Battle of Bardia 1941
Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate.
Key facts
| Date | 3 January 1941 – 5 January 1941 | Wikidata |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 1941 | Wikidata P580 (start time) |
| Era | World War II era (1939–1945) | derived from year |
| Location | Libya | Natural Earth (modern borders) |
| Continent | Africa | Natural Earth |
| War / conflict | World War II | Wikidata P361 |
| Coordinates | 31.7600, 25.0950 | Wikidata P625 |
About the battle
The Battle of Bardia was fought between 3 and 5 January 1941, as part of Operation Compass, the first British military operation of the Western Desert campaign of the Second World War. It was the first battle of the war in which an Australian Army formation took part, the first to be commanded by an Australian general and the first to be planned by an Australian staff. The 6th Australian Division (Major General Iven Mackay) assaulted the strongly held Italian fortress of Bardia, Libya, assisted by air support and naval gunfire and under the cover of an artillery barrage. The 16th Australian Infantry Brigade attacked at dawn from the west, where the defences were known to be weak. Sappers blew gaps in the barbed wire with Bangalore torpedoes and filled in and broke down the sides of the anti-tank ditch with picks and shovels. This allowed the infantry and 23 Matilda II tanks of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment to enter the fortress and capture all their objectives, along with 8,000 prisoners.
In the second phase of the operation, the 17th Australian Infantry Brigade exploited the breach made in the perimeter and pressed south as far as a secondary line of defences known as the Switch Line.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Battle of Bardia (revision 1380607401), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; shortened by selecting paragraphs and trimming at a sentence boundary; formatting and citations removed. No text added.
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Browse more: battles in Libya · Africa · World War II era battles