Description
Avenge Tobruk by Brigadier Eric Ponsonby Hartshorn
That the need to “avenge” Tobruk should exist nearly 20 years after it fell to a German attack in World War II must surely rank as one of the strangest anomalies in the annals of war. Yet, as this book records, notwithstanding all the official and unofficial accounts of this episode in the desert war of 1942 Tobruk remains fixed in the minds of the public as a shameful surrender, with all its attendant ignominy, born of rumour and distortion, that treachery, cowardice and lack of discipline were among the motivating factors on the part of the South Africans who were in nominal command of the Fortress at the time though their total forces represented only one-quarter of all the troops fighting in defence of the area.
A secret Court of Enquiry, into the fall of Tobruk, was appointed at the time but its evidence and full findings have never been published. No statesman or military commander of the day has raised his voice to wipe out the unwarranted stigma that has hung, now, for nearly a generation over the fighting qualities of the South African troops.
The author of this book, one of South Africa’s best known and most senior volunteer soldiers (Transvaal Scottish), set himself out to break this conspiracy of silence, to put the record straight with a fearlessness based on conviction. Not only does he give, for the first time, the full story of the last hours of Tobruk as told to him personally by General H. B. Klopper who gave the cease fire order to save the survivors from certain annihilation after the situation had become militarily hopeless, but he has also succeeded in tracking down one of the seven original copies of the evidence and findings of the Court of Enquiry. The relevant extracts are published here.
Tobruk is only one segment of the personal story the author tells of South African exploits in World War II. He has tried to place it in true perspective against the broader background of the courage, the skill and the loyalty of the South Africans that were demonstrated in every theatre of war in which they fought from the rugged mountains of Abyssinia, where they faced enormously superior forces, through the desert and on to Italy.
He tells of a “political pipe dream” that, but for the untimely death of South Africa’s greatest soldier of World War II, General Dan Pienaar, might have written a vastly different and happier chapter in the country’s post-war political history; of the serious disagreements that frequently bedeviled the relationships between South African commanders and their British counter-parts; of the indecisiveness of the British top commanders (in the days before Generals Alexander and Montgomery) that left scores of South African fighting units bewildered and uncertain; and of incidents, hitherto unpublished, involving high personages in the Middle East and in South Africa.
