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5. The Tunisian Campaign
- The University Press of Kentucky
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Sink, burn, and destroy. Let nothing pass. —Adm. Andrew B. Cunningham RN Allied prospects as of New Year’s Day 1943 were mixed. Although they had lost the race to Tunis, the British had won a major victory in North Africa at El Alamein and were pursuing Rommel’s forces westward toward Tripoli. On January 15 Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery’s Eighth Army forces launched an attack, and four days later the Fifty-first Division entered Homs (now Al Khums) and the Seventh Armored advanced to Tarhuna. Sensing defeat, Rommel ordered his forces out of Tripoli, leaving the veteran Ninetieth Light Brigade as a rear guard to lay mines and arrange demolitions.1 As the Eighth Army bore down on Tripoli, British officials in Cairo grew increasingly concerned that the departing enemy might scuttle vessels at the entrance to Tripoli’s harbor and render it temporarily useless . To forestall such a move, the Royal Navy sent two human torpedo, or “chariot,” teams to Tripoli. Similar to Italian human torpedo teams, British “charioteers” were first organized in the spring of 1942 and made an unsuccessful attack on the German battleship Tirpitz in November before departing the United Kingdom for Malta.2 In their first operation in the Mediterranean in early January 1943, the charioteers were conveyed by the submarines Thunderbolt and Trooper to Palermo, where they were able to affix explosives and sink the cruiser Ulpo Traino and the cargo ship Viminale. Although charioteers were lost or captured, the “experimental” attack on Palermo had paid off—the British human torpedo was neither a cloak-and-dagger toy nor an impractical imitation, but a weapon with a sting.3 CHAPTER 5 THE TUNISIAN CAMPAIGN j-Tomblin 05.qx2 6/30/04 1:09 PM Page 101 The British were hoping the chariots would score a similar success at Tripoli. Again they were carried to their mission to destroy any shipping in the harbor on board the sub Thunderbolt. Lt. Geoff Larkin and Petty Officer Conrad Berey were launched from the sub on January 18 but had to beach themselves when damage to the chariot’s hydroplanes rendered it unable to dive. They scuttled the chariot and after two days in hiding were discovered by the Germans, but they escaped in a truck and eventually made their way back to Tripoli, which had by then been captured by the Eighth Army. The other chariot team, Lt. H.L. Surtee and Chief Engine Room Artificer Stanley Buxton, fared no better. They were able to get near enough to Tripoli to see that the blockship had been scuttled across the harbor entrance. Their mission aborted, the charioteers swam for shore straight into the arms of sentries alerted by an explosion in a gasoline dump. Although British chariot teams were unable to keep the port of Tripoli open, MTB-264, MTB-260, and MTB-313 scored a morale boosting success just outside Tripoli two nights later when they ran a crippled enemy submarine being towed by three tugs. MTB-260 put a torpedo in the Santorre Santarosa, and when Tripoli fell several days later, the submarine was discovered high and dry on a shoal with the evidence of the torpedo clearly visible.4 That day, January 23, 1943, was a memorable one for the British Eighth Army, which had tried and failed so often to reach that sparkling white city on the Gulf of Sirte. Announcing the fall of Tripoli on German radio, German propagandist Lord Haw-Haw boasted that the port would be useless for months. But when the British drove into the city, they were surprised to find that despite months of Allied bombing and Axis demolitions, the city still had the basic necessities of civilization— a functioning electrical plant, telephone exchange, sewer and water systems , and a two-month supply of food. The port, however, was a shambles, thoroughly and deliberately wrecked by the fleeing enemy. Petty Officer Reginald Furness’s minesweeper, HMS Boston, was sent to sweep mines off Tripoli. “We then started to sweep a channel for shipping 30 miles west of Tripoli,” he wrote in his diary, “and have now been sweeping for a week outside Tripoli itself. At night we have heavy air-raids.” After Tripoli’s capture, Furness noted, “Today the first ships entered the harbour. It is blocked by three large enemy merchant vessels but a space has been cleared and we too entered today [February 4, 1943]. This afternoon Winston Churchill visited Tripoli, he has just...