War Establishments for late 1941 Light and Heavy Anti Aircraft Batteries and Regiments in North Africa

[WAKEN]

I'm looking for details of the War Establishments for late 1941 Light and Heavy Anti Aircraft Batteries and Regiments in North Africa - at the time of Crusader (Nov-Dec 1941).

Any help gratefully received.

Thanks,

Neil

[Sheldrake]

What is your interest? AA is less well documented in general histories. It may also be more complicated with differences between the establishments static establishments that defended ports etc and those in the field force - your mention of Op Crusader suggests the latter. However, most of the AA was deployed defending the Suez Canal and Alexandria under command 2nd AA Brigade.

Each division in Eighth Army had a Light AA Regiment. 12th AA Brigade was under command 13th Corps with the mission of co-ordinating the ground defence of airfields as well as AA defence in general. It had 68 and 88 Heavy and 2nd, 25th and 27th Light AA.

There is also a difference between war establishment and the actual equipment and personnel state which may be accounted for with chitties in lieu and buckshees. According to Routledge's History of AA Artillery in the summer of 1941 12th AA Brigade received a a changing assortment of Light Aa batteries released from Greece, Tobruk and Egypt.

You could try the RA Archivist or the RA Historical Society

Or contact Tony Chadwick http://www.warestablishments.net/index.html He has not posted the establishments you are after but he made be able to help.

[WAKEN]

Thanks for that. My interest is specifically the field forces, including those AA units defending airfields. I am doing some work to design an updated version of the 1978 GDW Operation Crusader game for my personal use. I am looking for the number of men, AA guns and other weapons (e.g. Bren guns) that light and heavy AA batteries had... according to War Establishment.
Useful info on the composition of 12th AA Brigade (68 and 88 Heavy and 2nd, 25th and 27th Light AA). Do you have any information as to its deployment at the start of Crusader?
I'll check the Tony Chadwick site too.

Cheers,

Neil

[Urmel]

The only info I have seen that is focused on the AA units is quite high-level (Egypt/Desert/Tobruk). You can however go into the OOB data for Eighth Army and see which regiments were directly sub-ordinated to ground forces, and the remainder then would have been area defense (air fields, railroad, supply dumps etc).

Not sure what the value of Bren guns is in this regard? AA weaponry were captured 20mm Bredas, 40mm Bofors, and a range of HAA types.