Raid on Bardia

In early 1941, after the big British and Commonwealth victory in Cyrenaica, the military position was soon reversed. Wavell ordered a significant portion of O'Connor's XIII Corps to Greece as part of Operation Lustre in the Battle of Greece. Adolf Hitler responded to the Italian disaster by ordering Unternehmen Sonnenblume (Operation Sunflower), the deployment of the newly formed Afrika Korps as reinforcements to the Italians, to prevent total collapse. The DAK had fresh troops with better equipment and tanks and a charismatic commander. When Rommel arrived in North Africa, along with six Italian divisions which included the Trento and Ariete, his orders were to remain on the defensive.[4][5]

In the first Italo-German offensive, the Axis force raided and quickly defeated the British at El Agheila on 24 March, exploited the success and by 15 April, had pushed the British back to the border at Sollum and besieged Tobruk. The new commander of XIII Corps (now HQ Cyrenaica Command) Lieutenant-General Philip Neame, O'Connor and Major-General Michael Gambier-Parry, commander of the 2nd Armoured Division, were captured. The Western Desert Force HQ took over under Lieutenant-General Noel Beresford-Peirse, who was recalled from East Africa. An armoured brigade group of the 2nd Armoured Division had been used to provide forces for the Greek campaign and the rest of the division in Cyrenaica had ceased to exist. Several Axis attempts to seize Tobruk failed and a front line was formed on the Egyptian border.[6] In April 1941, the plans for the deployment of Layforce were changed and their first operation would be a raid on Bardia.[1]

Despite the limited results and seventy casualties, the raid on Bardia had considerable strategic effect. The Germans diverted the greater part of an armoured brigade from Sollum, where it was beginning to exert heavy pressure on the Western Desert Force and kept it for some time guarding rear areas.[9] Layforce was less fortunate—instead of being used as a commando raiding unit—Layforce was deployed as normal infantry, a role for which they were neither equipped nor trained. As one of the few reserve forces available, they were sent to take part in the Battle of Crete; fighting as the rearguard they lost 600 men before being evacuated.[10] Layforce C Battalion was not sent to Crete but instead to Lebanon, where they lost over 120 men fighting in the battle of the Litani River.[8] The steady drain of manpower without the replacement system of normal British Army regiments meant that Layforce as a unit was left in an ineffective state and was disbanded in July 1941.[11]

The author Evelyn Waugh—who took part in the raid—related in an article he wrote for Life Magazine in November 1941, that the Germans "sent a strong detachment of tanks and armoured cars to repel the imagined invasion". In his diary published in 1976, a very different picture emerged of incompetent execution by the commandos, against virtually no opposition.[12]