![]() When the Free French commander brushed off a surrender demand, Luftwaffe fighters and bombers began mercilessly bombing and strafing the tumbledown fortress. Victorious in small unit actions but unable to entirely unhinge the Gazala Line, Rommel fumed at Koenig’s continued grim resistance at Bir Hacheim. Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie, commanding the British Eighth Army, deployed Koenig’s 4,000-man 1st Free French Brigade at the Gazala Line’s southern end, some forty miles deep in the Sahara Desert, at a desolate, crumbling old fort at Bir Hacheim.Ī French African Mortar Crew. Even in tactical defeat, however, the French had won a significant strategic victory.Īs May began, approximately 90,000 German and Italian troops, including 560 tanks, faced about 110,000 British, British imperial and allied troops and 840 tanks along the Gazala Line in Libya south and west of the important port of Tobruk. The French fought hard for two weeks before finally giving way, allowing Rommel’s forces to continue their advance toward the Suez Canal. One of WWII’s most stirring “Forgotten Fights” took place in May 1942 at the North African desert outpost of Bir Hacheim (also Bir Hakeim.) In this encounter, German and Italian forces under the command of Germany’s “Desert Fox,” General Erwin Rommel, faced off against Free French forces, including African colonial troops, under Brigadier General Marie-Pierre Koenig. ![]() ![]() Courtesy of the Imperial War Museums, E 13313. Top Image: French Legionnaires in action, June 1942. ![]()
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