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2 New
offensives, old battlefields By Ronan Thomas
One month on from a
Libyan popular uprising against the regime of
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, opposition forces face a
long, bitter haul. If they can hold on, that is.
After initial stunning reverses following
the first anti-Gaddafi protests on February 16,
forces loyal to the colonel are now fighting back
hard, hitting opposition-held towns in western
Libya whilst simultaneously advancing in the east
along Libya's Gulf of Sidra coastal highways.
In the past week, the pressure has
ratcheted up, sharply. On March 10-11, Gaddafi's
better-equipped forces retook the western town of
Zawiya (50 kilometers west of Tripoli). On March
12, the
eastern oil port of Ras Lanuf
fell. From March 14, the western opposition-held
towns of Zuwara and Misrata (208 kilometers east
of Tripoli) and the eastern port of Brega have all
suffered from Gaddafi's heavy weapons or
airstrikes. Gaddafi's next target appears to be
the town of Ajdabiya, the last obstacle to a
loyalist drive on the key port of Benghazi
(population one million). Both sides claim local
victories; the actual military picture remains
chaotic.
After four weeks, the watching
international community remains divided. The
United States has applied sanctions and deployed
naval forces off the Libyan coast but (after Iraq
and Afghanistan) appears lukewarm on direct
military intervention. Reports from Paris on March
14 suggested that US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton has gone as far as "entering dialogue"
with opposition figures.
The North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the
European Union (EU) have variously called for
humanitarian assistance and applied sanctions
against Libya but little else. Russia, China and
Turkey remain skeptical of the efficacy of direct
foreign-led intervention.
The United
Nations (UN) is split on authorizing military
force in a binding Security Council resolution.
Britain and France (supported in principle by the
Arab League) have recently led more strident calls
for Gaddafi to go, for a no-fly zone over Libya
and for the potential arming of the rebels.
Thus far these calls have been viewed as
an Anglo-French fixation with little wider
international diplomatic and military appetite. As
Libya's civil war continues on its increasingly
bloody course it is reminding many of the
international reluctance to act during the early
stages of the Balkans conflict in the 1990s.
Desert foxes and rats
Meanwhile, the current fighting is
stirring memories of older conflicts and the last
time international forces fought substantial
military action in Libya. Wind the clock back 70
years and a titanic contest between European
armies was in full flow, a mind- numbing series of
desert armored offensives and counter-offensives.
Much of the geography then, along Libya's
Mediterranean coastline and in its desert
hinterland, remains the same, as are the Libyan
(and Egyptian) place names. After all, foreign
armies - from Britain and its Empire, Italy and
Germany - have been in action in Libya before,
most destructively in modern times during World
War II's Western Desert .
The Western
Desert campaigns emblazoned forever the names of
Tripoli, Benghazi, Tobruk, Gazala, Sollum, Bardia,
Sidi Barrani and El Alamein (the latter two across
the border in Egypt) on the pages of military
history. Outstanding British and German military
leaders of the period - most famously Lieutenant
General Bernard Montgomery ("Monty") and Field
Marshal Erwin Rommel (The "Desert Fox") - vied for
control of the self-same Mediterranean coastline
currently under Gaddafi's barrages. Bruising
conflicts? Libya has seen it all before.
Ever since war revisited Libya four weeks
ago, the historical echoes have come thick and
fast.
On March 5, news broke that a small
team of soldiers from Britain's elite special
forces (Special Air Service or SAS) had landed in
eastern Libya on a classified mission. This team
was promptly arrested by local opposition
insurgents and obliged to leave Libya by naval
warship, stinging British governmental and
military pride in the process.
The affair
was particularly embarrassing given that the SAS
owes its proud origins almost entirely to Libya.
It was formed in the country in October 1941,
under the inspirational command of Lieutenant
David Stirling, as a frighteningly effective
behind-the-lines raiding force, harrying their
Italian and German opponents remorselessly across
North Africa.
On March, at an European
Union meeting in Brussels to discuss the potential
of a no-fly zone for Libya, Germany's Foreign
Minister Guido Westerwelle told the press: "We do
not want to get sucked into a war in North
Africa." Given the experiences of Rommel during
1940-1943, who rolled the dice masterfully in
Libya yet ultimately lost, Westerwelle's attitude
is understandable.
Third, it has not
escaped press attention that Gaddafi is a child of
the Western Desert campaign, born in 1942 near the
town of Sirte (on Libya's Gulf of Sidra coast,
halfway between Tripoli and Benghazi). Rommel's
forces swept east through Sirte in January 1942 en
route to take British defenses at El Agheila,
passing through Brega and then on to take Benghazi
on January 29, 1942. This week, Gaddafi may be
leafing through the field marshal's attack manual.
Mediterranean battle theater The
series of major battles in Libya and Egypt during
1940-1943 (collectively known to historians as the
Western Desert or North African Campaign), ranged
over 1,600 kilometers of territory, from the
western Libyan province of Tripolitania to the
eastern province of Cyrenaica and on across the
Libyan Plateau into Egypt, up to the main British
defensive lines at El Alamein, some 60 miles west
of Alexandria and 150 miles short of British
military headquarters in Cairo.
Initially
a contest between Italy and Britain in northern
and eastern Africa, the conflict expanded in
February 1941 with the arrival of elite German
mechanized and infantry divisions - the Afrika
Korps - in support of the Italians. The Afrika
Korps was led by one of Germany's finest military
strategists, General (Field Marshal from June
1942) Rommel.
In strategic terms, the
Western Desert campaign took place as the direct
consequence of Italy's entry into World War II in
June 1940, following the fall of France to Adolf
Hitler's Blitzkrieg. Italy - under Fascist Leader
Benito Mussolini - thus became an Axis power along
with Nazi Germany and with France's defeat saw its
chance to dominate the wider Middle East.
But Libya and Egypt were also key British
imperial strategic interests. With Italy's
opportunistic entry into the war, her existing
colony in Libya, her occupation forces in
Abyssinia and her garrison in parts of Somaliland
(together with her air bases in Sicily) now
directly threatened Britain's own possessions.
These included British Somaliland and
Britain's vital oil supply routes from the Persian
Gulf via the Mediterranean and through the Suez
Canal to the Red Sea (and thence to British
India). If Italy's new allies, Nazi Germany,
assisted her, Britain faced virtual oil starvation
and the prospect of defeat. With the United States
still a bystander and Britain in late 1940 under
mass German attack from the air, she had to act in
the Middle East, fast. Libya and Egypt would be
the crucible.
In August 1940, Italy made
its move. After Britain's Royal Navy destroyed the
Vichy French fleet at Oran, Dakar and Mes el Kebr
on 3 July, Italian divisions invaded British
Somaliland on August 4 and then Egypt on September
13, advancing over 100 kilometers before halting
to fortify their positions. On October 28,
Mussolini also brazenly invaded Greece although
his forces soon bogged down in the teeth of fierce
resistance.
On December 9, 1940, the
British bit back. Britain's senior military
commander in the Middle East, General Sir
Archibald Wavell, launched Operation Compass,
halting the Italian advance into Egypt in its
tracks. Wavell's Western Desert Force then
advanced into Cyrenaica, the eastern coastal
region of Libya. On January 5, 1941, Australian
forces took the town of Bardia. Wavell pushed on,
taking the port of Tobruk from the Italians on
January 22 and turning it into a key British
supply hub.
With two divisions, 6th
Australian and 7th Armored (the 7th were nicknamed
"The Desert Rats" due to their adoption of
divisional badge featuring the jerboa rodent),
Wavell's commanders then went on to prise Benghazi
from the Italians on February 8, 1941. The whole
of Cyrenaica had now been regained by the British.
In just two months fighting the Italians
suffered 150,000 casualties, the loss of 800 guns
and 400 tanks versus British and Empire losses of
around 2,000 men. Mussolini's Italy had now lost
all prospect of carving for herself a new North
East African empire. With Cyrenaica back in
British hands, prime minister Winston Churchill
diverted troops to support Greece against a new
German build-up against her in the Balkans. Wavell
was left with a seriously depleted force in
Libya.
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