Alamein (Major Battles of World War Two) Read online

  Then, as the sun slips away and the scorched earth, having no moisture content to retain heat, rapidly cools, the evening breeze springs up and the flies give up their day-long torment; there is a sigh of relief by all living creatures, as though a burden has suddenly been lifted from their shoulders. Night falls and the vault overhead becomes thronged with a myriad stars, glittering with diamond brilliance. Unexpectedly, the nights become very chilly, especially in the winter, and as the troops stand-to at first light it is bitterly cold and the keen wind cuts like a knife.

  To the newcomer who found himself alone and the young officer leading a column for the first time, the desert could be a place of real fear: no roads, no houses, no trees, no landmarks of any sort for hundreds of miles. He experienced for the first time the fear of being completely lost and meeting his end either in the arms of the enemy or in the malevolent thirstlands of the deep and empty desert beyond the fringes of the ranging armies. It was quite easy for the uncertain mind to break into panic. The deceitful mirages of the afternoon and the obliterating sandstorms added to the confusion of mind and senses.

  By night, the difficulties were greatly increased and, when there was no moon, it was unwise to move more than a few yards from one’s trench or truck or tent without taking a compass bearing and returning on the back bearing. Major-General Douglas Wimberley, commander of 51st (Highland) Division, when a newcomer to the desert, going out without a compass at night, took two hours to find his way from his caravan to the mess tent 400 yards away.

  To overcome fear of the desert and to learn how to find one’s way in its featureless wastes were the first points of training. Away from the coast, the maps, for the greater part, were completely blank spaces, marked only by the squares of the military ‘grid’, by which map references are given, or here and there by some small feature without significance to the unaccustomed. To locate any position with the precision needed for military operations was often a baffling difficulty. Even the most experienced men would disagree and the air pilot was no less perplexed. This aspect of desert warfare is, therefore, one that we should particularly notice, for in the Battle of Alamein it was to arise critically on several occasions and was to decide the fate of several attacks and the lives of many men. Battalions were required to attack an objective that was a mere pinpoint on a blank map; and the attacks were nearly always at night.

  Much was done by artificial means to remedy the blankness of the desert. Cairns and trigonometrical points were erected in any area occupied. Tracks for the main supply routes were marked out with oil drums, but night movement remained hazardous. On a straight, undeviating course the compass and the speedometer would take one reasonably near to one’s destination. The ‘sun compass’ — a simple gnomon mounted on a circular disc and fixed to the wing of a vehicle — was one of the hall-marks of the older desert hand.

  DESERT RIVALS

  Politically, until the defeat of the German-Italian armies, this Libyan or Western Desert was shared by Egypt and Italy. The boundary between their territories was marked by a 12-ft wide belt of barbed wire that ran from the sea at Solium southwards for 400 miles, but it was soon to become rent and ragged as the battle flowed to and fro across it.

  Beyond ‘the wire’, as this frontier was called by the British troops, lay the great bulge of Cyrenaica and westward of Cyrenaica was Tripolitania, both Italian colonies. In the early stages of the war the main pre-occupation of the British, whose small and sparsely equipped force was outnumbered by the Italians in the proportion of about ten to one, was to prevent the enemy from seizing Egypt and the Suez Canal, which were vital to Allied strategy in the global war. When it was seen with what unexpected ease the badly led Italians could be overcome, the grand aim was to defeat the enemy forces in both colonies and to march upon the capital city of Tripoli itself, 1,300 miles away. In the result, we went much farther. The grand aim of the enemy was to seize Cairo and Alexandria, when a yet vaster prospect would open up.

  Until El Alamein, nearly all the fighting had been in Cyrenaica: between the neighbourhood of Solium on the east and Agheila, gateway to Tripolitania, on the west. This was due to two facts — that between these two places there were few good defensive positions of any extent and that, the farther an army advanced from its main supply base, the weaker became its power to strike. To advance westward beyond Agheila represented a very severe strain on the supply system of the British, while to advance eastward much beyond Solium presented a similar problem to the Axis forces.

  THE MEN WHO PEOPLED THE DESERT

  Such, in brief outline, was the desert in which the armies and their airmen lived and fought. It was, on the whole, a healthy life, but it was not a soft one. To men who lived entirely in the open the absence of rain, snow and mud was a blessing that more than compensated, however, for its lack of comforts. If the sand penetrated your food, your clothes, your hair, your vehicle parts and made red rims round your eyes, that was better than mud. If the heat was stifling at midday and made one dizzy in the afternoon, it was enjoyed at other hours.

  The Australians, with their disregard of most outward forms of discipline, often wore little else but shorts and boots, and one might find that the only sign of a major’s rank was a crown drawn in chinagraph pencil on his bare, brown shoulders. Indeed, on occasions one might see an Australian aircraft sentry, on the approach of a hostile aircraft, get to his feet and stand up to his mounted bren gun completely naked.

  The worst of torments was the inescapable plague of flies. Soft-winged, silent, flying lazily without buzz of movement, they followed wherever man went. They crawled up your nose, fed on the moisture at the corners of your eyes, settled on your lips, flew into your mouth while you spoke. They relished sweat, and as you marched along you would see the back of the man in front of you completely blanketed with a black swarm. They swooped on all food as a hawk upon a partridge. While you ate your meal, one hand was employed continuously in waving them off, but they would, nevertheless, descend upon the morsel that you carried to your mouth. To the wounded who lay out in the desert till help came they were a hellish torture.

  The flies enjoyed any particle of blood from the smallest scratch or prick on your body and, together no doubt with some food deficiency, were the cause of the ‘desert sores’ that infected most men after a few months; the daubs of ‘gentian violet’ with which the doctors treated these unpleasant sores were a common sight on men’s faces, arms and knees. Because of the flies, hygiene was extremely important and in this, as in much else, Eighth Army had a high standard. In the battles of movement or on marches, one walked away to a flank with a spade, but when positions became fixed, as at El Alamein, latrines were dug and their sites frequently moved.

  As in all deserts, water was the most precious of all elements. Its provision was a responsibility of the Royal Engineers, after medical tests. It was strictly rationed and was supplied to forward units in small water trucks equipped with sterilising and chlorinating apparatus, and the tank was kept under lock and key after issues had been made. All water was chlorinated and sometimes the only supplies available were saline; hence the milk curdled in the tea and sank to the bottom of the mug. In times of moving operations water was carried on the outside of each vehicle in a chargal of thick canvas, in which it kept reasonably cool.

  Normally the ration was a gallon a day per man, which had to suffice for drinking, washing of oneself and one’s clothes, cooking, and the radiator of one’s vehicle. When far from water points the ration fell to half a gallon, and a man was then hard pressed. In the Alamein position, which was near to pure water supplies, the ration was generally one-and-a-half gallons.

  If the unit was in a stationary position, half the ration went to the cookhouse. With care, a quart was sufficient for washing. After the morning wash it was left in your canvas camp basin (or the half of a petrol tin if not an officer) all day. For the evening wash the soap suds were skimmed off and it was used again. Another skim next morning and i
t was poured into a petrol tin to accumulate for washing clothes. Finally, after the sand had been allowed to settle, it was carefully decanted into the radiator.

  The British soldier has usually been well fed, but in the Western Desert, though his food was ample, it was nearly always hard tack. Bully beef and hard biscuits was his staple fare, but he also had some tinned bacon, not very palatable, some tinned meat and vegetable ration, tinned butter, tinned milk and, of course, tea, which he brewed whenever he had the chance. Fresh provisions were unknown to forward troops, except for some occasional Egyptian onions. The quartermasters of the Highland Division usually managed somehow to get enough oatmeal for porridge by swopping it for the occasional rice ration. The harsh and acrid ‘V’ cigarette was, for most men, the only smoke.

  On the few occasions when positions became fixed, units were able to establish cookhouses and distribute hot meals to their men, but the typical method of cooking in the desert was for a soldier, or a group of soldiers, to ‘brew up’ his own food in a billy-can, which was to be seen hanging from a hook on many a jeep and truck. Thomas Atkins brewed up by means of a ‘desert fire’, which was made by simply mixing a little petrol with sand in an empty petrol tin and setting light to it: an operation by no means without mortal danger to the unskilled. The desert fire could not, of course, be lit in close proximity to the enemy.

  The Germans (but not the Italians) were better than we at providing forward tank crews and other forward troops with a hot meal. The German and Italian soldiers also enjoyed a more varied ration than ours, their tinned tomatoes and other vegetables, when we captured them, being found good. They, or at least their officers, also had good supplies of wines.

  At night the soldier’s bed was the ground and a very hard bed it could be where rock was predominant. When not in close contact with the enemy, most men and officers slept under a small bivouac sheet, or ‘bivvy’, or else underneath a lorry, and officers usually had a fight Houndsfield bed, standing a few inches off the ground. Tank crews slept beside their tanks, sometimes under tarpaulins slung pent-wise from it. General Auchinleck, like an infantry officer in the front fine, slept on the ground in the open and so did several other generals.

  The soldier thus led a fairly hard but a healthy fife. Apart from the prevalent desert sores, which were ugly, vexatious and stubborn, but only occasionally disabling, there were no widespread sicknesses, the principal being bowel diseases of varying degrees of severity (from mild forms of ‘Gippy tummy’ to the more deadly ones of amoebic and bacillary dysentery due to the multitudes of flies), some malaria, a certain amount of sandfly fever (a prostrating and sometimes fatal infection from the tiniest of flies) and a strange and widespread persistence of jaundice among officers.

  For about three months of the year the weather was cool enough to wear battledress, but for the rest of the year khaki drill, or ‘KD’, was the rule. This meant shorts and shirt for most of Eighth Army and their comrades of the Desert Air Force, but many commanding officers required all officers and men to wear slacks instead of shorts. Slacks, though not so cool as shorts, were a more sensible dress in a climate where there were so many things to bite or scratch you and they greatly reduced the danger of desert sores and malaria.

  The beret had not yet come in as the general headdress, except for the Royal Tank Regiment and some armoured-car units; the uniform wear, when it was not necessary to don steel helmets, was the impracticable fatigue or ‘side’ cap. Most officers, however, preferred the peaked Service cap. The Scottish and Australian regiments had their own special headgear. The jaunty bonnets or glengarries of the ‘Jocks’ of 51st (Highland) Division, who arrived shortly before Alamein, and the kilt worn by some of their pipers, gave a touch of panache to the otherwise drab scene.

  A different sort of panache, however, was contributed by the officers of some of the older desert regiments, particularly of the armoured units. The delight of the cartoonist ‘Jon’ of Eighth Army News, these officers had acquired a notoriety for the informality of their dress. Corduroy trousers, civilian-style pullovers and coloured scarves were the hallmarks of a fraternity — for these ‘old desert hands’ of pre-Alamein were very much a fraternity, bound together by ties of comradeship in many a critical action — who took their campaigning in a gay and gallant spirit, and they were also the hallmarks of an army that was composed mostly of civilians. Their ‘desert boots’, low-cut, of suede, soled with rubber, became fairly general wear for officers throughout the army and set a fashion that afterwards became adopted in civilian life.

  Most remarkable of all their garments, however, was the Hebron coat, usually called a poshteen, from its resemblance to the more elegant Indian coat of that name; it was a shaggy sheepskin garment worn to keep at bay the biting wind of the desert dawn and was the hallmark of the old desert hand. It was off-white in colour and could be seen a mile away.

  Thus, sometimes the only article of military uniform worn by an officer was his cap. When General Montgomery was appointed to command Eighth Army shortly before Alamein, it was quite expected that, with his reputation for austerity and sharp words, he would sternly forbid this informality in dress; in fact, to some extent, he fell for it himself.

  These few general observations will serve to show that the troops of Eighth Army led a very masculine and exclusive life. The desert was all their own and there was no one else in it but the enemy, who led a similar kind of existence. There were no billets, no pubs, no girls, no civilians of any sort and precious few ‘amenities’ or ‘welfare’ until one went back to the Nile Delta on local leave or rest or on a course. There was no home leave to Britain at all and before the end of operations many officers and men had been away from home for four years or even more. The flies, the all-penetrating sand, the heat, the hard tack, the tainted water were the background to daily life, and the ordeals of battle its forefront.

  Yet the spirit of all was extremely high; men were all the fitter and their morale all the more buoyant for being cut off from civilian contacts and for being cast out in the great spaces on a great enterprise.

  There has rarely been any army so bound together in a sense of comradeship and animated with so much pride in themselves as Eighth Army and the Desert Air Force in Egypt, and those who preceded them in title. They had a tradition all their own and of their own making. It was never quite the same after Africa. They were conscious that they were the only British troops fighting the Germans on land anywhere in the world and that the eyes of the nation were on them — the eyes of a hard-pressed nation groping in the black-out, severely rationed for food, clothing and all the material amenities of life and enduring, in many cities and towns, the ordeal of the bomb by night.

  All in all, therefore, the desert war was not a scene of fretful discontent and disillusion. There was a keen exhilaration and a sense of adventure in it. The arms of both sides were unstained by acts of barbarity or dishonour. There were no civilians. Soldier met soldier on land or in the air as in some vast amphitheatre reserved to themselves. If one had to make war, the desert was the ideal place. There was no mud, no snow, and ice, no restriction to free movement, no sense of confinement in the great space. One could fling wide one’s arms and stretch far one’s vision.

  Chapter Three: The Fight Begins

  EARLY OPERATIONS

  Fighting had been in progress in the Western Desert since the autumn of 1940. Britain at that time, by treaty rights, maintained small armed forces in Egypt, as she did also in Palestine, Iraq and other territories in the enormous area known as the Middle East, over all of which General Sir Archibald Wavell, one of the most able commanders and the most noble-hearted of men, was Commander-in-Chief.

  The Middle East, with its great oilfields, its control over the sea, air and land routes to the Indies and Australasia and its proximity to politically sensitive areas, was of immense importance to Britain and to the lands of the Commonwealth and Empire who, after the fall of France in June, faced the enormous strength of the
Nazis and the Fascists alone. While the bulk of the British Army, scantily armed with old weapons after Dunkirk, hourly awaited the expected German invasion of England, only a small force of 36,000 men stood guard in Egypt.

  With the fall of France, Mussolini, hoping to snatch some of the spoils of Hitler’s victories, had dragged Italy into the war at the German heels. Upon Wavell and his scanty, partially equipped forces in Egypt there thus suddenly fell a heavy responsibility; for, as we have seen, the Italian colony of Cyrenaica lay westward of the belt of barbed wire that fringed the Egyptian border, and its twin colony of Tripolitania stretched away yet farther west. Very large Italian land and air forces were assembled in these colonies, under the command of Marshal Graziani, far outnumbering all the British and Allied forces that Wavell had at his command in the whole of the Middle East.

  It was fortunate, however, that the slender British forces in Egypt included an improvised ‘mobile division’ which, in so far as he had been permitted by an unsympathetic higher command before the war, had been trained in the spirit and the tactical elements of modern tank warfare by Major-General P. C. S. Hobart, one of the formative thinkers and practitioners in that adventurous field. This stripling ‘mobile division’, at that time commanded by Major-General M. O’Moore Creagh, was to become the celebrated 7th Armoured Division, known to friend and foe alike by its proud badge of the Desert Rat.

  In September 1940, Graziani, hoping to add Egypt to Italy’s crown, crossed the frontier with about 100,000 men, supported by an air force greatly outnumbering our own.

  Advancing with extreme nervousness, he halted at Sidi Barrani, well within the frontier but still some seventy miles from the main British positions, and there, feeble of purpose, he built a series of fortified camps, manned by 80,000 men and 120 tanks.