's attack. Tobruk fell quickly, squashily, to the planes, tanks and guns of Germany's Erwin Rommel. The Axis announced that it took 28,000 Allied prisoners in the garrison, including "several generals." This was indirectly confirmed by a British report which said that Axis shelling prevented any substantial rescue...
Rommel was well known to be a demoniac master of desert war, but neither the British nor the U.S. public was prepared for Tobruk's fall. For it followed weeks of such cheery headlines as these: Planes pound Axis units in Libya. . . . British in Libya mopping up. . . . Heroic stand at Bir Hachéim foils Rommel. . . . Axis road to Egypt barred. . . . Even two days after Tobruk fell, the New York World-Telegram still bleated: R.A.F. Blasts Nazis in Libya...
...confident that their ground forces matched the enemy. One thing Rommel did, apparently, was to let the British exhaust themselves winning their "victories," then throw in his reserves to take the real victory. Moreover, he changed the pattern of desert warfare by stepping up the role of artillery. Before Tobruk's fall, when the British, confident of equal armor and equal or greater air strength, attacked Rommel's line south of the port, the German surprised them with a massive assembly of 88-mm. anti-tank guns and the British tanks took a dismal mauling-suffering losses which...
...Mediterranean attack was part of a larger sea & air action. By heavily escorted convoys from Gibraltar and Alexandria, the British tried to get supplies into battered Malta and to the retreating Eighth Army at Tobruk (see p. 20). Italo-German warships, planes, submarines and torpedo boats grabbed their chance, tried to knock out the bulk of Britain's remaining Mediterranean Fleet. Thanks partly to Colonel Halverson's roving bombers, the Axis failed in its main objective. But the British lost heavily, were able to claim only a limited success in getting the convoy through...