What Rommel Wrote in His Private Diary After 241 Days Failing to Take Tobruk

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]The desert at night holds a bitter chill, most folks simply don't expect.

[00:00:04]It's not the cold of home, it's not a frosty morning on the paddocks out at Bathurst, or a biting Melbourne winter.

[00:00:11]This is a different beast entirely, a cold that seeps up straight from the stones the minute the sun drops, settling deep into the aching bones of men who had been sweating in 45° heat just hours earlier. On the night of the 30th of April, 1941, the legendary German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel sat in a command vehicle somewhere southeast of a dusty Libyan port.

[00:00:36]>> [music] >> He was writing a private letter to his wife, Lucy. He wrote about the miserable weather. He complained about his failing health and a crook stomach. He wrote about missing her. But then, almost as an aside, he wrote something extraordinary about the place he'd been trying to crack for 19 long days. He admitted the coming attack would be fiercely difficult. And then he wrote the line that has always stopped me dead in my tracks.

[00:01:02]He told his wife the Australians inside were fighting with remarkable tenacity.

[00:01:07]Remarkable tenacity. Erwin Rommel was not a bloke given to flattering his enemies. The fact that he confessed those exact words in private to his wife, with no audience to perform for, that tells you exactly what our boys were putting him through at Tobruk. And it tells you something about the brutal 242-day siege that was still to come. I want to talk to you tonight about what Rommel [music] actually wrote about Tobruk. I'm not talking about the famous quotes you read in the history books, some of which, I'll be straight with you, are disputed, embellished, or misremembered as the years go by. I want to look at what the Desert Fox committed to paper [music] when he thought nobody important was reading. His letters to Lucy, his raw operational notes, the scribbles in the margins of his campaign diaries.

[00:01:56]Because in that honest private place, Rommel tells a story about Tobruk that doesn't quite match the grand myth he sold to the public. And the gap between those two stories is where the real history lives. A quick note before we go on. Good day, my name's Justin. [music] If you're new here, welcome. If you've been watching my videos for a while, thank you [music] for your support. I've spent a long time digging through the dust of this particular corner of the North African campaign, and I want to share the truth of what I've found. I'll also tell you what remains a mystery, because there's too much bad history out there pushed by people looking for a quick headline. I'd rather take my time, be fair dinkum with you, and get the story right than sound [music] clever and be dead wrong. Let's get into it.

[00:02:42]Tobruk is a small town on the Libyan coast.

[00:02:45]>> [music] >> In 1941, it had a natural harbor. One of the only deep water ports between Tripoli and Alexandria, >> [music] >> and a perimeter of defenses that had been dug by the Italians and then improved by the Australians and British who took them. The perimeter was roughly 50 km long, a horseshoe of concrete posts, anti-tank ditches, and wire anchored to the sea at both ends. Inside it, from the 10th of April, 1941, sat the 9th Australian Division under Major General Leslie Morshead, reinforced by the 18th Brigade of the 7th Australian Division, by British artillery and armor, and by Indian troops. All told, around 14,000 Australians and a mixed Allied garrison >> [music] >> of roughly 25,000 men when you count everyone inside the wire. The figure shifts depending on which return you're reading and which date, but the order of magnitude is right. Outside the wire, from the same date, sat a German-Italian force under Rommel, [music] who had arrived in Africa in February with the first elements of what would become the Afrika Korps.

[00:03:54]Rommel had driven the British back across Cyrenaica in a matter of weeks, a campaign that stunned London and Berlin in roughly equal measure. And by the second week of April, he was standing in front of Tobruk expecting to take it in a fortnight. He did not take it in a fortnight, he did not take it at all. He laid siege to it for 242 days until the [music] 8th Army broke through from Egypt in December and relieved it. By that point, most of the Australians were already gone, withdrawn in stages between August and October at the [music] insistence of the Curtin government in Canberra, against the wishes of Churchill who wanted them to stay. That withdrawal and the political argument around it is its own story and I'll come back to it. But what I want to do first is take you inside Rommel's writing. The Rommel papers, as they were published after the war, are an unusual historical source. They're a curated collection. Lucy Rommel [music] survived him, and with the assistance of the British military historian Basil Liddell Hart and others, she [music] arranged for her husband's letters, notes, and operational documents to be compiled and published in English in the 1950s.

[00:05:08]The book that resulted, The Rommel Papers, is the standard source most English-language readers have used ever since. It's also, I should be straight with you, a filtered source.

[00:05:19]Liddell Hart had his own views about armored warfare and his own reasons for shaping Rommel as a particular kind of commander. Some of the German originals were lost. Some were edited for readability. The selection of what to include was made by people with agendas, even if those agendas were often reasonable. All of that said, the letters to Lucy are the closest thing we have to Rommel thinking on paper without an audience. He wrote to her constantly, sometimes daily. He wrote about the campaign, he wrote about his stomach, he wrote about um politics carefully because you had to.

[00:05:57]He wrote about the men under his command.

[00:06:00]He wrote about his enemies. And in April, May, June, and July of 1941, the months when the first and second German assaults on Tobruk failed, and the siege settled into something he hadn't planned for, he wrote about Tobruk in a way that is very different from the confident dispatches going to Berlin. On the 13th of April, 3 days into the investment of the town, Rommel believed he was on the edge of taking it. He had sent a battle group forward the previous night in an attempt to break in at a point south of the perimeter, the area around what the Australians called the red line near posts numbered in the 30s. The attempt failed. It failed because of one Australian battalion, the 2/17 holding posts R31, 32, and 33, along with the anti-tank guns of the 3rd Royal Horse Artillery firing over open sights. A lieutenant named Austin McEll led counterattack with a handful of men and fixed bayonets, and the German infantry who had come through the wire behind their tanks were caught in the ditch between the wire and the second line.

[00:07:11]The tanks that did break through were hit by the Royal Horse Artillery at close range and lost direction and withdrew.

[00:07:19]It was a small action by the standards of what came later, but it was the first time in North Africa that Rommel had been stopped. His letter to Lucy that night is short. He tells her the attack didn't succeed. He tells her they will try again. He tells her the heat is terrible. He doesn't dwell on it. In The Rommel Papers, the account of that attack is compressed [music] and procedural. But in the German Afrika Korps war diary, which I've seen referenced in both Wolf Heckmann's work and in the translation work done in the official Australian history, Barton Maughan's volume on Tobruk and El Alamein, which remains the spine of the Australian understanding of the siege, the frustration is already visible.

[00:08:02]Units did not reach their objectives.

[00:08:04]The infantry were pinned down. The tanks that got through had no infantry with them. Casualties were higher than expected. The Australians were, in the language of the war diary, unexpectedly aggressive. That word, aggressive, is one you see come up again and again in German documents about Tobruk. And it matters because the Australian defense was not a passive one. Morshead had made a decision in the first few days that his garrison was not going to sit inside the wire and wait to be attacked. He said, in what became one of the famous quotes of the siege, that there would be no Dunkirk here. If anyone had to get out, he said, we would fight our way out. No surrender, no retreat. And beyond that, and this was the part the Germans found most unsettling, the Australians would go out through their own wire at night in patrols >> [music] >> and hunt. The no man's land at Tobruk belonged to the Australians, not because they outnumbered the besiegers, they didn't, but because they went out into it night after night after night in small parties and made it unsafe for anybody else. They ambushed listening posts, they kidnapped sentries, [music] they laid their own mines, they came back with prisoners for interrogation.

[00:09:19]The [music] Germans began to refer to the perimeter at night as a place where, in the dry phrasing of one German officer quoted in Maughan, one did not go unless one had to. The 2/43 Battalion, a South Australian unit, became so systematic about it that they made maps of the ground between the lines and gave German positions their own Australian names. Rommel noticed in a letter to Lucy on the 4th of May, after his second big attempt on Tobruk, what the Germans called the Battle of the Salient between the 30th of April and the 4th of May, he writes that the Australians are fighting with remarkable tenacity. That's the phrase I opened with. He says the resistance is greater than he expected.

[00:10:04]He says his own casualties are very heavy. He does not say that he has been forced to abandon, at least for now, the idea of taking the town by direct assault, but his operational orders say it and his actions say it. After the 4th of May, Rommel did not launch another full-scale attack on Tobruk for the [music] rest of the time the Australians were there. He tried to bleed them with artillery. He tried to starve them with aerial attacks on the harbor and the supply runs. He tried to exhaust them.

[00:10:32]He did not try to storm them again. Why not? The answer is in the letters and in the war diary and it's harder to read in the polished post-war memoirs.

[00:10:42]>> [music] >> Rommel's first assault, the 13th and 14th of April, had cost him something [music] like 150 German casualties and the loss of around a third of his tanks committed [music] to the attack. The second assault, the Battle of the Salient at the end of the month and into May, was worse. The Germans took a bite out of the perimeter, [music] a wedge about 3 and 1/2 km deep by 4 and 1/2 km wide at tremendous cost. Rommel's war diary records, depending on the source you use, [music] around 1,200 German casualties across those four days with Italian losses additional. The Australians lost heavily, too. The 2/24 Battalion in particular was severely hit, but they held the line at the base of the Salient and stopped Rommel from exploiting forward. The German armor had run into massed British 25-pounders firing at close range and had been stopped and had been driven back with losses Rommel could not afford. I want to be straight with you about something.

[00:11:41]There's a famous line attributed to Rommel that the Australians at Tobruk were the finest troops he ever faced or words to that effect. You'll find versions of it in half a dozen books and on the plaques at Tobruk memorials and in speeches.

[00:11:59]I've spent a fair bit of time trying to find its actual source. The honest answer is >> [music] >> I can't confirm it in the form it's usually quoted.

[00:12:08]Something like that sentiment appears in his writing in the letters to Lucie, in comments recorded by his aides, but the exact phrasing has been sanded smooth by seven decades of retelling. What I can tell you is this. In what Rommel actually wrote in private, he repeatedly expressed a specific operational respect for the Australian defenders of Tobruk.

[00:12:29]He said they fought harder than he had expected. He said they they used the ground better than he had expected. He said they were aggressive at night in a way he had not seen before and he made, over and over, the strategic calculation that he could not afford to lose the number of men it would take to dig them out by force. That's not quite the same as saying they were the finest troops he ever faced, but it is the same general shape and it has the advantage of being traceable to something he actually wrote. Let me pause here. If you're watching from somewhere that isn't Australia, and a lot of you are, I know from the comments, >> [music] >> there are people tuning in from Canada, from Germany, from the United States, from the United Kingdom, from Indonesia and Japan and Brazil and a dozen other places. I'd love to know where you're watching from tonight.

[00:13:19]>> [music] >> It's one of the genuinely strange and good things about running a channel like this.

[00:13:24]>> [music] >> A story about 14,000 Australians in a hole in the Libyan desert in 1941 turns out to be a story lots of people around the world care about. If you're finding what I'm doing here worth your time, subscribing is the single thing that helps most. It tells YouTube this kind of careful, slow, honest work has an audience. It tells me to keep going.

[00:13:45]And if you have family history in any of this, a grandfather at Tobruk, a great uncle in the Africa Corps, an Italian relative in the Ariete Division, the comment section [music] is always the best conversation I have all week.

[00:13:59]Right, back to the letters. By the middle of May 1941, um Rommel is writing to Lucie about exhaustion.

[00:14:07]Not his enemies' exhaustion, his own.

[00:14:10]The letter of the 15th of May talks about the heat, about the Ghibli, the hot south wind that comes off the desert in the spring and fills everything with fine sand, [music] and about the fact that he has had to postpone operations because his men cannot continue at the tempo he wanted.

[00:14:26]He writes with a kind of surprise about the supply situation. He is dependent on the Italian merchant marine to get fuel and ammunition from Italy to Tripoli and on trucks to get it from Tripoli to the front, a distance of roughly 1,600 km.

[00:14:40]The British and Australian submarines and aircraft out of Malta were taking a steady toll on the shipping. The desert was taking a steady toll on the trucks.

[00:14:49]Rommel had more tanks on paper than he had in serviceable condition. And every day he was not taking Tobruk was another day the British inside Tobruk were getting reinforcements and supplies by sea through the harbor his artillery could not close. That's the central strategic point about Tobruk that often gets lost and I want to put it plainly, Rommel could not advance on Egypt with Tobruk in his rear. The port was too dangerous a base for raiding, the garrison was too aggressive.

[00:15:19]>> [music] >> The 2/25th Australian patrols out of the perimeter were hitting his supply lines 20 and 30 km back from the wire. As long as Tobruk held, Rommel was pinned in place. The siege wasn't a sideshow, the siege was the campaign. Everything else, Sollum, Halfaya, Bardia, was conditioned on the fact that 14,000 Australians were sitting in a port Rommel could neither take nor ignore and he knew it. In a letter to Lucie in late June, after the failure of Operation Battleaxe, the British attempt to break through from the Egyptian frontier to relieve Tobruk, which Rommel defeated, he writes with real satisfaction.

[00:16:00]>> [music] >> He has beaten the British in open country, he has destroyed most of their tanks and then, almost immediately, he writes that he cannot exploit the victory because he has to keep the bulk of his force watching Tobruk. He writes it not with frustration at the Australians, but with frustration at his own position. The thing he cannot do, the thing the [music] garrison is preventing him from doing. A victorious commander writing to his wife explaining why he cannot advance.

[00:16:29]>> [music] >> The men inside Tobruk called themselves the rats. The name came, as I'm sure many of you know, from Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce, the Irish-American Nazi propagandist broadcasting from Berlin, who described the garrison as poor desert rats >> [music] >> caught like rats in a trap. The Australians took the name and made it their own. They printed a trench newspaper called the Tobruk Truth. They made medals out of scrap metal in the shape of rats. They developed a culture inside that perimeter that was specifically and identifiably Australian, short, laconic, ironic, [music] bitterly funny, deeply pissed off at Lord Haw-Haw and deeply pissed off at pretty much everyone else, too, but devoted in a way they did not say aloud to the bloke next to them in the post. Morshead, Ming the Merciless, they called him after the Flash Gordon villain, because he was strict about cleanliness, about fire discipline, about patrolling, about everything. Morshead understood that discipline was [music] not the enemy of morale, it was the scaffolding of it. He insisted on hot meals where possible, on personal hygiene, on leave rotation within the perimeter. He moved battalions between front-line posts and rest areas.

[00:17:43]>> [music] >> He made sure the post commanders knew he knew their names.

[00:17:47]The 9th Division before Tobruk had not been considered a particularly exceptional formation. It was the newest of the Australian divisions in the Middle East, the one the 6th and 7th had slightly looked down on. After Tobruk, no one looked down on the 9th. Morshead also did something that I think does not get enough attention and that speaks directly to the question of what Rommel was reading about his opposite number.

[00:18:11]Morshead made the decision very early not to fight on the perimeter as a rigid line. He fought in depth. The forward posts were lightly held. The main line of resistance was behind them. The counterattack forces, infantry with anti-tank guns, British tanks in reserve, were held further back still.

[00:18:31]When the Germans broke through the first line on the 30th of April, they found themselves in a killing zone >> [music] >> rather than a breakthrough. That was a decision. It was a decision that cost the forward battalions terribly. Being in a lightly held forward post when German armor is coming through is not a pleasant posting and Morshead knew it and the men in those posts knew it and they did it anyway. Rommel's war diaries record the shock of it. [music] The Germans were used to break through meaning exploitation. In Tobruk, breakthrough meant ambush. [music] Now, there is a question I have wrestled with for a long time and I want to share it with you honestly because it's the kind of thing where I don't think the record resolves cleanly. The question is how much did [music] Rommel in private come to see Tobruk as his defeat? In his public writings, the dispatches, the post-war notes prepared for a book he was working on when he was forced [music] to take his own life in 1944, he tended to frame Tobruk as a missed opportunity that was nobody's fault in particular. The supply situation, the Italian troops under his command, the Luftwaffe's other commitments, the distance [music] from Tripoli, the weather, these are all things he mentions.

[00:19:45]And they were all real, but [music] in the letters to Lucie and in a handful of private remarks recorded by his staff officers, most notably by Fritz Bayerlein, who later wrote about his time with Rommel. There is something else. There is the sense of a man who understood that he had underestimated his enemy and had not wanted to admit it at the time and could not quite bring himself to admit it later, either. I read the letter of, I think, the 2nd of August 1941.

[00:20:13]I'd want to check the exact date. I'm working from memory here.

[00:20:17]>> [music] >> And I'd rather be slightly wrong on the date and right on the substance than pretend to more certainty than I have.

[00:20:23]And he is talking to Lucie about the siege as something that is wearing on him. Four months in, the Australians are still there, the British relief attempts have failed. His own men are sick with dysentery and jaundice. [music] Tobruk has become, he writes, a place he thinks about constantly, a place he cannot get out of his head. He compares the defenders to a particular kind of opponent he has not encountered before.

[00:20:48]He does not use the word Australian in the letter. He rarely did. He often [music] wrote the English or the British even when the troops were Australian or Indian or South African. But he is writing about Tobruk and the garrison of Tobruk is at [music] that moment still predominantly Australian and he knows it. That letter and others like it is why I cannot quite accept the clean post-war version of Rommel on [music] Tobruk. In public, he was philosophical.

[00:21:17]In private, to his wife, he was frustrated. And he was impressed. And he [music] was, I think this is the right word, haunted. Something else worth mentioning. Rommel's relationship with his Italian allies at Tobruk is a fraught subject, uh and one where the record is particularly unkind to the Italians. Much of it unfairly. The Italian divisions at Tobruk, [music] Trento, Bologna, Brescia, Pavia, Ariete, did a great deal of the static siege work.

[00:21:45]They took casualties the German divisions did not. Rommel in his letters is sometimes dismissive of them. Some of that is the prejudice of his class and his army. Some of it though was operationally specific.

[00:21:58]He had Italian units placed under his command whose equipment was inferior and whose training for desert warfare was, in fairness, less developed than the German units. But I want to be careful not to pass on uncritically the version of Italian performance that comes from German sources with an axe to grind. The Italian soldier at Tobruk on the besieging side was, in many cases, >> [music] >> as exhausted, as badly fed, and as stuck as the man he was besieging. The Australians who patrolled into the Italian sectors at night generally reported that the Italians fought often hard, sometimes very hard, and sometimes broke as any troops in that situation would. This is the kind of place the post-war narrative got simplified and I think it is worth correcting where we can. The withdrawal, when it came, is its own hard story. By August of 1941, the Australian government under Prime Minister Robert Menzies and then from October under John Curtin was pressing Churchill there to withdraw the 9th Division. The reasons were medical and political. Medical, [music] the garrison had been inside the wire for four months. Disease rates were rising, the men were exhausted. Political, Australia's military commitment in the Middle East had been made on the understanding that Australian troops would fight as a coherent Australian force under Australian command. And the government was increasingly uneasy about the strain on the one division committed to the siege. Churchill resisted. The exchange of cables between London and Canberra is sharp, even by the standards of wartime diplomatic correspondence.

[00:23:38]Eventually, Churchill gave way and the 9th Division was withdrawn in three lifts, August, September, October, by destroyers and fast mine layers running into Tobruk Harbor at night under air attack and taking off the Australians battalion by battalion. The 2/13th Battalion was the last to leave and it did so in late October. A British and Polish garrison replaced them. The relief, when it came in December, came through Operation Crusader launched by the 8th Army under General Alan Cunningham later relieved by General Neil Ritchie after Cunningham lost his nerve and the link-up with the Tobruk [music] garrison was made in the first week of December 1941.

[00:24:19]Rommel wrote to Lucie that month about the retreat. The line was no longer holding. The British had put more into Crusader than he had expected. He was going to have to pull back. He was going to have to abandon the siege. He wrote about it with a kind of flat, exhausted honesty that is hard to read. He had been outside Tobruk for 242 days. He had not taken it. And now he was leaving. He did eventually take Tobruk in June of 1942 after a campaign that had seen the 8th Army pushed back across the desert again. Rommel took Tobruk in a single day.

[00:24:54]33,000 Allied troops surrendered including two South African divisions.

[00:25:00]It was the catastrophe Churchill had feared the previous year, but by then the Australians were gone. The Rats of Tobruk had been replaced and the men who held the town in June 1942 were not the men who had held it in April 1941 and the circumstances of the defense were not the same. Rommel took Tobruk, but he never took the Tobruk the Australians held. This is what I want to leave you with, something I've thought about for a while. Rommel's private letters to his wife weren't about Tobruk's later surrender.

[00:25:31]He focused on the 14,000 who held out in 1941, the garrison he couldn't break. He wrote of the 9th Australian Division, tough and aggressive, enduring harsh conditions, sandfly fever, water tasting of petrol, and night patrols owning the desert. Later, reflecting on his African campaign, Rommel called the Australians at Tobruk some of the finest soldiers he'd encountered.

[00:25:56]This wasn't just for public consumption.

[00:25:59]He told his wife the same, a quiet admission after his campaign was lost.

[00:26:04]242 days. Remarkable tenacity, nae, that's what he called it.

[00:26:10]The 9th fought [music] on from Tobruk to El Alamein, suffering heavy casualties, then to the Pacific. These men, young soldiers then, returned home older, known as the Rats of Tobruk, though they'd simply seen themselves as blokes doing a job. Today, a cemetery at Tobruk holds hundreds of Australian graves. The town has since changed hands many times.

[00:26:32]The old wire, ditches, and battlegrounds are now mostly sand. Even the sea seems to have forgotten. But Rommel remembered [music] until his death in 1944, forced by Hitler, he carried the memory of the place he couldn't conquer >> [music] >> and the men who stopped him. His letters offer an honest record of standing outside that perimeter >> [music] >> month after month and being held back.

[00:26:55]Remarkable tenacity.

[00:26:57]He wrote it and for a man like Rommel, that word wasn't given lightly.