At Sidi Barrani the assault took three days. At Bardia it took two and a half. This time, at Tobruch, the job was done in one. The pattern was familiar by now. First the thin semicircle of defense around Tobruch was surrounded. Day before the attack, by way of feint, heavy concentrations of vehicles and men were massed east of the town, near the sea. In the night they were stolen away to the point of real attack—a place just by the Bardia road where the Italians, in digging their tank traps, had come to solid rock and dug down only two feet.
At 5:40 a.m. the triple blast of land artillery, air bombs and shelling from ships opened. Sappers went out to grade the tank ditch and kill land mines. Tanks poured through, wagging their tails of infantry behind them. Some Aussies crept ahead under cross-curtain of tank and machine-gun fire to cut barbed-wire entanglements. Then the full power of attack brushed past pillboxes, deployed back and crushed them from behind. That accounted for the outer semicircle. For the inner, the process was the same. By noon both had been broken. By sunset the attackers had pushed eight miles to the heights looking down on Tobruch.
They could have gone in that night, but some of the boys might have got shot. In the morning it was just a kind of parade. The defense was no more spirited than usual, for not a single Italian plane or ship showed itself. Lots of the British vehicles just drove into town on the road.
The cocky Aussies entered Tobruch in a burlesque of glory. Along the way some of them sat down and calmly had a snack of bully beef. In town a previously captured Australian airman in blue trousers, a blue sweater and a British Army cap, who had persuaded many Italians to cease firing, greeted the attackers in the principal square: "Welcome, pals! Come right in—the town's yours." An Aussie soldier hauled down the Italian flag and hauled up his broad-brimmed hat in its place. Another changed the name of the main street from Via Mussolini to Via Ned Kelly—after a famous bush bandit from New South Wales who in his raids on towns defied death by dressing in 97 pounds of iron armor.
The pattern of surrender was familiar, too. Italians rushed around looking for captors (see p. 40). The British advance commander and the Italian admiral in command of the town met in a little shack. The admiral: "The town capitulates. All troops are disarming." The British brigadier: "Please delegate officers immediately to show us the position of every mine in the harbor and the town." About 25,000 men were captured, bringing the total since Dec. 9 to 119,000.
The Italians had tried to destroy everything that might be of use to the attackers. They touched off the damaged 33-year-old, 9,232-ton cruiser San Giorgio, which had been beached to be a permanent antiaircraft battery, with a dynamite blast.
They burned most military records and much of the town itself.