Three Kings

Everything he said was true, but O’Connor felt that if he could find a way to press on now, he might drive the Italians from Cyrenaica while he had them on the run. Yet his division was in no shape to move. It was scattered all over the desert, with seventy percent of its tanks and vehicles stalled, broken down, or out of fuel. Yet there was still that thirty percent, and he set out now to find it.

Chapter 9

The Italians were beaten. Graziani made one last call on his gilded, monogrammed telephone, sending a frantic message to Mussolini saying that all of Cyrenaica would soon be lost. Electric BeardBergonzoli was howling about the need for Germany to attack with its entire air force. He was hastily evacuating the last of his Colonial troops fromDerna on the north coast, even as the Australians pushed on up that road. As the Italians left, the Arabs drifted into town in their long desert robes, like phantoms emerging from the desert, and they began to loot the place, dragging away anything of value the Italians left behind.

Cyrenaica was a vast peninsula extending from Bardia in the east, then curving up throughDerna, and west to Benghazi before it dipped down again toAgadabia on the Gulf of Sirte. The best road was along that curving edge of the coast, for inland the ground rose in the imposing terrain of the JebelAkhdar, the Green Mountains.

O’Connor could see that he had one last chance to turn a solid victory into something truly decisive. If he allowed the remaining Italian troops to escape, he would only end up having to fight them another day. So he stared at the map looking for another way west, but found no roads fingering their way into the deserts beyond Bardia and Tobruk. There were goat trails, thin tracks tracing their way through the wadis, remnants of secondary roads that were really nothing more than the tracks of a vehicle that had wandered there, and they were all shifting with the wind on the sand.

So he decided. He would make his own road. He would simply get a column together and point it west, cutting right straight across the wide base of the peninsula, through the open desert. He Found General MichaelO’Moore Creagh, commanding 7th Armored, and urged him to move via the thin trail network throughMechili, Msus andAntelat.

“Get west,” he said. “Any way you can. I don’t care if you have to cannibalize every unit you have, but gather any vehicle that has petrol and get them moving!”

Creagh made the decision to give this job to the intrepid commander of his division reconnaissance unit, Lieutenant Colonel John Combe of the 7th Hussars.

“Look Johnny,” he said. “I’m going to cobble together anything that still has petrol and give you a flying column, about 2000 troops in all. You do the flying. Head southwest and position yourself defensively to block the Italian retreat to Tripoli.”

Combe looked at the map, seeing nothing but blank space along the route Creagh was pointing out. “Along what road?” he asked the obvious question.

“There isn’t one,” said Creagh. “At least not anything we would call a road. You’ll just have to make your own. We’ll follow as best we can with the rest of the division.”

“Very well.” Combe smiled. It was a classic cavalry action for his Hussars. He would dash on ahead through the night, braving the unknown, scouting out the way, and when he got there he would be facing off the remnant of the entire Italian 10th Army, perhaps 30,000 men, and he would hold until relieved.

“Got it,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation, and “Combe Force” was born. He had a squadron of his own 11th Hussars in old Morris and Marmon Herington armored cars, supported by B Squadron of 1st King's Dragoon Guards, with a few Mark VI Lighttankettes and another handful of armored cars. C Battery, Royal Horse Artillery, had a few 25 pounders, and he had some truck mounted 37mm anti-tank guns from 106th Regiment RHA. The infantry element was the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, motorized infantry.

And off they went into the night, with the armored cars leading and Combe squinting at his map and compass. Just follow a compass heading southwest, he thought, and it was a fitting end to the operation he had led with his Hussars from the very first. They navigated around wadis, over cold stony ground, the vehicles jolting over the rugged terrain, through occasional thickets of desert scrub. Fuel was always an issue, but he reckoned he had enough to get his force to the west coast. Getting back was another matter, but that never entered his mind.

The sun rose on his force half way through that ordeal, and he pushed on, warily watching the sky for any sign of enemy aircraft. None came. The last Italian air strike had managed to zero in on a cluster of 8000 prisoners well behind British lines, where the Italians suffered the ignominious humiliation of being bombed by their own air force.