They were left to die. 14,000 men, abandoned in the desert, surrounded by the most terrifying army on Earth. And their own commanders didn’t just expect them to lose, they planned on it. In 1941, the world’s greatest generals made a cold, mathematical calculation. They decided the that these men, these fathers, brothers, and sons from the bottom of the world were nothing more than a speed bump for Adolf Hitler.
A sacrifice to buy time for the armies to escape. But they made one fatal mistake. They forgot to tell the Australians. What happened next wasn’t a battle, it was a brawl. It was a scandal that Winston Churchill tried to hide. It was the moment a ragtag group of undisciplined bush mechanics took on the invincible Nazi war machine with stolen guns, jam tin bombs, and pure stubborn spite.
Today, we are opening the files on the siege of Tobruk. We’re going to show you the secret telegrams London didn’t want you to see. We’ll show you how these men turned certain death into the biggest humiliation of the German army. They called them rats. By the end of this video, you’ll know why that became the most honorable title in military history. Buckle up.
This is the story they never expected us to tell. It was the 14th of April, 1941, and the entire North African front was collapsing like a house of cards caught in a brutal sandstorm. German Panzers were rolling east at a terrifying pace, swallowing entire divisions whole as the legendary Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, continued his unbroken streak of victories since arriving on the continent.
British commanders were issuing frantic retreat orders that changed by the hour, while supply lines were cut and communication posts fell silent one after another in a chaotic domino effect. In the middle of this catastrophic avalanche of defeat, stood the tiny Libyan port of Tobruk, surrounded on three sides by the most feared armored force on Earth.
Inside that crumbling perimeter with barely enough ammunition to last a week, sat 14,000 Australian soldiers who had just received the most insane directive of the entire Second World War. Do not retreat, do not withdraw, and hold this port at all costs, no matter what comes over that horizon. But this was only the beginning of a nightmare that would test the limits of human endurance.
The sheer scale of the disaster unfolding across the desert was almost impossible to comprehend for the men on the ground. Just weeks earlier, the allies had been celebrating victories, but now the horizon was black with the smoke of burning vehicles and the dust of a retreating army. The roads leading east were clogged with trucks, ambulances, and demoralized troops fleeing for their lives, desperate to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the relentless German advance.
Amidst this scene of total disintegration, the Australians in Tobruk were the only ones not moving, anchoring themselves in the sand like a rusted nail that refused to be pulled out. They watched as their allies disappeared into the distance, leaving them isolated in a hostile landscape that offered no cover, no water, and absolutely no mercy.
The silence that followed the retreat was deafening, broken only by the distant rumble of approaching tanks that signaled the arrival of a predator who had never known defeat. However, the true horror of their situation was not just the enemy in front of them, but the cold calculation happening behind their backs.
The order to stand and fight came directly from the very top of the British command structure, relayed by General Archibald Wavell, the commander-in-chief of the Middle East, with the full and explicit backing of Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself. Tobruk had to hold, not because anyone believed it could be saved, but because it was the last major deepwater port standing between Rommel and the vital Suez Canal.
If Tobruk fell, Rommel would secure a direct supply route for his Panzers, allowing him to push forward with unlimited fuel and ammunition. If he got that port, Egypt would fall, the Suez Canal would be severed, and potentially the entire Allied position in the Mediterranean would collapse within weeks. The strategic logic was brutal and coldly mathematical, demanding that someone stay behind to absorb the full crushing weight of the Africa Corps, while the rest of the Allied forces regrouped hundreds of kilometers to the east. That
someone turned out to be the 9th Australian Division, along with elements of the 18th Brigade and a scattering of British artillery units. But make no mistake about who was being asked to pay the ultimate price. Yet a secret calculation in London suggested that their sacrifice had already been written off before the first shot was fired.
Um British intelligence officers privately estimated that Tobruk would hold for no more than 48 hours once Rommel committed his full force to the attack. 48 hours was the lifespan London had assigned to 14,000 men. Some senior staff officers in Cairo openly referred to the garrison as a sacrificial pawn, a necessary loss to buy a few precious days for the greater good of the British Empire.
The Australians were seen as expendable in the grand chess game of desert warfare, or so the thinking went in the air-conditioned headquarters far from the blistering heat and flies of the front lines. These intelligence officers had made a fatal miscalculation by measuring Tobruk’s chances using conventional military arithmetic, counting tanks, counting guns, and counting supply tonnage.
They looked at the maps, saw the overwhelming superiority of the German forces, and concluded that resistance was futile. What they failed to count was something far more dangerous and unpredictable than any weapon in the German arsenal. They failed to measure the sheer, reckless, unbreakable stubbornness of Australian diggers who had just been told they were expected to lose.
And that single error in judgment would soon turn the tide of the entire war in North Africa. The betrayal felt by the men on the ground was palpable, a bitter pill to swallow as they realized they had been left to face the wrath of the Wehrmacht alone. Rumors began to circulate in the trenches that they had been abandoned, that the Royal Navy would not be coming back, and that their own government back in Australia had been kept in the dark about the severity of their situation.
The feeling of isolation was absolute, compounded by the harsh reality of their environment. The desert around Tobruk was a barren wasteland of rock and sand, scoured by winds that could strip the paint off a truck and bake a man alive in his uniform. There were no natural defenses, no mountains to hide behind, and no forest to provide cover.
There was only the flat, unforgiving Earth and the enemy who now encircled them completely. Every soldier knew that if the perimeter was breached, there would be nowhere to run, no rear guard to fall back on, and no rescue coming from the east. They were trapped in a cage with a tiger, and the only weapon they had was their own refusal to accept defeat.
But just when it seemed the situation could not get any more desperate, the first shells began to fall. It was not just the strategic abandonment that stung, it was the specific political context that made the decision so controversial. Winston Churchill, sitting in his war room in London, viewed the global conflict through the lens of empire, where divisions could be moved and sacrificed like pieces on a board.
He had already stripped North Africa of its best troops to fight a losing battle in Greece, a decision that had directly led to the collapse of the front and the rise of Rommel. Now, to cover that mistake, he was asking the Australians to perform a miracle. General Wavell, under immense pressure to save his own career, passed the order down without hesitation, knowing full well that he was signing the death warrant for thousands of men.
The cynicism of the high command was breathtaking in its scope. They were willing to trade Australian blood for British time, gambling that the ferocious reputation of the diggers would buy them just enough delay to fortify the Egyptian border. It was a gamble made with other men’s lives, decided by aristocrats who would never have to endure the thirst, the flies, and the terror of a Stuka dive bomber screaming down from the sky.
And yet, in the face of this betrayal, the Australian response was not despair, but a cold, hard fury. The men of the 9th Division were not professional soldiers in the British mold. They were volunteers, men from the bush, the farms, and the cities of a young nation that prided itself on mateship and a healthy disrespect for authority.
They did not care about the grand strategies of Churchill or the panicked orders of Wavell. What they cared about was the man standing next to them in the trench. When the realization hit that they were alone, that the Palms had run away and left them to hold the bag, a collective resolve hardened within the garrison.
They would not die for the empire, and they would certainly not die for the generals who had abandoned them. They would fight for each other. This unique Australian spirit, forged in the harsh conditions of the Outback and tempered by the Great Depression, became the unexpected variable that ruined every calculation made in Berlin and London.
They took the broken, rusted defenses of Tobruk and turned them into a fortress, not because they were ordered to, but because they were stubborn enough to believe they could win against the odds. This defiance would soon become the stuff of legend, but first, they had to survive the coming storm. As the sun set on the first terrifying day of the siege, the reality of their position became clear.
The Germans were not just outside the wire, they were everywhere. Rommel’s forces had cut the road to the west, the south, and the east, leaving the sea as the only lifeline, a a lifeline that was currently being pounded by the Luftwaffe. The perimeter itself was a joke, a series of shallow ditches and crumbling concrete bunkers left behind by the Italians, stretching for nearly 50 km around the port.
It was too long for the number of men available to defend it, leaving gaps that had to be covered by aggressive patrolling and sheer bluff. The equipment was just as bad. Tanks were broken down, artillery pieces were short of shells, and the anti-tank defenses consisted largely of captured Italian guns that were notoriously unreliable.
By all conventional military standards, Tobruk was indefensible. It was a trap, a killing jar where the enemy could pick them off at leisure. But, the Germans had forgotten one crucial detail about their enemy. The Australians began to work with a frantic energy, digging deeper into the rocky soil, laying thousands of mines, and stringing miles of barbed wire in the dark.
They scavenged everything they could find, turning derelict trucks into pillboxes, and using flattened fuel drums to reinforce their dugouts. The bush mechanics went to work, repairing guns that should have been scrapped years ago, and inventing new ways to kill tanks with limited resources. This was not a passive garrison waiting for the end.
This was an army preparing for a brawl. The sense of betrayal by the high command was channeled into a ferocious desire to make the enemy pay for every inch of ground. Every soldier knew that the eyes of the world were not on them yet, but soon they would be. They were determined that when the history of this war was written, it would not say that the Australians surrendered.
It would say that they stood when everyone else ran. And as the first German probes tested the line, the world was about to find out exactly what happens when you corner your rat. But, while the soldiers in the trenches were preparing to sell their lives dearly, the men in the command tents were already writing their eulogies. British intelligence officers, analyzing the situation from the safety of Cairo, privately estimated that Tobruk would hold for no more than 48 hours once Rommel committed his full force to the attack.
48 hours was the precise lifespan London had assigned to 14,000 men. Some senior staff officers openly referred to the garrison as a sacrificial pawn, a necessary loss to buy a few precious days for the greater good of the British Empire. The Australians were seen as expendable in the grand chess game of desert warfare, or so the thinking went in the air-conditioned headquarters, far from the blistering heat and flies of the front lines.
These intelligence officers had made a fatal miscalculation by measuring Tobruk’s chances using conventional military arithmetic, counting tanks, counting guns, and counting supply tonnage. They looked at the maps, saw the overwhelming superiority of the German forces, and concluded that resistance was futile. What they failed to count was something far more dangerous and unpredictable than any weapon in the German arsenal.
They failed to measure the sheer, reckless, unbreakable stubbornness of Australian diggers who had just been told they were expected to lose. And that single error in judgment would soon cost Erwin Rommel his perfect record, shatter the myth of German invincibility in the desert, and create a legend that burns white-hot to this very day.
To understand why those 14,000 Australians did what they did, and how they pulled off what military historians still call one of the most audacious defensive stands of the 20th century, we need to rewind the clock just a few weeks. We must look at the disaster that made the sacrifice of Tobruk necessary in the first place. Back when the British were riding high in North Africa, in February of 1941, the British had been celebrating a string of victories that seemed to signal the end of the war in the desert.
Operation Compass, launched the previous December, had been a stunning success that saw the Western Desert Force smash the Italian 10th Army and capture over 130,000 prisoners in just 10 weeks. Entire Italian divisions surrendered en masse, and the road to Tripoli seemed wide open, with confidence in Cairo reaching sky-high levels as officers drafted plans for a complete liberation of Libya.
The war in the desert appeared to be all but won until a single political decision changed everything. However, Winston Churchill then made one of the most controversial moves of the war, ordering a massive diversion of troops from North Africa to Greece, where a German invasion was imminent. Experienced divisions were pulled off the front line and shipped across the Mediterranean, leaving behind a skeleton force of under-equipped and exhausted units to hold the ground they had just won.
This was exactly the opening Adolf Hitler had been waiting for. And on the 12th of February, 1941, a relatively unknown German general named Erwin Rommel arrived in Tripoli with the advanced elements of what would become the legendary Afrika Korps. Rommel had strict orders from Berlin to hold a defensive line and wait for reinforcements, but he ignored those orders within days.
On the 31st of March, Rommel launched a lightning offensive that caught the weakened British completely off guard. What followed was a catastrophe of staggering proportions that no one in London had anticipated. The British 2nd Armoured Division was shattered in the onslaught. Generals were captured in their own command posts, and the fortress of Mechili fell with terrifying speed.
Benghazi was abandoned without a fight, and in barely 2 weeks, Rommel recaptured nearly every square kilometer that the British had spent 3 months fighting for. The speed of the collapse was breathtaking, sending shockwaves all the way to London as Churchill fumed and the war cabinet spiraled into crisis. On the ground in Libya, thousands of Allied soldiers were streaming eastward in disorganized columns, desperately trying to stay ahead of Rommel’s advancing Panzers.
It was in this atmosphere of total panic that the Australian garrison in Tobruk received its final orders. You are staying, everyone else is leaving, and you are the cork in the bottle that must stop the entire thing from spilling over. But, as the dust settled, a strange and eerie silence fell over the desert, signaling the calm before the storm.
Inside the perimeter of Tobruk, the Australians were not panicking like their British counterparts. Instead, they were digging in with a grim determination that baffled their allies. The 9th Division under the command of the formidable Major General Leslie Morshead began to transform the dilapidated Italian defenses into a fortress of unparalleled resilience.
Morshead, a strict disciplinarian known to his men as Ming the Merciless, made it clear that there would be no surrender and no retreat. He told his commanders that there would be no Dunkirk here, and if they had to get out, they would fight their way out. The diggers, many of whom were veterans of the First World War or hardened men from the Australian bush, took this to heart and began to lay mines, string barbed wire, and prepare for the inevitable German assault.
They scavenged every piece of scrap metal, every broken vehicle, and every abandoned weapon they could find, turning the desert refuse into a deadly arsenal. Little did they know, their ingenuity was about to be tested against the finest tanks in the world. As Rommel’s forces approached the perimeter, the German commander was confident that this rabble of colonials would crumble just as easily as the British and French had before them.
He sent probing attacks against the outer defenses, expecting to find weak points that his Panzers could exploit with ease. Instead, his tanks were met with a ferocious barrage of artillery fire and anti-tank rounds that seemed to come from nowhere. The Australians had mastered the art of camouflage and deception, hiding their guns until the last possible second, and unleashing hell on the unsuspecting Germans.
Rommel was stunned by the ferocity of the resistance, noting in his diary that the Australians were fighting with a skill and tenacity he had never encountered before. This was not the disorganized retreat he had been promised. This was a well-coordinated and lethal defense that was bleeding his forces dry with every attempted advance.
And then, the psychological war began in earnest. The German propaganda machine, led by the infamous Lord Haw-Haw, began broadcasting nightly messages to the defenders of Tobruk, taunting them with insults and threats of annihilation. He called them the rats of Tobruk, claiming they were caught in a trap from which there was no escape.
The intention was to break their morale, to make them feel isolated and hopeless in the face of overwhelming odds. But, the Australians, with their characteristic dark humor, embraced the insult and wore it as a badge of honor. They began to call themselves the rats, painting the image of a rodent on their vehicles and equipment, and even creating unofficial medals out of scrap metal to commemorate their status.
Far from breaking their spirit, the taunts only served to unite the garrison and strengthen their resolve to prove the Germans wrong. But, the real test was yet to come. And it would happen under the cover of darkness. Realizing that daylight attacks were suicidal against the entrenched Australian artillery, Rommel shifted his tactics to night assaults, hoping to catch the defenders off guard.
But, the Australians were masters of the night, conducting aggressive patrols into no-man’s land to gather intelligence, capture prisoners, and sow chaos in the German lines. These patrols were terrifyingly effective, often creeping up on German positions in total silence, wearing woolen socks over their boots to muffle the sound of their footsteps.
They would strike with bayonets and grenades, disappearing back into the darkness before the enemy could react. The Germans soon learned to fear the night, knowing that the rats were out there, watching and waiting for any mistake. The psychological toll on the besiegers began to mount as sleep became impossible and paranoia set in among the ranks of the Africa Corps.
Rommel was furious and he decided it was time to crush these upstarts once and for all. He planned a massive coordinated assault involving the full might of his Panzer divisions and the elite infantry of the Africa Corps intended to break the Tobruk perimeter wide open. The attack was launched with a deafening artillery barrage that shook the ground for miles, followed by waves of tanks and infantry surging forward.
But Morshead had anticipated this move and had prepared a deadly surprise for the attackers. Instead of trying to stop the tanks at the perimeter, the Australian infantry allowed the Panzers to pass through their lines, separating them from their supporting infantry. Once the tanks were isolated inside the perimeter, they were engaged by anti-tank guns and field artillery from all sides, while the Australian infantry emerged from their dugouts to engage the German foot soldiers in brutal close quarters combat. The result was a slaughter that
would go down in history. Cut off from their infantry support, the German tanks were picked off one by one, turning the desert into a graveyard of burning steel. The German infantry, stripped of their armored cover, were mowed down by machine gun fire and bayonet charges. For the first time in the war, the mighty Blitzkrieg tactics that had conquered Europe had failed.
Rommel was forced to call off the attack, leaving dozens of his precious tanks burning on the battlefield. The myth of German invincibility had been shattered, not by a great superpower, but by a defiant garrison of Australians who refused to play by the rules. The news of the victory at Tobruk spread like wildfire across the world, providing a much-needed morale boost to the allies and proving that the German war machine could be stopped.
But the siege was far from over and the suffering was only just beginning. Nope. For the next 8 months, the defenders of Tobruk would endure constant shelling, aerial bombardment, and the torment of the desert environment. They lived in holes in the ground plagued by flies, fleas, and the constant grit of sand in their food and water.
Water was rationed strictly and fresh food was a luxury they could only dream of. Yet, through it all, their spirit remained unbroken. They developed a unique culture of survival, creating underground hospitals, workshops, and even a newspaper to keep morale high. The rats became a symbol of defiance, a beacon of hope in a dark time, and their stubborn resistance tied up vital German resources that were desperately needed elsewhere.
It was a standoff that frustrated Hitler himself. The siege of Tobruk became a personal obsession for Rommel, who could not believe that a ragtag group of colonials was holding up his entire campaign. He threw everything he had at the fortress, launching attack after attack, but each time he was repelled with heavy losses.
The Australians had turned Tobruk into a thorn in the side of the Axis powers, a strategic nightmare that disrupted their supply lines and prevented them from advancing on Egypt. The world watched in awe as the months dragged on and the rats continued to hold out against impossible odds.
It was a testament to the power of the human spirit and the unbreakable bond of mateship that defined the Australian soldier. And just when it seemed they could take no more, a political storm erupted in London. The Australian government, led by Prime Minister John Curtin, became increasingly concerned about the welfare of the 9th Division.
They felt that their men were being used as cannon fodder by the British command and demanded their withdrawal from Tobruk. This led to a heated standoff between Curtin and Churchill, with the Australian leader refusing to back down. After months of tense negotiations, the decision was finally made to relieve the garrison.
Under the cover of darkness, the Royal Navy began the perilous operation of evacuating the exhausted Australians and replacing them with fresh troops. It was a dangerous mission with ships running the gauntlet of German bombers and submarines, but slowly the rats were brought home. But they left behind a legacy that would never be forgotten.
When the last Australian soldier left Tobruk in October 1941, they had held the fortress for 242 days. They had defied the might of the German army, humiliated Erwin Rommel, and proven to the world that the Axis powers were not invincible. The siege of Tobruk remains one of the most celebrated chapters in Australian military history, a story of courage, resilience, and the triumph of the underdog.
The Rats of Tobruk are remembered not just as soldiers, but as legends who stood firm when the rest of the world was falling apart. Their sacrifice and determination saved the Middle East from falling into Nazi hands and changed the course of the Second World War forever. And so, the legend of the rats lives on. But to turn a crumbling port into an impenetrable fortress, the 9th Division needed more than just courage.
They needed a leader who was as tough as the land they were defending. Enter Major General Leslie Morshead, a man whose reputation for strict discipline had earned him the terrifying nickname Ming the Merciless among his own troops. Morshead was not interested in the gentlemanly conduct of war, he was interested in survival, and he knew that the only way to survive Rommel was to be more aggressive than the Germans themselves.
On his very first day in command of the garrison, he gathered his officers and delivered a message that would define the entire siege. “There will be no Dunkirk here,” he told them, his voice cold and steady. “If we have to get out, we shall fight our way out. There is to be no surrender and no retreat.
” This was not just a speech, it was a promise, and Morshead backed it up with a brutal training regime that turned his volunteers into the most lethal fighting force in North Africa. However, the battlefield he inherited was a disaster waiting to happen. The Italian defenses around Tobruk were a joke, a series of shallow unconnected ditches and crumbling concrete bunkers that had been neglected for months.
The barbed wire was rusted and full of gaps, the anti-tank ditches were filled with sand, and the minefields were unmapped and dangerous to friend and foe alike. Morshead looked at this mess and ordered every man from the cooks to the clerks to pick up a shovel. For weeks, the garrison worked under the blistering sun and the cover of darkness, digging deeper, laying thousands of new mines, and stringing miles of fresh wire.
They didn’t just repair the defenses, they reinvented them, creating a complex web of interlocking fire zones that would funnel any attacker into a deadly kill box. But the most ingenious part of their preparation was not what they built, but what they scavenged. The {underscore} {quote} {underscore} four {underscore} of the 9th Division scoured the desert for abandoned Italian artillery, broken trucks, and even downed aircraft, stripping them for parts and turning scrap metal into functioning weapons. They would need
every single one of those weapons because Rommel was not planning to wait. On the 13th of April, 1941, just 1 day before the official {quote} six of the siege, the German commander launched his first major assault, confident that he could crush the Australians with a single overwhelming blow. This was the beginning of the {underscore} {quote} {underscore} seven, {underscore} a ferocious clash that would set the tone for the entire campaign.
Rommel sent the 5th Light Division, his elite Panzer unit, charging towards the southern sector of the perimeter, expecting the defenders to break and run at the sight of his tanks. It was a classic Blitzkrieg tactic that had worked in Poland, France, and across the deserts of Libya, relying on speed and terror to paralyze the enemy.
But as the German tanks roared towards the Australian lines, something strange happened. The Australian infantry did not run. They did not even fire. They simply stayed in their holes, hidden in the dust, and waited. What happened next was a tactical masterstroke that stunned the German High Command. Morshead had drilled his men to do the unthinkable, to let the tanks pass.
As the Panzers rolled over the Australian trenches, the infantry remained hidden, holding their fire until the steel monsters had rumbled past. Then, as the German infantry followed behind the tanks, expecting the way to be clear, the Australians popped up from the ground like ghosts. They unleashed a withering storm of machine gun fire and grenades, cutting down the German foot soldiers and separating them from their armored support.
Suddenly, Rommel’s tanks were alone inside the perimeter, stripped of their infantry protection and blind to the dangers around them. That was when the Australian artillery opened up. Anti-tank guns, field artillery, and even captured Italian cannons began to pound the isolated Panzers from every direction, turning the break through into a slaughter.
The German tanks, now panicked and confused, tried to retreat, but they found their escape route blocked by the very infantry they had just bypassed. For the first time in the war, the unstoppable Blitzkrieg had hit a brick wall. The defeat was humiliating for Rommel, who lost 17 of his precious tanks in a single morning.
But for the Australians, the victory came at a steep price. In the chaos of the battle, individual acts of heroism became the difference between holding the line and total collapse. One such act belonged to Corporal Jack Edmondson, a 26-year-old farmer from New South Wales, who would become the first hero to Brook.
During the height of the German attack on the night of the 13th of April, a group of German infantry broke through the wire near post R33, threatening to flank the Australian position. Edmondson, despite being wounded in the neck and stomach by a burst of machine gun fire, refused to be evacuated. Instead, he led a countercharge against the enemy, charging headlong into the darkness with his bayonet fixed.
His final moments were a testament to the sheer grit of the Digger spirit. Bleeding heavily and barely able to stand, Edmondson collided with the German officer leading the attack and engaged him in desperate hand-to-hand combat. He dispatched the officer with his bayonet and then turned to save his platoon commander, who was being overwhelmed by two other German soldiers.
Edmondson killed both of them, clearing the trench and forcing the remaining Germans to flee before finally collapsing from his wounds. He was carried back to the aid post by his mates, but the damage was too severe and he passed away the next morning on the 14th of April. For his magnificent courage and devotion to duty, Jack Edmondson was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest military honor in the British Empire.
His sacrifice was not in vain. The line had held and the Germans had been thrown back, bloody and bruised, but while the Easter battle was a tactical victory, the strategic nightmare was only just beginning. Rommel, furious at his first defeat, realized that he could not take Tobruk by force alone, so he decided to starve the defenders out.
The siege settled into a brutal war of attrition and the conditions inside the perimeter began to deteriorate rapidly. This was the beginning of life in hell, a daily struggle against an enemy that was just as deadly as the Germans, the desert itself. The heat was relentless, soaring to 50° C during the day, baking the men in their shallow dugouts and turning the metal of their weapons into burning irons.
Then, as soon as the sun went down, the temperature would plummet, freezing the sweat on their bodies and leaving them shivering in the dark. But the heat was nothing compared to the flies. Millions of them swarmed over everything, covering the food, crawling into eyes and mouths and turning every scratch into a festering sore. Desert sores became a common affliction, painful ulcers that refused to heal in the unsanitary conditions, leaving men covered in bandages and constantly fighting off infection.
And then there was the water, or rather the lack of it. Water was rationed strictly to 1 gallon per man per day, but that gallon had to cover everything, drinking, cooking, washing, and cooling the engines of the trucks. And the water they did get was often salty and foul-tasting, drawn from brackish wells that were little better than seawater.
Dysentery swept through the ranks, leaving men weak and dehydrated. Yet they were expected to stand guard, dig trenches, and fight off German attacks. It was a test of psychological endurance as much as physical strength, and the Germans knew it. This was when the propaganda war began in earnest, with the voice of William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, drifting over the radio waves every night.
He taunted the defenders, telling them they were forgotten, that their wives were cheating on them back home, and that they were living like rats in a trap. But the Germans had made a critical error in their choice of insults. Instead of being demoralized by the name Rats of Tobruk, the Australians adopted it with a perverse sense of pride.
They reasoned that if they were rats, then they were the toughest, meanest rats the world had ever seen, and they were going to make the German eagle regret ever trying to catch them. The name became a badge of honor, a symbol of their shared suffering and their refusal to break. Soldiers began to fashion unofficial medals out of scrap metal from downed German planes, engraving them with the image of a rat, and wearing them on their chests alongside their official ribbons.
The rats developed a unique culture of defiance, a dark humor that allowed them to laugh in the face of death. They held concerts in bomb-proof caves, printed their own newspaper called Digger Diary, and even organized sports days during lulls in the shelling. This camaraderie, this unbreakable bond of mateship, became the glue that held the garrison together when everything else was falling apart.
But survival required more than just morale, it required ingenuity. Cut off from regular supplies, the Australians had to become masters of scrounging, a polite word for theft and improvisation. They stole fuel from abandoned vehicles, raided Italian supply dumps for food, and repurposed captured weapons to bolster their firepower.
The bush artillery was born, a collection of oddball guns manned by cooks, clerks, and drivers who had no formal artillery training, but learned on the job. They used Italian field guns, German anti-tank rifles, and even old British naval cannons, firing whatever ammunition they could find. But the most famous invention of the siege was the jam tin bomb.
Lacking proper grenades, the diggers filled empty jam tins with explosive amatol, scrap metal, and nails, inserted a short fuse, and sealed it with clay or cement. These crude but deadly devices were thrown by hand or launched from makeshift catapults, terrifying the German infantry, who never knew what was coming next.
This ingenuity extended to their underground world as well. To escape the constant shelling and the Stuka dive bombers that screamed down from the sky every day, the Australians went underground. They dug elaborate tunnel systems, underground hospitals, and workshops where they could repair their equipment in safety. These catacombs became a second city beneath the sand, a place where men could sleep, eat, and plan their next move without fear of being blown to pieces.
It was a troglodyte existence, living like animals in the dirt, but it kept them alive. The Germans pounded the surface with thousands of tons of high explosives, turning the port into a moonscape of craters and twisted metal, but the rats were safe below, waiting for the sun to go down so they could emerge and strike back.
Because when the sun set, the desert belonged to the Australians. Rommel had hoped that the night would provide his men with the chance to rest, but the Australians had other ideas. This was the patrol war, a campaign of psychological terror waged in the darkness of no man’s land. Every night small groups of Australian soldiers would slip out of their perimeter wire and creep towards the German lines.
They wore woolen socks over their boots to muffle the sound of their footsteps on the rocky ground, moving like shadows among the dunes. Their mission was to gather intelligence, capture prisoners, and keep the enemy in a constant state of anxiety. They would crawl for hours, inching forward on their bellies until they were close enough to hear the Germans talking in their trenches.
Then they would strike. A sudden burst of submachine gun fire, a few grenades tossed into a dugout, and then they would vanish back into the night before the Germans could react. The effect on German morale was devastating. German prisoners captured during these raids spoke of a growing fear of the {quote} 32, who seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
They could not sleep, they could not relax, and they could never be sure that the shadow moving in the distance wasn’t a digger with a bayonet. Rommel’s troops, who were used to fighting conventional battles in daylight, found themselves fighting a guerrilla war against an enemy who refused to play by the rules. The Australians dominated no man’s land to such an extent that they regarded it as their own territory, referring to deep raids into enemy lines as going for a walk in the park.
This aggressive patrolling not only kept the Germans off balance, but also provided Morshead with a constant stream of intelligence about Rommel’s plans, allowing him to anticipate attacks and move his limited reserves to the threatened sectors. But the defenders could not fight on courage alone.
They needed bullets, beans, and bandages. The only lifeline to the outside world was the sea, and keeping that lifeline open was the job of the Royal Navy and the Royal Australian Navy. This was the {quote} 35, a nightly gauntlet of death run by destroyers and small merchant ships that brought supplies into the besieged port and took out the wounded.
It was a mission of suicidal danger. The harbor was constantly mined by German aircraft, and the approach channel was within range of Axis artillery. Ships had to arrive under the cover of darkness, unload their cargo in a frenzy of activity, and depart before dawn exposed them to the Luftwaffe. The wrecks of ships that didn’t make it littered the harbor, their masts sticking out of the water as grim reminders of the cost of the Spud siege.
One of the most famous victims of the Spud Run was the destroyer HMS Waterhen. Affectionately known as the Chook by the Australians, the Waterhen had been a workhorse of the run, making trip after trip to keep the rats alive. But on the 30th of June, her luck finally ran out. Struck by a bomb from a German Stuka, she capsized and sank, taking her precious cargo to the bottom of the Mediterranean.
The loss of the Waterhen was a blow to the garrison, who had come to see the little ship as a symbol of their connection to the outside world. Yet, the run continued. Other ships took her place, their crews knowing full well that they were sailing into a trap, but doing it anyway because they knew that without them Tobruk would fall in a week.
The bond between the rats and the sailors became legendary, with the soldiers often sharing their meager rations with the navy crews and the sailors smuggling small luxuries like cigarettes and chocolate to the men in the trenches. But, as the summer dragged on, a new crisis was brewing, one that would threaten the garrison more than any German tank.
But, as the summer of 1941 dragged on, a new crisis was brewing in the salient, a bulge in the defensive line where the fighting was most intense. This was the killing ground, a chaotic jumble of trenches and shell holes where the opposing forces were often separated by only a few meters. The Germans, desperate to break the stalemate, threw everything they had at this sector, launching wave after wave of infantry assaults back by artillery barrages that turned the ground into a moonscape.
For the Australians manning these positions, life became a blur of dust, noise, and death. Sleep was impossible, and every movement drew sniper fire. Yet, they held. They fought with a ferocity that bordered on madness, often engaging the enemy in brutal hand-to-hand combat with bayonets and grenades.
The salient became a symbol of the entire siege, a place where the irresistible force of the German army met the immovable object of Australian stubbornness. However, the cost of holding this line was becoming unbearable. Casualties were mounting at an alarming rate, and the physical condition of the men was deteriorating rapidly.
The constant shelling, the lack of fresh food, and the relentless heat were taking their toll. Dysentery and desert sores were rampant, and many men were suffering from what was then called bomb happiness, a form of shell shock caused by the incessant noise and stress. General Morshead, watching his division slowly bleed to death, knew that something had to give.
He sent urgent messages to Cairo demanding reinforcements or relief, but the response was always the same. Hold on, help is coming. But, help seemed further away than ever, and morale began to waver for the first time. The feeling of abandonment, which had been simmering since April, now boiled over into open anger. And that anger was echoed in the halls of power in Australia.
Prime Minister John Curtin, a man who had always been skeptical of British strategy, was now furious. He saw the 9th Division as Australia’s last line of defense against a Japanese invasion that seemed increasingly likely. He could not afford to lose his best troops in a dusty port in North Africa while his own country was left vulnerable.
Curtin sent a series of blistering telegrams to Winston Churchill demanding the immediate withdrawal of the Australian garrison. Churchill, who was focused on the bigger picture of the war in Europe, was appalled. He argued that pulling the Australians out would be a logistical nightmare and could lead to the collapse of the entire front.
The two leaders locked horns in a bitter political struggle that threatened to tear the alliance apart. For weeks, the fate of the rats hung in the balance, decided not by generals on the battlefield, but by politicians thousands of miles away. Finally, in August, Churchill blinked. Under immense pressure from Curtin and fearing a political backlash in Australia, Churchill reluctantly agreed to relieve the 9th Division.
It was a victory for Australian sovereignty, but for the men in Tobruk, it was a bittersweet moment. They were leaving the place where they had fought, bled, and buried their mates for five long months. The relief operation, code-named Supercharge, began in September under the cover of darkness. It was a massive logistical undertaking involving the Royal Navy and the Polish Carpathian Brigade, who were to replace the Australians.
The first ships arrived on the night of the 19th of September, slipping into the harbor like ghosts. The exhausted diggers, many of whom could barely walk, were loaded onto destroyers while the fresh Polish troops disembarked to take their place in the trenches. I But, the Germans were not going to let them leave without a fight.
As the convoys made their nightly runs, the Luftwaffe intensified its attacks on the harbor. Ships were bombed and strafed, and the sea became a graveyard for vessels trying to escape the trap. One particularly tragic incident occurred on the 25th of October when the fast minelayer HMS Latona was struck by a bomb while carrying troops from the 2/13th Battalion.
The ship caught fire and began to sink rapidly. In the chaos, men were trapped below decks or forced to jump into the oil-slicked water. Despite the heroic efforts of the crew and the other ships in the convoy, many soldiers and sailors were lost. It was a cruel twist of fate that men who had survived months of siege warfare were killed just as they were on the verge of freedom.
By the end of October, the majority of the 9th Division had been evacuated, leaving behind a small rearguard to help the new garrison settle in. When the last Australian soldier finally boarded a ship and watched the lights of Tobruk fade into the distance, they left behind a legend that would never die. They had held the port for 242 days, the longest siege in British military history.
They had defied the might of the German army, humiliated Erwin Rommel, and approved to the world that the Axis powers were not invincible. The rats had done what no other Allied army had managed to do. They had stopped the Blitzkrieg in its tracks. However, the war was far from over for these men. The 9th Division would go on to fight in the decisive Battle of El Alamein, where they would play a crucial role in the final defeat of the Africa Corps.
Then, they would return home to face a new enemy in the jungles of New Guinea, fighting the Japanese with the same tenacity they had shown in the desert. But, for the rest of their lives, they would always be known as the Rats of Tobruk. The name, once intended as an insult, became a badge of honor worn with fierce pride.
It symbolized a unique brand of Australian courage, the ability to endure, to improvise, and to look after your mates no matter how bad things got. The legacy of Tobruk lives on today in the Anzac tradition. It is remembered every year on Anzac Day, not just as a battle, but as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
The story of the 14,000 men who said no to the most powerful army on Earth continues to inspire new generations. Memorials in Tobruk and across Australia stand as silent witnesses to their sacrifice. But, perhaps the greatest tribute came from their enemy. Years after the war, Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox himself, wrote in his papers, “The Australian troops fought with magnificent tenacity.
Their defense of Tobruk was a masterpiece.” It was the ultimate validation for the men who had been written off as a sacrificial pawn. They were not pawns, they were rats, and they were the best soldiers he ever faced.
