were knocked out or broken down and not recovered. The RAF lost 36 aircraft. German losses were 678 men and Italian losses are unknown, with in addition twelve tanks and ten aircraft lost. The British failure led to the sacking of Wavell, the XIII Corps commander, Lieutenant-General Noel Beresford-Peirse and Creagh, the 7th Armoured Division commander. General Claude Auchinleck took over as Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East Command. In September, the Western Desert Force was renamed the Eighth Army. Operation Crusader The Eighth Army (Lieutenant-General Alan Cunningham) conducted Operation Crusader from 18 November to 30 December, aiming to relieve Tobruk and capture eastern Cyrenaica. The Eighth Army planned to destroy Axis armour before committing its infantry but was repulsed several times, culminating in the defeat of the 7th Armoured Division by the at Sidi Rezegh. Rommel ordered the panzer divisions to relieve the Axis positions on the Egyptian border but failed to find the main body of the Allied infantry, which had bypassed the fortresses and headed for Tobruk. Rommel pulled his armour back from the frontier towards Tobruk and achieved several tactical successes, which led Auchinleck to replace Cunningham with Major-General Neil Ritchie. The Axis forces then withdrew to the west of Tobruk to the Gazala Line and then back to El Agheila, leaving the Axis garrisons at Bardia and Sollum isolated and which surrendered later. The British suffered 17,700 casualties against 37,400 Axis, many of them taken prisoner when the garrisons left behind at Halfaya and Bardia surrendered. Tobruk had been relieved, Cyrenaica recaptured and airfields reoccupied to cover convoys supplying Malta. Axis supply: 1940–1941 Axis supplies from Europe to Libya were moved by road and after Operation Compass (December 1940 – February 1941), only Tripoli remained as an , with a maximum capacity of four troopships or five cargo ships at once and an unloading capacity of about per month. Tripoli to Benghazi was along the and only half way to Alexandria. The road could flood, was vulnerable to the Desert Air Force (DAF) and using desert tracks increased vehicle wear. The Axis advance of to the Egyptian frontier in early 1941 increased the road transport distance to . Benghazi was captured in April; coastal shipping there had a capacity of only and the port was within range of the DAF. About of supplies per day could be unloaded at Tobruk but lack of shipping made its