British retake Sollum

On the afternoon of 14 March 1916 British cavalry and two battalions of South African infantry entered Sollum, a small port on the Egyptian-Libyan border. The forces of the Senussi order had left the town in haste, without a fight. The British returned there less than four months after they had withdrawn the Egyptian garrison to Mersa Matruh in November 1915. The same day armoured cars caught up with the fleeing Senussi forces in the desert and took all their artillery.

The march across the plateau

The way had been opened by the victory at Agagia on 26 February. Two days later the Western Frontier Force occupied Sidi Barrani, which became its new base. Supplying it was difficult: the landing place was poor, and German submarines prowled the waters off the coast. By 4 March, however, the navy had managed to land stores, and on 7 March the commander of the force, Major-General William Peyton, moved his headquarters to Sidi Barrani. The shortest route to Sollum ran along the coast, but above the bay rose the steep escarpment of the plateau, on which, according to reports, the Senussi forces stood. Peyton did not want to storm it from below. He decided to outflank the enemy from inland, climb onto the plateau by passes about 30 kilometres south-east of the town and seize the dominating heights himself.

On 9 March Brigadier-General Henry Lukin’s infantry set out, and on 11 March Lord Hampden’s mounted column. The plan soon had to be changed, because the wells at the foot of the escarpment and the cisterns on the plateau turned out to be much poorer than the reports had promised. Lukin climbed onto the plateau on 13 March with only two battalions and a Hong Kong mountain battery, with camels carrying water behind him. The rest of the infantry and the cavalry turned back to the coast road under Peyton’s personal command. On 14 March all three columns met at the Halfaya Pass, about 5 kilometres from Sollum. There was no battle. In the afternoon the town was occupied by the cavalry and the 2nd and 3rd South African Infantry Battalions, and the rest of the troops arrived the next morning, when the first supply ship sailed into the bay. The British official history of the operations in Egypt calls this march remarkable: so large a force had crossed a desert lacking water and forage, about 390 kilometres from the nearest railway station.

The armoured car pursuit

As the cavalry entered the town, the light armoured cars of Major Hugh Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster, were ordered to check the enemy camp at Bir Waer and, if it was empty, to pursue him “with reasonable boldness”. The camp was abandoned. The Senussi commanders evidently believed, as before, that a day’s march into the desert would keep them safe. The hard surface, however, allowed the cars at times to travel at up to 60 kilometres an hour. They passed hundreds of fleeing armed Bedouin without paying them any attention until, according to the official history, about 40 kilometres west of Sollum (Gwatkin-Williams places this clash closer, at Bir Azeiz), they came upon the main enemy force and attacked it at once.

According to the official history, only now could it be seen what Agagia had done to the enemy. The Senussi fighters immediately scattered across the desert. Only a few Turks remained with the guns and machine guns; they defended themselves bravely, but fell under the fire of the oncoming cars. The British captured three guns, all the enemy had on this front, nine machine guns and a quarter of a million rounds, and took 30 prisoners, including two officers. The pursuit continued for a further 16 kilometres. The British themselves lost no one.

The prisoners from the Tara

In abandoned Sollum the British found in one of the Arab houses a letter from Commander R. S. Gwatkin-Williams, commander of the steamer Tara, sunk in November, addressed to the British garrison, of whose evacuation he had not known. The letter and the interrogation of prisoners made it possible to establish where the Senussi were holding the survivors of the Tara and of the transport Moorina: at Bir Hakeim, deep in the Libyan Desert, far beyond the border. Early on the morning of 17 March the Duke of Westminster led a column of armoured cars and ambulances there. He freed 91 exhausted, starving prisoners and brought them back to Sollum.

The recapture of Sollum ended the war with the Senussi on the coast. The Aulad Ali tribe, which had joined the Senussi in the hope of plunder in the Nile Delta, began to surrender en masse, and the unrest around Alexandria clearly subsided. The fighting against the Senussi moved to the oases of the Western Desert. At the beginning of April Lukin’s brigade returned by sea to Alexandria, and from there soon sailed for France.