Raid On Bardia
In the meantime, a British battalion was selected for the Bardia raid, with the object of harassing Rommel's line of communication and inflicting as much damage as possible. The attack was conducted on the night of 19/20 April by No. 7 Commando—part of Colonel Robert Laycock's Layforce—and a small detachment of the Royal Tank Regiment aboard the supply ship HMS Glengyle, escorted by the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Coventry. The Australian destroyers HMAS Stuart, Voyager and Waterhen covered the landing of British Commandos. During the raid, a Commando sentry mortally wounded a British officer and one detachment of 67 men were later reported captured in a counter attack on the beaches. 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". However, in his personal diary published in 1976, a very different picture emerged of incompetent execution by the commandos against virtually no opposition.
Read more about this topic: Siege Of Tobruk
Famous quotes containing the words raid on and/or raid:
“Each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“John Brown and Giuseppe Garibaldi were contemporaries not solely in the matter of time; their endeavors as liberators link their names where other likeness is absent; and the peaks of their careers were reached almost simultaneously: the Harper’s Ferry Raid occurred in 1859, the raid on Sicily in the following year. Both events, however differing in character, were equally quixotic.”
—John Cournos (1881–1956)