on 15 February, as LRDG patrols surveyed the defences. Tripoli The main British attack was made along the coast road by the 51st (Highland) Division and an armoured brigade as the 7th Armoured Division advanced via Tarhuna, Castel Benito and Tripoli. The 90th Light Division fought delaying actions along the road, which exacerbated the Allied transport difficulties. From 20 to 21 January, the 90th Light Division made a stand at Corradini, having made 109 craters in the road from Buerat to Homs. The vanguard of the 7th Armoured Division reached the vicinity of Aziza on 21 January and next day the 51st (Highland) Division reached Castel Verde. A race developed and the Germans retired from Tripoli during the night; the 11th Hussars were the first into Tripoli, west of Benghazi, on the morning of 23 January. Five hours later, a Naval Base Party arrived and surveyed the wreckage of the port. On 26 January, five ships anchored outside the port and began to unload via lighters; on 30 January, of stores were landed. In March the Eighth Army entered Tunisia and on 9 March, Rommel returned to Germany to communicate to Hitler the realities of conditions in North Africa. Rommel failed to persuade Hitler to allow the Axis forces to be withdrawn and was not allowed to return to Africa, ostensibly on health grounds. Aftermath Analysis In 1977, Martin van Creveld wrote that Rommel had claimed that if the supplies and equipment, sent to Tunisia in late 1942 and early 1943, had been sent earlier, the Axis would have won the Desert War. Creveld disagreed, since only the German occupation of southern France after Operation Torch made French merchant ships and Toulon available for dispatch and Bizerta available for receipt, which did not apply in 1941. The extra distance from Bizerta to the Egyptian border would also have negated the benefit of using a larger port. Axis supply had always been determined by the small size of the ports in Libya, a constraint that could not be overcome and attacks on Axis shipping had compounded chronic supply difficulties. With the German army bogged down in the USSR, there was never sufficient road transport available for the and the , despite the relatively lavish scale of transport compared to other fronts. The cancelled attack on Malta in the summer of 1942 had less influence on events than the small size of