Alamein and the Desert War

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ALAMEIN AND THE DESERT WAB A DRAMATIC ACCOUNT OF VICTORY IN AFRICA BY FIELD MARSHAL BEBNABD M0NT60MEBY AND OTHEBJK^ EDITED BY DEREK JEWELL

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"The

battle

which

is

now about

be one of the decisive battles of

to begin will history.

It

will

be the turning point of the war."

-Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery

Montgomery defeated Rommel, the famed "Desert Fox," in one of the most At Alamein, brilliant

and savagely fought tank battles of

World War

II.

To commemorate the 25th anniversary

of

the Battle of Alamein, the London Sunday

Times

invited Field

Marshal Montgomery to

return to Africa and recreate the story of his famous victory. To his narrative have been

added contributions of world-famed writers and military experts: Len Deighton compares the merits of German and Allied tanks; Barrie Pitt analyzes Rommel's tactics and the fighting in Tunisia; George Perry interviews German Generals on the African campaign, and other writers complete the picture of desert warfare in this vivid

specially

and supremely exciting book

prepared under the editorship of

Derek Jewell. A special 16-page color section shows the uniforms and insignia of the combatants with color photos of

Rommel, Montgomery and

episodes of the war.

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Alamein andihe desert war edited by

Derek Jewell

Historical adviser Barrie Pitt

Art director Michael Rand Designer David Barnes

(0) BALLANTINEBOOKS'NEWYORK ^^1

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life

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© Times Newspapers First

American

Ltd.,

and Derek Jewell, 1967.

Printing: July, 1968

Printed in the United States of America

BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC. 101 Fifth Avenue,

New York, N.Y.

10003

:

:

Contents 1

Three years of battles

The Benghazi Handicap 1940-1942 by Banie Pitt The patterns of war 1940-1943 drawn by Roy Castle The leaders who was who Rommel's desperate drive by Barrie Pitt Fortress Tobruk a view from the sea by Neil Bruce Ironmongery of the desert by Len Deighton 61 The battle of Alamein by Field-Marshal Montgomery 95 The chase to Tunisia by Barrie Pitt 11

24 28 32 42 48

2

:

:

What makes an army?

100 Rommel and Montgomery photographed by Horst Baumann and Ian Yeomans 104 The desert style drawn by Roger Coleman 107 Badges of battle drawn by Ken Lewis 109 The Intelligent Bad Element makes good

by Philip Norman 120 The

Enemy

1

:

Rommel

reassessed

by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen and Antony Terry 126 The Enemy 2 what the generals think :

by George Perry 130 The private armies by Len Deighton 138 The Gaberdine Swine - and others a glossary of desert slang by Peter Sanders 143 Desert newspapers a grassroots press by Susan Raven 147 Lilli Marlene: a song for all armies by Derek Jewell

3 The frmges of conflict 159 Cairo: back from the Blue by Olivia Manning 177 The canvases of war by Susan Raven with paintings by Ardizzone, Gross, Bawden etc. 182 Farouk and the night of shame by Barrie McBride 192 A portrait of Brother Ahmed by Charles Avite drawing by Roger Law 197 The desert poets by Philip Oakes 203 Poems by Keith Douglas, Jocelyn Brooke,

Hamish Henderson and Gerald Kersh

Introduction: a different kind of war The Desert War fought early 1943

may

struggle against

more

in

Egypt and Libya between 1940 and

not have been the most important front in the

Germany,

Italy

and Japan. But no war could be

fascinating.

was not unimportant, of

was crucial for Britain, was fully geared to help in the task of beating Hitler. Defeat in the Middle East, and the cutting off of her oil source, could have crumbled Britain's position. The effect on the nation's morale would have been catastrophic too, and the few crumbs of victory from the Western Desert gave the British some comfort during the defeat-ridden days of 1941 and 1942. The Soviet Union, engaged on the eastern front in the most It

course. It

especially before America's strength

and decisive battles of the second world war, would also have been in extreme peril had the Axis been able to use the Nile terrible

delta as a springboard to

move

against Russia's southern borders.

But outside the grand strategic context, the Desert War had a life of its own. A particular flavour. It was fought in wide open spaces where there were comparatively few towns and few civilians to get hurt. If there has to be war, then this was the perfect arena. The land is desert but not, on the whole, the soft and yielding sand of popular Beau Geste imagination. Beneath the yellow face of the Egyptian desert and the greyer surface of the Libyan is rock. It makes, militarily, for good going. This is inhospitable terrain, supporting only scrub, a few tough animals, snakes and lizards, and infuriating myriads of flies. Communications were difficult for the armies. Water was precious. The sense of emptiness and loneliness could unhinge a man's mind. There were mirages, discomforts, disappointments. In this cockpit, somehow isolated from the rest of the second world war, a special esprit de guerre grew up. If there can be oldstyle chivalry in modem war, which some may doubt, then it was here. It was quaintly expressed in June 1940, when the raf dropped a wreath from the air after the Italian commander. Marshal Balbo, had been shot down over Tobruk by his own anti-aircraft guns. The heroic, piratical flavour was maintained by Rommel, dashing around among his leading tanks, and by British units like the Long Range Desert Group. Only later, as the desert filled up with larger quantities of men and material, did the modem feeling of two goliaths facing each other intrude. Even then the war produced a hero-figure in Montgomery, as already it had tumed up its O'Con-

nors and Gotts and Auchinlecks

- and, of

course,

its

Rommel,

admired by his enemy like no general since, perhaps, Napoleon. This book, based upon material collected for The Sunday Times Magazine of London in the 25th anniversary year of the Alamein victory, is only the latest in a very long

War

Desert ative

and reminiscent

in purpose, partly intended as

of certain aspects of the war. It

and honourable

literature. It is a reporter's book, partly

It

line of

commemor-

a reassessment

has also tried to be something more.

concentrates, a quarter of a century later, especially on the back-

ground to the war, which gave

For

it

an extra dimension of

interest.

war meant the end of a dream of empire. For there were imperialistic overtones. This was in certain

Italy, this

Britain, too,

respects the latest episode in her long love-hate involvement with the Arabs.

That

is

why

sections of this

book deal with desert slang

Arabic accretions; with Cairo; with Farouk and the ordinary Egyptians; with the songs, poems, paintings, and newspapers of the desert campaigns. Despite all that has been written about this war, there are still new facts, and new perspectives, to be discovered. Against the accepted ideas of its chivalry must be set the fact that wells were sometimes poisoned by retreating troops, which is scarcely chivalrous. Nor is the mine a very chivalrous weapon. There weren't, certainly, many civilians who got hurt. But there were some. Arabs were driven from their land, and the desert-dwellers of Egypt and Libya have suffered grievously in the last quartercentury from the 20 million mines which the British, Germans and Italians left behind in the ground. Since the war, around 30,000 Egyptians have been killed or maimed through stepping on them.

and

its

The former belligerents have seemed largely unconcerned. It was a war curious in its revelations of national behaviour. For in the end, men rather than weapons were decisive. The Italians tried to

transform this alien land it.

They

in their

image, instead of learning

marble monuments. They had the luxury of fine sheets, grandiose uniforms, good food and drink, ice cream, even mobile brothels. It was preposterous; a recipe for defeat. The Germans were more realistic. They were good desert soldiers: excellent at fast movement, map-reading and navigation. They had palatable food and fine equipment - from guns and tanks to pills, purifiers, powders and goggles. But they loathed the desert, and it was unkind to them. On the eve of Alamein Rommel was away on sick leave in Germany. His three senior staff officers - Westphal, Gause and to live with

built

Bayerlein - were

all ill. Even poor General Stumme, left in charge, had a heart attack and died once Montgomery's assault had begun. The British were by contrast, perky as fleas in the desert. The Allied army was one of the Attest in history; bronzed and tough. Maybe this was because the colonising British had had centuries of

experience in tropical medicine.

There

were

New

Australians,

British,

Zealanders,

South

Africans, Indians, Poles, Czechs, Greeks and French on the Allied side.

The

under an informal discipline,

British, dressing informally,

usually wore just boots and shorts (or a weird conglomeration of suede, shaggy sheepskin, corduroy and neckscarves) and lived on

and hard tack. The others all had their talents - the Aussies in hard, bloody killing matches; the Kiwis in night fighting; the Indians in guerilla passages. They took to the desert. And, in tea, bully beef

the end, they triumphed.

This book

is

not encyclopaedic.

of the war. Neither does

it

It

deals only with

some aspects

delve very deeply into politics. There has

been enough controversy and no little bitterness already. If there was once a tendency to blame many of the early generals overmuch for their defeats - when indifferent and scanty equipment, too few planes, political manipulations and other factors were often the

cause - then the latterday

game of

scorning the achievements of

Alexander and Montgomery has been ludicrously overplayed. Montgomery had a good, experienced army awaiting him. He had Alexander to back him up. He also had excellent equipment, and a

But he gave purpose, leadership, self-confldence and logical direction to an army which largely welcomed it. And he won. His fame is as secure as his style, of which he likes not a lot

comma,

of

it.

capital or special spelling changed.

Many of those who have written for this book owe a great debt to war by generals, historians, have been produced without the assistance of hundreds of people, military and non-military, who knew the war at flrst-hand and who have talked or given guidance. They were of many nationalities, and they include the Egyptian authorities, who gave excellent facilities for Field-Marshal Montgomery to literature already published about the

journalists. It could not

return to the Alamein battlefield in

fortune to

who was

May

1967.

War, had the great good accompany Field-Marshal Montgomery on that journey.

Its editor,

not in the Desert

For the many lessons the Field-Marshal taught me, for

his kind-

am

grateful.

nesses, for the

Derek Jewell

work of all contributors

to this book,

I

Three years of battles 'No landscape a la Goya. Here are no trees Uprooted, gutted farms; the unsalvaged scrap The scattered petrol-cans, the upturned And abandoned truck, the fallen Heinkel; all The rusted and angular detritus Of war, seem scarcely to impinge Upon the hard, resistant surface of This lunar land'

Ruweisat Ridge, 1967: Montgomery works out once more the shape of battle. A quarter of a century earlier he was also here, planning and talking, as the Desert War, which had seesawed for so long, approached its Alamein climax.

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The Benghazi Handicap 1940-1942 by Barrie Pitt Why

Why

were the British, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Indians, the Germans, the Italians and all the other nations locked in battle in the Western Desert? Here Barrie Pitt outlines the historical background to the whole Desert War of 1940-43 and traces the campaigns of that war until the hour of Montgcinery's arrival in the desert. He is the editor of the massive, and still continuing, Pumell's History of the Second World War, and also the author of many books of military history, including The Edge of Battle, Zeebrugge, Coronel and Falkland, and 1918 The Last Act.

was there a desert war

at all?

But why were we there? Through the dark, velvety night the lines of men crunched their way forward, Cameron and Gordon Highlanders and men of the Black Watch on the left along the line of the Sweetwater Canal, Royal Irish, Royal Marines, York and Lancasters and Fusiliers on the right, with 42 pieces of artillery trundling between the divisions. Household Cavalry trotted to the right rear, while the Indian Division with Sikh Lancers, Pathan mountaineers, Baluchis and Oudh Sepoys guarded the left flank, south of the canal. Well to the front rode the General and his staff, while in front of them marched Lieutenant Rawson of the Royal Navy piloting the force by the stars. Eleven thousand bayonets, 2000

guns and six machine guns were on the move - against manned, it was believed, by 20,000 regular Egyptian Army troops, supported by 6000 Bedouin and irregulars, 2500 cavalry and 60 guns. Dawn was at 5.40 and the marching columns were closing on the first ramparts, when the right wing bumped an Arab cavalry picket who fired on them. The General dismounted and ran forward to peer through the dim light, an Egyptian shell screeched overhead and buried itself in the soft sand between him and his horse, the Arab picket galloped across the front and then raced off into the morning mist - and the Highlanders on the left charged forward, their pipers frantically filling the pipe bags which had been deflated as a precaution before the night march. Solid ranks, crested with steel, swept forward on to the black mound under the lilac sky. A line of fire sparkled along the top of the mound, but in their frenzy the defenders fired high and bullets sabres, 61

fortifications

11

and

balls

whined out into the desert

to

furrow the distant sand-

As the Highlanders surged over the top, the pipes wailed into the March of the Cameron Men and the Scots were at work with bayonet and gun-butt among desperate, white-clad Egyptians and Sudanese who fought with maniac fury but little drifts.

skill.

With a crash and

a skirl of Irish pipes the right-hand

division stormed into the attack, while

beyond them the Life Guards swung wide and then rode over the Egyptian guns. In half an hour, it was all over. That very model of a modem Major-General, Sir Garnet Wolseley, had won the Battle of Tel el Kebir (September 13 1882) and Britain was in Egypt to stay. The British stayed at first because Lord Dufferin (despatched from London by Mr. Gladstone) had difficulty in drawing up the report on the measures necessary for the restoration of good order and government - an obviously essential preliminary to the withdrawal of British forces. Then they stayed because of all the trouble with the Mahdi, the assassination of Gordon in 1885 and the crumbling of Egyptian frontiers in the south, all of which

Army by English one of whom. Sir Herbert Kitchener, became Sirdar or Commander-in-Chief. Naturally he needed a nucleus of British soldiers on whom he could rely. necessitated the retraining of the Egyptian

officers,

After the Sudan was pacified, the regiments stayed because they might be needed with the troubles further south in the

when the Boer Wars were over they stayed because British efforts to restore that good order and government which was Lord Dufferin 's ideal necessitated the presence of a large colony of British administrators. These required protection from the peculiarly ungrateful natives, of whom there were large Transvaal, and

numbers and many

When

factions.

world war came, the British stayed to ensure that the Suez Canal was kept open for the passage of Australian and Indian troops to France - though in the end a larger number of British troops were sent out to the area in order to deal with the proliferations of troubles which then ensued than of Australians or Indians to arrive on the Western Front. But by 191 8, as a result of the Middle East campaigns, a huge British military base had been built up. Nevertheless, as a result of prolonged and often caustic discussion, the British protectorate of Egypt ended on February 28 1922, and Egypt was declared to be an independent, sovereign the

first

state - with just four matters reserved to the British

12

Government

agreement could be reached upon them: the security of communications with her Empire, the defence of Egypt itself, the protection of foreign interests and minorities in Egypt, and control of the Sudan. As the years between the wars went by, the Royal Air Force grew in size, parts of the British Army became mechanised despite opinion in the Cavalry Club, and as a final result of that astonishing era of maritime revolution inspired by Lord Fisher, the Royal Navy stopped using coal, and relied for motive power on oil-fired turbines. All of this meant that without the products of the Mosul oil-fields at the head of the Persian Gulf, Britain would be powerless to wage war. So early in September 1939, a British until

British

official carefully explained to King Farouk (younger, slimmer, and much better-looking than he is now remembered) that British control of Egypt would have to be both retained and increased until the Axis had been defeated. "Oh all right!" replied the King, moodily. "But when it's all over, for God's sake lay down the white man's burden, and GoV

Up and down the desert The Western Desert became a battlefield in the second world war because it was the western flank of our defence of the essential and because here the Axis, in the shape of Italian was separated from us by nothing more substantial than a double wire fence along the Egyptian border. Italy entered the war on June 10 1940, and on the day after, men of the Western Desert Force, under the command of MajorGeneral Richard O'Connor, cut the wire, swept into the Italian Empire and then out again, neatly scooping up some 70 prisoners on the way. While the Italian command were considering the episode, British tanks and armoured cars appeared out of the desert and shelled Italian forts at Capuzzo and Maddalena, and

Middle East

oil,

forces in Libya,

days after Mussolini's gradiloquent announcement of martial come for the descendants of the Roman Legionaries, an armoured column was ambushed on the road to Bardia and 89 of those descendants - including the Engineer General of the Italian 10th Army - were courteously shepherded back into Egypt to hastily-constructed prisoner-of-war camps. six

glories to

Incensed, Mussolini ordered Marshal Rodolpho Graziani, Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief in Libya, to begin the series of martial victories which would allow him at least to meet his Axis partner north of the Alps on equal terms, if not to 13

patronise

him again

as in the halcyon days of the early Thirties;

back resounding messages of enthusiastic about organising the essentials for a grand offensive, which apparently included a mobile brothel. These preparations took until September 13, when after a loud bombardment of the British frontier posts (empty at the time, as it happened) the Italian 10th Army moved magnificently, though perhaps rather ponderously, forward. After four days, it had advanced 65 miles and reached Sidi Barrani, where it rested while preparations were made for a metalled road to be brought forward, pipe-lines constructed and stores brought up. Graziani arranged his defences in a semi-circle of armed encampments, the northern sector hinged on a point named Nibiewa, the southern fanning out below the edge of the escarpment towards Sofafi. Through the gap between the sectors, wearing the Italian Silver Medal for Valour awarded him in 1918, General O'Connor launched the Western Desert Force consisting of the tanks and lorried infantry of 7th Armoured Division, plus the infantry tanks, guns and infantry of 4th Indian Division while detached artillery and a mixed brigade named Selby Force held Italian attention from the east. The end-result was as spectacular an achievement for British arms as that of Sir Garnet's nearly 60 years before. Caught by surprise completely off balance, the dazed Italians were rounded up in thousands by elated British, Indian and (after the fifth day) Australian infantry. They were cut off and blockaded by threatening tanks, harried and machine-gunned by armoured cars and light carriers, and by February 7 1941 - two months after the first attack - O'Connor and his men had achieved at Beda Fomm inspired, Graziani sent

accord and

set

that military rarity, a victory of total annihilation.

No fewer than

130,000 Italians had been killed, wounded, or herded back into overflowing prison-camps. British patrols probed forward past El Agheila towards Sirte and Tripoli, and the whole of Cyrenaica was under O'Connor's control. True, the wear and tear on transport had been heavy, and practically all tanks would have to be replaced, or at least given major overhauls. But the destruction of the whole Italian force had been achieved at the cost of 476 killed, 1225 wounded and 43 missing, and if the men were tired, they were also in good heart. One of O'Connor's minor problems was the disposal of a. lorryload of sprightly and unconcerned Italian ladies under the unlikely protection of a lone, soutaned priest.

14

;

But

at this stage Hitler decided to take a

hand

in the

muddled

affairs of his ally. He despatched Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel to North Africa to command what was to become the Deutsche

Afrika Korps, and several of his more favoured generals (with forces far larger than the Afrika Korps would ever comprise) into the Balkans - both to subdue Jugoslavia and bring to a tidy end the farcical campaign against the Greeks that Mussolini had

been prosecuting since the previous October. It was this Balkan interference which robbed the Western Desert Force of the fruits of its victory. With all Middle East

now

on possibilities of aid to Greece, renamed 13 Corps, was distributed over the Cyrenaica command, its key personnel and most experienced troops redeployed, its ranks made up with green troops under the field command of General Neame, while O'Connor went to hospital with recurring stomach trouble. attention

O'Connor's

focussed

force,

On March

31 1941,

Rommel

sent forward units of his Light

Division in a probing reconnaissance towards Mersa Brega and by the end of the day was not only in control of the position, but

had appreciated the mediocrity and uncertainty of the opposition. By April 2 he was at Agedabia, and Wavell flew up to Neame's headquarters at Barce, quickly to conclude that the battle was out of British control.

command

in the field

blocking Rommel's

He

sent for

O'Connor

to

come

up, took

himself for that day and issued orders for

line

of advance. Unfortunately there were

and Rommel with that opportunism which was later to become the hallmark of his generalship, and despite his lack of numbers, chose to advance along all three. As a result, the British 2nd Armoured Division, attempting an organised and steady withdrawal, was caught between the three prongs of Rommel's advance. By April 6, the Afrika Korps was at Mechili by the 7th a detachment had cut the road at Dema and by the 1 1th, Rommel was carefully probing the defences of Tobruk while the British hastily reorganised Mersa Matruh as three possible lines -

;

a base of operations.

By mid-April, except

for the garrison at

Tobruk, the British were back behind the Egyptian frontier. Even more serious, O'Connor had been taken prisoner, with Neame, as they drove back from Barce towards Derna. The second phase of what had by now been laconically dubbed 'The Benghazi Handicap' was undoubtedly a win for Rommel - and so were the next two phases. In May, a small operation code-named Brevity failed miser15

May 1941. Close to besieged Tobruk's defences, Germans manhandle an 88mm anti-aircraft gun, soon to become the Desert War's best-known artillery piece. In June the Afrika Korps began It is

.

using

it

in

an anti-tank

devastating. But this use obsessive. It often

role.

The

effect on Allied armour was became, after a while, somewhat

of denuded Rommel's it

air defences

offire-power

ably, but at the same time a convoy arrived in the DeUa bringing tank reinforcements - new Crusaders, straight out of the factories -

and with an impatience that was to bedevil field the war, Mr. Churchill wanted them

commanders throughout

On

reformed 7th Armoured Division, the 22nd Guards Infantry Brigade and 4th Indian Division moved forward in an attack which Rommel had clearly foreseen, and against which he had disposed excellent defences. And so, by the afternoon of June 18, it was evident that Operation in action.

June

15, the

had

failed -

Battleaxe, too,

the left

and

failed at a grievous cost.

Over half

new Crusader tanks had been knocked out, and their wrecks in German hands; as German recovery methods were far

superior to the British, and not pletely 'brewed up', in service

all

the British tanks

some products of British

factories

had comwere soon

with the Afrika Korps.

As

a direct result of the failure of Battleaxe, Wavell was relieved of the Middle East command and sent to India (where his responsibilities would shortly be just as onerous) and his place taken by General Sir Claude Auchinleck, an officer of the Indian

Army, who thus now found himself forced

to choose between the

merits and promise of many British Army officers of whom he had no personal knowledge. He also found himself almost immediately subject to immense pressure from Mr. Churchill to launch another offensive, but resolutely refused to launch one until his forces were adequate. This condition was not fulfilled, in his opinion, until November - and on November 18, Operation Crusader was begun. As the various sectors of the British force (now renamed»8th Army) advanced through the wire towards Tobruk (still under siege) the Afrika Korps reacted first with an unusual wariness, and then as Rommel's imagination took hold, with a foolhardiness which, had it been blessed with luck and thus successful, would still be hailed as genius. At one time the disposal of

took the appearance of a gigantic military multiple sandwich with British and German forces layered between each other, each layer resupplied as necessary from the enemy dumps in their area. At another, with the relief of Tobruk by the New Zealand Division taking place 60 miles west of the wire, Rommel himself was east of the wire in a diversionary attempt on 8th Army's lines of communication. He was extremely lucky not to have been taken prisoner. But in the end, the weight of the British attack proved too heavy forces

18

and too prolonged, and Rommel went back, first as far as Gazala, and ultimately right back out of Cyrenaica to the positions beyond El Agheila from which he had started out nine months before. Another stage of the 'Benghazi Handicap' was over, this time in the British favour. The situation did not last long. Nobody appreciated more keenly than Rommel the wear and tear on men and equipment of a desert advance, or the disadvantages of lines of communication stretched back over hundreds of miles - as his had been of late. So, scarcely three weeks after the last spasms of Crusader died away, Rommel (who had just received reinforcements of both tanks and men) struck again, and finding 8th Army both overextended and over-confident, his tanks chased them back over their own footprints like sharks after a shoal of mackerel until both sides arrived, breathless and astonished, in the dustbowl between Tmimmi and Gazala.

commander. General Ritchie, disposed based on the assumption that any further attack by Rommel would be weighted in the north, and Auchinleck, under pressure from Mr. Churchill, instructed Ritchie to prepare for an offensive early in June. They were thus both taken somewhat aback when on May 26 Rommel opened his offensive with a deep hook around the south of Ritchie's lines, and after a series of prolonged and bitter battles, levered 8th Army away from Gazala and sent it tumbling eastwards again. To add further bitterness to the British cup, the neglected defences of Tobruk fell before the Afrika Korps' onslaught, and when Auchinleck flew up the front to discover what Ritchie's plans were for wresting the initiative back from the enemy, he Here the British

field

his forces in defensive positions

found his field commander talking despondently - but resolutely - about defensive positions at Mersa Matruh. Here, according to Ritchie, 8th Army would stand or fall. But there were no worthwhile defences at Matruh, and if 8th Army did fall, the way to the Delta and the essential oil beyond would be open to the Axis. On June 25, Auchinleck therefore took over command in the field from Ritchie and pulled the Army back to the 'Alamein Gap' - the shortest space between the coast and the Qattara Depression, and thus a position which, if filled, could not be outflanked. Here, as the brave but bewildered remnants of 8th Army came in, he reorganised them piecemeal and formed them into battlegroups consisting of infantry and artillery in self-supporting brigades, at the same time organising 19

defences of the Delta behind them and plans for further with-

drawal Chief,

if

necessity arose.

Middle East,

Army, and

For Auchinleck was Commander-in-

as well as General Officer

Commanding

8th

his position entailed wider responsibilities than just

two rather battered Army Corps in Egypt. Here at Alamein, on June 30, arrived Rommel, his men weary beyond the point where triumph could buoy them up, and with only 60 tanks still mobile. Throughout the first half of July, the two armies struck clumsily at each other, while Rommel strove to wring more effort out of his tired men and while Auchinleck and his staff devised realistic defences against which the Afrika that of

Korps could batter itself into impotence. The First Battle of Alamein began on July 13, and during the next few days Rommel tried frantically to smash away the last obstacles between his troops and the Nile, while Auchinleck systematically destroyed the Italian units under Rommel's command, knowing that the purely German element, upon which Rommel relied, was too weak in numbers and too tired to stand alone.

On July

1

7,

Rommel called off the battle and wrote in enough to make one weep!"

his evening letter to his wife "It's

Fighting flared up again on July 21 as Auchinleck ground

more of the German

strength, but the British forces

away

had neither

and this phase of the ended on July 27 when, in any case, Auchinleck's staff had produced an analysis of the situation which forecast the methods and timing of Rommel's defeat at Second Alamein with the energy nor the weight to break through battle

considerable accuracy.

were not to put them into action. had been given the news of the fall of Tobruk by Roosevelt on a visit on which he had meant to impress the President with British achievement. "It was," he was later to write, "the worst moment of the war for me." As soon as he could do so, Mr. Churchill went out to the Middle East accompanied by the c.i.G.s., Sir Alan Brooke, and in Cairo met both Wavell and Smuts. He felt that a new spirit was needed in the Desert War, and was further disturbed by Auchinleck's unwillingness to launch another offensive before September. Already the p.m. had decided on changes in the overall command structure and, rightly, that the area of both Wavell's and Auchinleck's responsibility had been too large. It must be divided, Auchinleck would be offered command east of Suez, and General Alexander command in Egypt and the Western

But Auchinleck and

By a

20

his staff

piece of sad irony, Churchill

r

^ »-=-

f

—

u-lb^HiJ^^rs^jg,

Ml'li

Two moments of Allied victory: Montgomery

(top) looks out from

Grant tank turret on November 4 1942. The last Axis retreat is beginning. He used this tank rather than a jeep because it was less dangerous if a mine exploded; its guns had been removed and the interior fitted out for map-reading. Behind him is his ADC, John Post on, who was killed in Germany during the last week of the second world war. The Italians (bottom) were captured when Bardia fell in January 1941. During this first British offensive of the Desert War, Wavell's 'Thirty Thousand' took 130,000 Italian prisoners within two months, but the Italian annihilation persuaded Hitler to send aid to his ally. 21

Desert. Eighth Army itself would be commanded by MajorGeneral Gott who, although perhaps tired, appeared to be the most experienced commander in the area. But Gott was killed in an air-crash the day before he was due to be appointed, and the second choice was quickly informed and instructed to fly out immediately to take over. He was LieutenantGeneral Bernard Law Montgomery, who arrived in Cairo on August 12 1942 and took command in the desert the next day.

The army quickly felt that a new man, with new and often uncomfortable ideas, had taken control of them, and that this control reached right down to the grass roots of the whole military structure in the desert; and Mr. Churchill quickly learned that this was a commander who could be just as stubborn as himself. General Montgomery's estimate of the time necessary for re-training and reinforcing his command was such that under no circumstances must the Prime Minister hope for an off"ensive as early as September and, moreover, the new general was not prepared to say when he could expect one; but it would not be until he was certain that he could win. To soldiers who had been participating in the Benghazi Handicap for two years there was a great deal of reassurance in this flat statement of intention, when it became known.

New man and new methods Lieu tenant-General B. L. Montgomery in 1942 was 54 years had served as a regular officer since 1908. He owed both his rank and his new position as commander of Britain's only

old and

army in the field to nothing but his own eff'orts, plus that element of luck which is essential in any career and especially in that of arms. He had had the benefit of neither inherited wealth nor family connection to help him up the ladder of promotion, and the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in which he had been first commissioned was not so close in its connection with the Crown that it could qualify for the adjective 'fashionable'. A single-minded devotion to his profession was what had placed Montgomery in the most important position in the Allied armies, at that moment in time that, and an acceptance of the fact that in his particular case, failure would not be veiled by influence nor cushioned by private means. Like a hungry boxer, Montgomery must win or retire into oblivion. ;

Such conditions breed self-sufficiency and ruthless attitudes. Within days of Montgomery's coming to command 8th Army, 22

many distinguished senior officers were on their way home with feehngs outraged by the abrasive manner with which they had been sacked, and many more heads were to roll before Montgomery felt, as every Army Commander should, that his orders would be both understood and obeyed without question

moreover, that they would The new corps comknew Montgomery and admired him.

by his immediate subordinates be relayed

down

- and,

the line with enthusiasm.

manders would be men who With the problems of immediate subordinates solved or process of solution,

Montgomery turned

in

his attention to those

upon whom his success would most surely depend - the men of 8th Army, who in 1942 regarded all general officers with some reserve and those fresh out from England with downright suspicion. During those last days in July when Rommel's attacks had been repulsed, some of the stain of defeat had been washed away from 8th Army, and many of the men now felt considerable affection and respect for 'the Auk', who had created order out of chaos and given them back their hope of victory. Thus in order to win their acceptance, Montgomery now faced a difficult task; but he had one immense advantage over his predecessors. More clearly than any of them - perhaps more

Army Commander in British history Montgomery appreciated that to the common soldier, the world

clearly than

is

any previous

divided into 'them' and

which come

'us'.

'They' inhabit the world from

and conditions which make wartime often end it; 'us' are all those in like condition to ourselves - including also the poor devils on the other side of the hill. 'They' are unreasonable, omnipotent and invisible; 'us' are those we know, those we have seen - above all those we have talked to or who have talked to us. Montgomery set out to be known by the men of 8th Army, to talk to them and to listen to them, to be identified with them and accepted by them. Quite soon, 'the General' was no longer a vague figure barely glimpsed through the dust and exhaust fumes of a fast-travelling staff car. He was an often-seen, instantly recognisable character with an odd taste in hats, a mode of expression evocative of Kipling and the playing field, and a growing and somewhat apocryphal reputation for rebellion against 'them' and telling 'them' exactly what every private soldier had wanted to say for years. This helped immensely - and life

so

all

orders, circumstances

unbearable, and

some of

in

the reserve thawed.

What remained

to be seen

was whether he could

wm a battle. 23

Patterns of war, 1940-43 drawn by Roy Castle 1

O'Connor destroys an army and captures 130,000

Italians

CYRENAICA ITALIAN FORTIFICATIONS

BRITISH

ADVANCE

LIBYA

i

EGYPT

2 Rommel's first push: hut the Australians save Tobruk

ELAGHEILA

CYRENAICA

^^ GERMAN 24

FORCES

LIBYA

EGYPT

Operation Brevity, May 1941. The Axis forces are at the frontier, but short offuel. A lull comes in the war, broken only by Brevity - an unwise British offensive which Rommel easily repels 'i

4 Battleaxe, June 1941. Another premature attack - and failure

mt^ BRITISH FORCES «^' GERMAN FORCES

m

SIDI

GERMAN POSITIONS •> SID! AZEIZ

OMAR

25

\

5 Crusader:

Rommel

is

pushed back

to the

El Agheila

line

BRITISH FORCES

7 Desert victory, 1942: 8th Army under Montgomery wins at Alamein, then hounds the Afrika Korps 1500 miles to Tunisia in Enemy surrender

in

Cape Bon peninsula May 13

^

y^

Allied

advance

Tu

through Tunisia

Mareth defences broken Mar 28

NOFILIA

TUNISIA 26

]

6 Rommel's two-stage offensive

Jan 21 Jan 29

Feb 3

Jan 25

- all the

way

to

Alamein

June 21

1942

GAZALA TOBRUK

BENGHAZI

SIDI

BARRANI

MERSA

MATRUH

ANTEUT EL

/halfayapass

^r^AGEDABIA

alamein

•

EueKEiu

CYRENAICA h ALEM EL MGAAD

GERMAN FORCES

EGYPT

LIBYA I

3 months.

Now

the Desert

War proper

ends; 8th

Army

links with

other Allied troops for a knock-out blow against the Axis forces

Nov 9

Dec 15 Nov 20

captured

Nov 8

British

offensive

Rearguard

begins

broken

Oct 23-24

1942

Nov 12 Ft.

Capuzzo captured

MERSA MATRUH

FORT CAPUZZO

EL ALAMEIN

^^

HIMEIMAT HALFAYA PASS

OAnARA

^^ L

DEPRESSION

LIBYA

AGHEILA

27

The

leaders:

who was who

No

one now forgets the names of Montgomery and Rommel. Here are some other top men - with ranks as at that time.

2

Gen. Ammibale Bergonzoli - or 'Electric Whiskers': commanded Italian 13th in 1940 advance; captured at Beda Fomm. 2 Marshal Ettore Bastico, nominal Axis C.-in-C, N. Africa: always arguing with Rommel. 1

Army

4

5/J

3 Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, Rommel's immediate superior: tried in vain him from Hitler's interference. 4 Gen. Ritter von Thoma: briefly commanded Afrika Korps during Alamein; captured November 3 1942. 5 Gen. Walter Nehring: commanded Afrika Korps from June 1942 till he was wounded in battle of Alam Haifa. 6 Marshal Ugo Cavallero (right) with Rommel: Italian Chief of Staff during Desert War. Rommel called him a "weak-willed office-chair soldier" but also said he was "intellectually fairly well qualified". to protect

7 Gen. Sir Archibald Wavell: C.-in-C. Middle East Command from 1939 till June 1941 ; under his command the Italian army in Africa was destroyed. 8 Gen. the Hon. Harold Alexander: as C.-in-C. Middle East he was Montgomery's immediate superior. Gave him complete support, always defended him against criticism from impatient politicians in London.

9

«^afr

10

i«^

^^v 4

11

9 Lt.-Gen. Ludwig Cruewell; commanded Afrika Korps August 1941-June 1942, when captured at Gazala. 10 Marshal Rodolpho Graziani: was Italian C.-in-C. in Africa at outbreak of war; resigned February 1941 after Beda Fomm defeat. 11 Lt.-Gen. Sir Brian Horrocks: former pupil of Montgomery's; was given command of 13 Corps at Alamein. 12 Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder (right), A.O.C. Middle East, 1941-1942: gave Montgomery best possible air support. Air Vice Marshal Arthur Coningham (left): commanded Desert Air Force from November 1941 ; organised 'carpet of bombs' for 8th Army.

Tg

13 Lt.-Gen. Wilioughby Norrie: commanded 30 Corps during Crusader and until August 1942. 14 Maj.-Gen. Bernard Freyberg VC: New Zealand's most famous soldier: commanded N.Z. Div. in desert.

15 Admiral Sir James Somerville: Flag Officer commanding Western Squadron, Force H; forced through vital Malta convoys. 16 Lt.-Gen. Neil Ritchie: took over 8th Army from Gen. Cunningham during Crusader; later conducted retreat from Gazala (June 1962) till Auchinleck took command himself. 17 Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham: C.-in-C. Mediterranean Fleet throughout Desert War; brother of Gen. Cunningham. 18 Maj.-Gen. Eric Dorman Smith: principal liaison officer between Wavell and O'Connor, later Auchinleck's principal ops officer. 19 Gen. Sir Alan Cunningham: fine campaign in East Africa, early 1941; the first commander of the 8th Army, but soon replaced by Gen. Ritchie.

16

^.f^-^*"

t^'^di

/-:>,

^

^

a

Western

20 Lt.-Gen. Sir Richard O'Connor (centre background): commanded with Lt.-Gen. Sir Desert Force in 1940-41. Captured during Rommel's first advance, (right). Philip Neame (centre foreground) and Maj.-Gen. Gambier-Parry

21 Gen. Sir Claude Auchinleck: took over Middle East Command from Wavell, June 1941, and command of 8th Army from Ritchie, June 1942; halted Rommel at Alamein before Churchill removed him from command. 22 Lt.-Gen. Sir Oliver Leese: another ex-pupil of Montgomery's; commanded 30 Corps at Alamein; later succeeded Montgomery as 8th Army commander in Italy. 23 Brig. Francis de Guingand: Montgomery's Chief of Staff with 8th Army. 24 Lt.-Gen. Sir Leslie Morshead: commanded Australian 9th Div. at Alamein and earlier. 25 Lt.-Gen. W. ('Strafer') Gott: fought solidly in desert till August 1942; was to head 8th

Army, but

killed in air crash. HhAft^}-

,y

:

Rommers desperate drive by Barrie Pitt Montgomery had scene'' of 8th

He

arrived.

Army

had been

'^horrified at the desolate

headquarters in the desert.

He

called the

mess

tent there '^a sort of fishnet full of flies which couldn't get out".

Now he was

at his new main headquarters on the beach near Burg Arab, some 20 miles behind the Alamein line, working closely with the Air Force in planning his great battle which was to come. But before that Rommel was to have one last gambler's fling and on the ridge of Alam el Haifa Montgomery was to score a teUing victory. Barrie Pitt here looks at the Alam Haifa battle, el

which Field-Marshal Montgomery also discusses Alamein later in this book.

During the days

account of

end of July when Auchinleck had been

at the

eroding

systematically

in his

Rommel's

strength,

his

Chief Staff

Dorman

Smith, had drawn up an appreciation of the military position with plans for the wresting of initiative from the enemy. This appreciation contains the following passage

Officer,

Major-General Eric

"15 Course recommended

.

do any more combined with offensive gestures from time to time, including raiding. The cover plan should be such as would induce the enemy to strike prematurely, i.e., mid-August, say, between August 10 and 20. Meanwhile the Army front should be strengthened, and so held that at least one formation could come into reserve and train. At the same time the command of 8th Army should be put on Seeing that

we

are hardly

attacks, our best course

fit

at present to

the defensive

is

a regular footing. 16 Plan

recommended

Intention 8th .

pass through 17 (a)

it

.

Army will or round

defeat any attempt of the

enemy

to

it.

Method. Forward Troops. 30 Corps.

1

st

South African Division,

9th Australian Division. 13 Corps.

Right:

German command

car

in

1st

New Zealand

7th

Armoured

Division,

Division.

action during Wavell's offensive

(Battleaxe) of mid- June 1941. Superior tank tactics, as well as guns like the dual-purpose 88s, contributed to Rommel's victory.

32

Another time when Rommel was in the ascendant-January 1942. this moment he was about to push 8th Army back towards

At

34

Egypt. These Panzer formations were preparing at dawn for an attack near El Agheila. Rommel was finally halted at Alamein.

35

5th Indian Division (4th Indian Division Armoured Division.

(b) Reserve.

eventually); 1st

General

(c)

line

of Forward Defended Localities

.

El Alamein defences - Point 63 (eastern) on Ruweisat Ridge - vicinity of Alam Nayil.

South of Alam Nayil the flank

will

be covered by 7th Division." This passage, together with others referring to the bringing forward of divisions newly-arrived in the area to positions some 25 miles behind the centre of the front, plus another statement of intention to defeat

Rommel

"in the triangle El Alamein -

Qattara Depression - El Hammam" can certainly be taken as an indication that Auchinleck would have met Rommel's next

same manner as Montgomery did. This impression is reinforced by a passage in the Official Despatch written by Montgomery's superior, General Alexander, which reads: "The plan (Auchinleck's) was to hold as strongly as possible the area between the sea and the Ruweisat Ridge and to threaten from the flank any and every advance south of the ridge from a strongly defended prepared position on the Alam offensive

move

in

much

the

Haifa Ridge." This is basically what Montgomery did in the course of his first and most completely set-piece battle, though he has always firmly denied that he knew anything at all of the previously existing plans. This has been the cause of much post-war con-

el

troversy,

for the simple possibility that

two men,

similarly

trained, and faced with the same problem, might arrive at the same solution, seems peculiarly unacceptable to some. But what is that whoever devised the plan, Montgomery and his was the responsibility for putting it into eifect. His, also, would have been the head to roll had it failed not that there was much chance of this, for it was a very sound plan. Throughout August, reinforcements in both tanks and men arrived in Egypt, and the strength of 8th Army divisions at the front was built up while reserves accumulated and became acclimatised at the rear. By the end of the month, the Tel el Eisa salient in the north was firmly held by 9th Australian Division, while south of them as far as the Ruweisat Ridge stretched the positions of the 1st South Africans. Fifth Indian Division held

is

indisputable,

chose

it

-

;

Left: flair

Rommel, with usual goggles, visits his troops. Tactical and personal leadership gave him victories in 1941 and

early 1942; but they were not enough in the

Alam Haifa gamble. 37

Ruweisal Ridge itself, 2nd New Zealand Division lined out to the south with its flank turned back along the northern edge of the Deir el Munassib, and minefields continued the defensive positions down as far as the edge of the Qattara Depression. Away to the south-east lurked 7th Armoured Division, waiting to strike at the southern flank of any force which broke through. Such a force would, it was reasonable to assume, be aimed at

Army, running back along the coast road - and the actual point of aim would probably be El Hammam. To reach there, the penetration force would have to pass along the southern edge of the Alam Haifa Ridge, first under the close attention of 22nd Armoured Brigade, with 23rd in close support, then under positions taken up by the bulk of 44th Division, which Montgomery brought up from the Delta despite its late appearance in the desert. the vulnerable lines of communication of 8th

If

Rommel

accepted the bait of a

held out to him, his forces would

'soft spot'

now have

thus apparently

most dangerand dominating positions on one side - strongly manned and armed with the new six-pounder anti-tank guns - and the mobile and experienced 7th Armoured Division on the other. Altogether, the British could put 713 tanks into battle, of which 164 were heavy Grants. The trap was set. Rommel had, in fact, little option but to walk into it. He knew that the forces facing him were increasing more quickly than his own. Unless he struck soon and burst through to the Nile Delta, the victory, which had lately been apparently so near, would be gone forever; besides which, Rommel himself was ill with a nose infection and an enlarged liver, he would get worse before he got better, and the war would not wait upon his health. On August 27, he extracted a promise from his superiors, Marshals Kesselring and Cavallero, that 6000 tons of petrol would be delivered to him during the course of the next few days and issued orders for the attack which depended to a large extent on an advance of 30 miles in the vital section (through the minebelt) between midnight and dawn. His account begins:— "During the night August 30-31, the infantry with the motorised group of the Panzer Army moved to the attack against the southern bastions of the British El Alamein front. Before long, relay bombing attacks by the raf began on the area occupied by our attacking force. With parachute flares turning night into day, large formations of aircraft unloosed sticks of he bombs." ous gauntlet between

38

fortified

to run a

s

This map, originally published in Field- Marshal Montgomery' Memoirs, shows clearly what Rommel hoped to achieve. His attack swung towards the sea. Had he broken through the defences on the A lam Haifa Ridge, 8th Army would have been taken in the rear; the road to Alexandria, 60 miles away, would have lain open.

39

.;

Not only was

the minebelt far

had given him

Intelligence

more

extensive than

Rommel's

to believe, but the parachute flares

allowed the British artillery to add their fire to the raf bombing, while forward elements of the watching 7th Armoured Division

were also in action against the Panzer Army. By dawn Rommel's men were hardly through the belt, let alone 30 miles beyond it, while General Bismarck, commanding 21st Panzer Division, had been killed and General Nehring, commanding Afrika Korps,

was badly wounded. Wearily, to

Rommel went up

find the

ground carefully foot of

it,

all

himself to urge his troops onwards,

old antagonists, 7th

Armoured

Division, giving

and exacting a heavy price for every the while falling back to the south-east to form the in front

southern wall of the gauntlet.

Rommel

could

now

see the fate

which awaited him unless he changed his tactics, so he ordered an early turn northwards and a direct attack on the British armour at the western end of the Alam Haifa Ridge. By early afternoon, the Afrika Korps had refuelled and its ammunition stocks were renewed - and a heavy sandstorm was raging which at least shielded them from the incessant air attacks on the other hand, it held up the advance of supporting units still coming through the gap in the minefields and added to the fuel consumption of the blinded armour, now churning its way through soft sand. Petrol supply, in fact, would exercise a dominant influence in this battle and Rommel was already seriously worried - so worried, indeed, that as reports of fastemptying fuel tanks came in, he halted the attack on Point 132. But the orders did not reach the leading tank squadrons, and by early evening they were advancing on the western end of Alam Haifa and the positions occupied by the British 22nd Armoured Brigade. The commander. Brig. G. P. B. Roberts, wrote later:— "Now I can see the enemy myself through my glasses. They are coming straight up the line of the telegraph posts which lead in front of our position. There is some firing by their leading tanks, presumably at our light squadrons, so I instruct these to come back -.but to take it wide so as not to give our position away. "On they come, a most impressive array. It is fascinating to watch them, as one might watch a snake curl up ready to strike. And now they all turn left and face us and begin to advance slowly. The greatest concentration seems to be opposite the County of London Yeomanry and the anti-tank guns of the Rifle Brigade. (Eighty-seven German tanks were counted at this time .

.

.

40

opposite this part of the front.)

I

warn

all

units over the air not

it can't be long now a few seconds the tanks of the c.l.y. open fire and the battle is on." Quickly the German 75mm guns took toll of the Yeomanry tanks and the desert was pocked with flame while black plumes rose into the sky; Roberts called a squadron of Scots Greys for-

to fire until the

and then

enemy

are within 1000 yards;

in

reserve, but in the meantime the German tanks edged forward again until they unwittingly crept within range of the Rifle Brigade guns. Again tanks flamed and smoke billowed up, but by sheer weight of numbers the Germans overran some of the Rifle Brigade positions - at which the reserve artillery opened up and blanketed the area. When the blanket lifted, a few tanks still lumbered blindly about, while the remainder smoked and reeked of hot metal and charred flesh. The squadron of Greys arrived to block the hole left by the destruction of the c.l.ys - and the light faded on a scene of desolation. But for 8th Army, the position was now secure. Early next morning, Montgomery - certain that the Afrika Korps would not burst through on to his lines of communication - closed the ring on the German armour. Twenty-third Armoured Brigade came up on Roberts' right, 8th Armoured Brigade moved in from the west and blocked the passage to El Hammam, while 7th Armoured Division closed up from the south. Whichever way the German tanks probed now, they ran into a wall of steel and their tank losses mounted. Three times - with the courage and resolution which always distinguished the Afrika Korps - they tried to break eastwards out of the ring and three times they were beaten back to leave smoking hulls and torn bodies behind them. "By September 2," Rommel was later to write, "out of the 5000 tons of petrol which had been due to arrive by the 3rd, 2600 tons had already been sunk and 1 500 tons were still in Italy." Rommel had been defeated - by lack of support from his own side, and by cool logic and control on the other. No longer would he face an enemy army indiff"erently armed, loosely organised or

ward from

;

no longer would his flair for movement, his willingness to take enormous risks, be enough to win. Early on the morning of September 3, the men on Alam Haifa Ridge watched as German vehicles milled around below them, formed into columns and made off" - westwards. The battle was over, and there was no doubt as to who had won. indecisively controlled;

41

:

Fortress Tobruk

a view from the sea

:

by Neil Bruce Lord

Haw Haw mocked

the

Tobruk garrison as

'rats% ^self-

supporting prisoners\ But in the seven-month siege which began in April 1941)

perimeters;

Rommel's it

armour was somehow from 1000

choicest

recovered

flung back from

its

air raids in the first

The siege ended in December, and even the fall of June 1942 helped to destroy Rommel by luring him on towards Cairo and by thus giving Malta a breathing space from the three months.

Tobruk

in

projected

German

invasion. Neil Bruce, lecturer in Politics at the

University of Keele,

is

writing a book on the

he served as a young naval officer

in

fall

of the town, where

1942.

Tobruk, for me, is just a view from the harbour: a wartime view in which perspective has inevitably become distorted. We lived in a legend called Tobruk, and in those days we all ate and slept and lived with the echoes of the heroes of that legend. We were simply a hangover from the great Siege of 1941 and, for most of us in the Navy, the Western Desert was just an extension of the Mediterranean, where our war, the real war, was being fought. We were all very egocentric,, and we were remarkably ignorant about the real activities of the other Services. Tobruk was where the desert burned into the sea, and, in retrospect, my horizon hardly extended beyond the first escarpment.

summer of

1 942, Tobruk was no longer a fortress or a was a name, like Mons or Verdun in the first world war. But few of us saw this in those summer days 25 years ago. Tobruk, then, existed in itself and for itself, and for us; and we could not but be aware that the whole world was watching. So many men, on both sides, had lived and died for this battered little place, and we were its casual inheritors. We were proud inheritors, too, although we would never have admitted it then. I had gone up there from Alexandria only two months before Tobruk fell, with a strange little flotilla of what were, in the event, rather useless little boats - Support Landing Craft. We patrolled from dusk to dawn east and west along the coast, a few miles off" shore, on the look-out for German E-boats or an invasion force. What we should have done had we ever met them, I do not know our ancient portable radios never managed to establish communications with the shore for the first month we had no more than 50 rounds of ammunition for the two old point five machine

By

the

useful port.

It

;

42

S^Ub^^k-' Tobruk received a continuous bombardment from

shells

and bombs

during the siege that became a legend of war in 1941. Sunken ships were a part of *he usual harbour skyline; and on land, few

war photoa wrecked church in early was quickly given a special name - the Angel of Tobruk.

buildings were left standing. But Cecil Beaton, then a

grapher, found this statue 1942.

It

still

intact in

43

guns and our compasses were as erratic as our navigation. I well remember our briefing before the first night's patrol. The senior naval officer had not seen our strange flat-bottomed little craft, and was not aware that their maximum speed was nine knots. "If you meet enemy craft," he said, "you will immediately ;

batteries." "How?" we asked. "By radio, of only have army walkie-talkie sets and they do not work," we said. "In that case you will fire Very lights." "We have none," we explained, "only the pistols." "Then you must use your imagination," he said. And this, I suppose, we did, though to what purpose I shall never know. It is sad to reflect that the senior naval officer, in command of the Inshore Squadron, would not have been in Tobruk had it not been for our patrol. As it was, he remained to the end and was taken prisoner, badly wounded.

warn the shore course."

"We

My boat and its crew had been carried up from Alexandria the bowels of a tank landing craft (in those days

known

in

as

whose commander was an old friend, Dennis Peters, from our Combined Operations base on the Suez Canal. He had been on the 'Spud Run' all through the 1941 siege. There 'A-Lighters')

have been many stories of the siege. Beleaguered for seven months by the Germans, and held mainly by Australian troops (later relieved by the Poles), it had been sustained by the Royal Navy. Most of the stores and ammunition were brought in at night by destroyers, minelayers, and a gallant little band of merchant ships. But the tank landing craft also carried a small but important proportion of the burden - food, high-octane petrol leaking from flimsy tins into the tank hold, and ammunition - churning along the coast at a maximum speed of around nine knots. They, and their crews, were a part of the tradition that I inherited, and a part of the legend. 'Pedlar' Palmer, too, was a part of that legend, and we all knew his story. He was an Australian r.n.r. officer and skipper of a captured Italian schooner, the Maria Giovanni. He used to sail up the enemy-held coast in splendid ignorance of all navigational theory but, somehow, always got to Tobruk. He used to recognise that hidden fold in the coast by its regular air raids, which provided a splendid beacon for the casual sailor. One night he got

"How the hell do they expect moon and no bloody air raid?" no me One sad day we heard the news that 'Pedlar' Palmer had not arrived, but though he lost an arm and spent some two years as a prisoner of war, it is good to know that he survived the war.

lost,

and arrived very

to get in here

44

when

late,

saying

there's

I can only speak from personal experience of the last days of Tobnik before it fell, in June 1942. I remember particularly the morning of June 18. We came in from patrol late - well after dawn: I had mistaken the harbour entrance, as quite often happened, and it was a noisy morning in the town. There was an air raid, and the harbour was being shelled. When we tied up, we learned that Tobruk was besieged once again. It was not a cheerful thought, but in a way it seemed right and proper, as if Tobruk had come into its own again. We never, I think, doubted that it would be held again, although we should have known better. We knew the war was going badly in the desert - night after night we had followed its course roughly from out at sea, guessing at the geography of the battles by the flares and the fireworks of war. We had watched it start at the Gazala Line and move jerkily eastwards. But things moved so fast, backwards and

forwards, that this created neither surprise nor any special dismay. Eighth Army, we were sure, would turn on the Afrika Korps

some

at

point,

and back they would

roll

once again.

We ought to have guessed - and perhaps some did - that somewrong with

Tobruk

situation. Only a day or two and port personnel were evacuated in the last convoy out of Tobruk and with them went a number of 3-7 aa guns - half, in fact, of the main aa defences. We now know that it had been decided months before that

thing was before,

all

the

'non-essential' naval

;

Tobruk could not be supplied during another siege; the naval losses of the previous year had been terrible, and the Mediterranean Fleet was by now only a pale ghost. But we did not consider the possibility of Tobruk falling uncomfortable as it was, it was for us one of the few stable, continuing facts in a :

largely incomprehensible war.

One of the things about the Desert War which has often struck me in retrospect is the violence of its contrasts. Especially in the Navy, we were commuters to a war - however infrequently. As sailed into Alexandria the war disappeared completely. Alex was virtually a peacetime city, utterly remote from the world of war: cosmopolitan, gay and cheerful. Hot baths and ice-cold beer - and attractive, well-dressed women. Those, and in that order, were our dreams in or near the desert a few hours away. And, in any case, in Tobruk itself our life was astonishingly parochial, and the natives - if there were any - hardly impinged on our consciousness. It was, after all, our war and the inhabitants of Egypt and Libya were merely sightseers as far as we were con-

we

45

The pin-ups were Betty Grable and Hedy Lamarr; the songs came from Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton (the girls from next door); and the laughs from Tommy Handley and Robb cerned.

It was all very cosy and homely. The morning of June 20 was much like any other morning, but

Wilton.

rather noisier, and by nine o'clock

German

shells were straddling on the edge of the harbour. There was, I recall, a heavy black cloud of dust and smoke hanging over the eastern edge of the perimeter, but we paid no great attention to this. It was, after all, the Army's affair: there were 25,000 South African troops, together with an Indian division, to defend the fortress, whose commander was a South African general called Klopper. Here, once again, facts of which I was certain at the time proved to be myths, persistent and dangerous. Long after Tobruk fell, we learned that its garrison had been over 35,000 men, and that the majority were British and not South African - but for years it was the South Africans alone who took the blame for the disaster. The facts are so well known now that there is no need to go into the details of that pitiful last day. The point is that, noisy and unpleasant as it all was, at midday we in the harbour had no idea that anything serious was happening. Captain Walter, Senior Naval Officer Inshore Squadron, was told by the Army at about that time that the situation was 'under control' - and that, he has told me later, was the last signal he ever received from the Army.

Navy House, where we

lived high

By seven o'clock in the evening, German tanks were entering town of Tobruk, and the mad exodus began. The Navy were not alone in their ignorance. The Army in

the the

western sector of the perimeter carried on quite normally all through that day, not knowing that the Germans had broken through the perimeter on the south-east in massive strength. One officer from a Royal Artillery survey unit, Lt. Harold Hayley, for example, watched the German dawn attack through binoculars and could see the German bombers taking off from, and landing at. El Adem (our own raf base until only a few days before). He too was unperturbed, for none of us knew that all communications inside the perimeter had broken down early that day. He had in his truck plans of all the survey details for gun positions all round the perimeter; for defence boxes already set up on the Egyptian frontier, equipped with food, ammunition, water and petrol. It was only on the morning of June 21 that he learned that Tobruk had surrendered, and burned these small pieces of paper

46

X

-x.?

-^t .^%.^^

/,

The troops besieged in Tobruk were Australian, British, Polish. They were, not surprisingly, dubbed cavemen, for many lived and worked in solid-rock shelters. Often ventilators were taken from ships sunk in the harbour and ingeniously installed in the shelters.

morning of June 21, but in fact it died the evening before in an hour of shambles in the harbour. One of the last ships out was an old mine-sweeper whose captain was an Australian. I remember looking back at Tobruk, from the shelter of its bridge, at a smoking mess: how terrible that it should end this way; Tobruk, which was the Desert War. After all its heroics, it simply walked, or fell, out of the war in a few

Tobruk surrendered

in the

hours of a summer day. Almost all our judgments made in Tobruk in 1942 were wrong. The personal element is of no importance what is important is the contradiction between the attitudes at the time and the facts as we learned them, slowly, a long time afterwards. We know now that, because Rommel captured Tobruk so quickly, the invasion of Malta was deferred. It could come after Rommel had reached the Nile. Tobruk served its purpose finally it gave Malta a respite, and it deserves to be a name in the history of the war. :

:

47

Ironmongery of the desert by Len Deighton additional research by Chris Ellis

and Peter Chamberlain any war, a commander can be only as successful as his supply and his equipment. In the Desert War this was doubly true guns, tanks and planes were operating in the most rigorous conditions, often many hundreds of miles from a supply base. Tanks, mobile artillery and even obsolescent planes were ingeniously refitted and rearmed for their desert role, and captured enemy vehicles became a significant factor in any battle. The ironmongery of the war, from the light armoured cars of the Thirties to the villainous minefields of Alamein, is described by novelist Len Deighton, himself a weapons enthusiast, who is editing the forthcoming Jonathan Cape Weapons and Warfare series. In

lines

Stage

One

:

the junkyard armies

and loud arguments about and General Fuller in England, where the tank had been invented, de Gaulle in France (where the tank had been developed almost as early as Britain), Chaffee in America and Guderian in Germany argued that the tank should be used in predominantly armoured units, using other arms as support for the armoured breakthrough. The In the Thirties there had been long

the role of the tank in future warfare. Liddell Hart

prevailing official position in countries other than

was

Germany

on their hands would never supplant crack cavalry regiments, and that if tanks had to have a place on the battlefield, it was essentially in support, in particular a support to infantry. However, in the years immediately preceding the war British ideas had crystallised sufficiently to lead to the development of three distinct types of tank, the iight' tank for scouting (and adequate for the 'police' role of a peacetime army), the 'cruiser' tank for following up or maintaining an attack, and the 'infantry' tank designed to move with advancing infantry. So at the outbreak of war most British tanks were equipped either with machine guns or small - two-pounder - guns. Much of the early desert fighting between the British and the Italians had a strong 'colonial' war flavour, as armoured car patrols skirmished along the Libyan frontier wire. There were armoured cars reminiscent of those used by 48

that fellows with grease

Lawrence of Arabia,

like the Rolls

Royce (1924

pattern),

and the

Morris reconnaissance car - a typical 'cut price' job - which was an armoured version of the standard Morris truck. The Italian Ansaldo dated back even further to a basic design of 1 909. Most of the Italian tanks - like the tiny CV3/35 - stemmed from the same parentage as the British light tanks. Of the 60 used by the Ariete Division, Rommel commented: "Completely obsolete design. They were far too light, and had once been used to chase the natives around Abyssinia." At Sidi Barrani and Tobruk these light Italian tanks were pounded by the best British tank at this time; the Matilda (or Infantry Tank Mk II). Far superior to any Italian tank, and so heavily

armoured

that

it

was

virtually

immune

to Italian anti-

tank guns, the Matilda ruled supreme in spite of its very small (two-pounder) gun and slow speed, until the Germans arrived.

The standard British army anti-tank weapon was basically the same two-pounder that was fitted to the tanks, though a good deal of reliance was still placed on tiny outmoded anti-tank rifles.

many

infantry units found themselves still using the Lewis gun of 1918, rather than the Bren gun which had oflficially

Similarly,

replaced

it

in 1938.

Most of

the artillery was 18-pounder and six-inch howitzers which were basically first world war designs. The invaluable 25-pounder had only just begun to arrive in the desert in 1940 and so had its ammunition, g.h.q. rationed 25-pounders to two rounds per day. This was a 'colonial' war on the grand scale. Significantly Britain's last horsed cavalry regiment survived in the Middle East until 1941. The removal of one of Britain's armoured warfare experts, Major-General Hobart, from the War Ofiice to a quiet 'colonial' job in Egypt led directly to Wavell's great success in the initial campaign against the Italians in Libya. Hobart, who had commanded the experimental mechanised force in the early Thirties, was banished to organise a Mobile Division in Egypt, which became 7th Armoured Division. With 4th Indian Division this made up Wavell's Western Desert Force

of 1940, forerunner of 8th Army. Hobart's training routed a 300,000-strong Italian army with a force of only 36,000 men (Wavell's renowned 'Thirty Thousand') - though Hobart had

gone by then

-

and vindicated the armoured warfare theorists of was Britain's first and

the Thirties. This Libyan offensive in 1940

most successful attempt

at

mechanised war. 49

War

time was of comparatively hghter significance. The Itahan Caproni three-motor transport and the Savoia in the air at this

Machetti

SM79 bomber

looked more

like the

passenger planes

Heston airport than like military aircraft, while the Gloster Gladiator and Italian CR42 and CR32 flights flew in steady formation across the frontier where Italy's 12-foot-deep barbed wire fortifications stretched into the desert for a distance of 400 miles. A waggle of the wings meant that the enemy was sighted, and a close combat dogfight, with the wind whistling through the wires, ensued. The victors returned to an airfield with tented accommodation and the whole business was more like a remake of Dawn Patrol than a modem war. Hostile actions were not encouraged, an attack on enemy transport was likely to call forth rebuke, and it was to be a long time before the raf fully integrated its actions with the Army's needs. On August 13 1940 the Army was told not to ask for air support unless an enemy attack was imminent, and in the rest of the month there were only two air attacks against field targets. The Middle East Command of the Royal Air Force found itself with territory of four and a half million square miles to operate in, and too few aircraft to use. Their standard fighter was flying out of

the obsolescent Gloster Gladiator biplane, their

bomber

the

which struck the first blow of the Desert War against El Adem on the night Italy declared war. Tactical reconnaissance was done by the Westland Lysander. As if they weren't antique enough, the rest of the command included aeroplanes like Wellesleys, Hartebeests, Vincents, Hardys, Audaxes, Harts, Londons, and even a few Junkers 86s - converted airliners. There was exactly one Hurricane in M.E. Command on tropical trials in June 1940 and this was moved around constantly, although whether this was to impress the raf crews or demoralise the enemy is not clear from the Official History. Blenheim Mark

1,

Left: the early stages of the Desert War were symbolised by the captured Italian solar topees (1), which British troops also

wore and which were very different from later informal gear. The Italian cruiser San Giorgio (2) was an RAF victim when Tobruk fell to O'Connor in January 1940. Typical, too, of the early and outdated weaponry were the Morris reconnaissance car (3), seen by the famous 400-mile 'wire' on the Egypt- Libya border, and Gladiator fighter (5). The Matilda tank (4), however, commanded the scene until the

German armour

arrived to help the Italians. 51

Stage Two imports and improvisations When Rommel and his German soldiers entered the desert fight:

ing, they brought new ideas and new equipment. The Germans had used the blitzkreig successfully in Poland and France and their equipment was all designed as part and parcel of this technique. They did not have the problem, that the British had, of adapting and co-relating their equipment to an overall concept. When Auchinleck took over from Wavell he looked at the German war machine to see what could be learned from it. The first important change was closer co-operation between soldiers and aeroplanes. This close support was the crux of the blitzkreig in which the dive-bomber was used as airborne artillery. The Luftwaffe had brought with it the Ju87 (Stuka) divebombers that had been such a success in France and Poland. (In the Battle of Britain they had been cut to pieces by the Spitfires and Hurricanes, but here in the desert there were no Spitfires and few Hurricanes.) Hitler ordered Mel 10s and Stukas into Africa "if necessary withdrawing them from warfare against Britain". In the middle of 1941 a few Lease Lend P40 Tomahawks, con-

sidered unsuitable for operations in Britain, were replacing the last

ancient Gladiators. These P40s and later the improved but Kittyhawk - vastly inferior fighters to the Messerschmitt

similar

109s - were equipped to carry 250-lb bombs and became useful ground-attack aircraft instead. Another American aeroplane to arrive was the Maryland. A squadron of them was operating. It was a useful bomber, its top speed (278 m.p.h.), was about on a par with the Do215, and considerably faster than the Helll, but with fuel for 1000 miles it

bomb load of only 2000 lb (about the same as the Do 17 or Do215). This was puny compared to the Luftwaffe's new JuSSs which, with fuel for 1280 miles, could carry a bomb load carried a

of 4400 lb. General von Mellenthin said that the German successes were due to co-operation between the arms, tactical methods and the anti-tank gun. He said that the British thought of anti-tank guns as defensive weapons while Rommel used them for attack and defence. Perhaps the most vital single weapon the Germans brought to the Desert War was their standard 50mm anti-tank gun. In France in 1940 the Germans had failed to pierce the armour of the British Matilda tanks with their 37mm anti-tank guns. This new 50mm gun kept the same low profile as the previous one, but its increased size (unlike the British two52

pounder) was large enough to fire a shell with an explosive charge inside. Later still the Germans were able to put into action their even better PAK40 (75nim) and the Russian 76-2mm a/t gun, large numbers of which were captured on the Eastern Front.

A

50mm gun was

similar

made them

German

fitted in the

tanks, which

a worse threat to infantry than our tanks were. More had only the two-

especially so because the British infantry

defend themselves. In an effort to improve and lightly protected two-pounder, the the idea of carrying them in a modified truck British adopted (called a 'portee') from which they could be (and often needed to

pounder

gun

a/t

to

the mobility of the puny,

be) fired. But with the standard anti-tank

commanders

often

had to

call

on

their

gun

largely impotent,

25-pounder howitzers to

act in the anti-tank role.

The Mark

German

III

vehicles.

tank and

They

Mark IV

ruled the

tank were the two classic North African battlefield until of British anti-tank guns and

Alamein, overrunning batteries destroying Matildas and Crusaders with carefully placed shots

from

their short low-velocity

The only

75mm

guns.

Allied tank which could face the best

German

tanks

on equal grounds was the American-built Grant which reached the desert in May 1942. This was the first tank in British service with a gun large enough (75mm) to fire a high explosive shell. However the Grant was a high-profile tank, and this factor was made more serious by the low placing and limited traverse of the gun. The Grant had to be high against the skyline and facing the Overleaf: second-phase Desert

Tomahawks began

War weaponry. The Lease Lend

to arrive in crates to

be assembled

in

Africa

but were no match for the Me 109s which had entered the fight, together with the notorious Stuka dive-bomber (10). The (1)

mm

Germans also had the edge in tanks (8. their Mark IV, with 75 and 37 gun) and anti-tank guns like the 75 mm, 50 (3). British guns were usually the under-sized 2-pounder, though mounting it on a truck as a 'portee' (9) helped. So, in 1942, did

mm

mm

giving the Crusader tank a 6-pounder (6). Use or evaluation of captured gear, like the German armoured car (2) and the German

NSU

motor-bike-like tractor

(5),

was very characteristic of

war. Italian equipment, like the knocked out

continued to be rather (4.

Mussolini's

inferior.

famous 'Marble

German panzers pictured

M 13140

Their grandiose

tank

this (7),

monuments

Arch', close to El Agheila, with

in the foreground)

proved more durable. 53

enemy before

it

could

fire,

but

its

arrival

swung

the balance

and did wonders for morale. design was to ever larger guns. Adolf in tank The tendency Hitler had personally ordered that from August 1942 all Mark III tanks being repaired in factories must be fitted with 50mm L/43

decisively in favour of the British,

These modified vehicles, called PzIII the answer to the Grant had they been available in sufficient numbers. To get more mobile support on to the battlefield in as short a time as possible, designers on both sides compromised by putting guns into chassis that were really too small for them. This was done either by putting an long-barrelled

(Specials)

guns.

would have been

gun into the biggest chassis available, or putting the current tank gun into an obsolescent smaller chassis. Either way round, this made for a heavy vehicle that must be faced

extra large a/t

towards the target; such vehicles were self-propelled (s.p.) guns. Some of the German gun-plus-chassis combinations were bizarre - none more so than the Lorraine s.p. gun which was a first world war Krupp howitzer carried on a pre-war personnel transporter captured in the invasion of France in 1940. These were still being used at Alamein. Another weird s.p. gun was the Marder III. Upon a small tank, from a Czech factory taken over by the German invasion in 1938, was mounted a reconditioned 76mm anti-tank gun captured on the Russian front. One hundred and seventeen of these s.p. guns were used by Rommel in his drive on Cairo. By contrast British attempts at s.p. guns were more modest. The major development was the 'Bishop', a 25-pounder on a Valentine tank chassis, but there were numerous unofficial adaptations such as captured Italian guns mounted on Marmon Herrington armoured cars.

A

War as it heaved to Libya was the extensive use each side made of captured equipment. Rommel, his reinforcement situation always tenuous, had batteries of British 25-pounders, and tank squadrons of assorted British tanks - a crude whitewash cross denoting the new owners. Rommel himself used a captured British command truck as his personal caravan - and Montgomery followed in the tradition. Aircraft were less often captured intact, but the Germans used several captured Hurricanes while the raf utilised Ju52s and SM79s to supplement their perpetual need for transport aircraft. Best prize of all, however, was the Fieseler Storch - the land-anywhere utility plane - which and

56

particular characteristic of the Desert

fro across

was much favoured by British brass as a personal aircraft. Perhaps the most famous gun of the war was the German 88mm FLAK gun. Experts argue about whether the British 3-7" aa gun would have made a similarly awe-inspiring tank-destroying gun, but it should be remembered that Rommel denuded his supply bases of anti-aircraft protection by using these 88s in the field, it was probably loss of supplies that - as much as anything - lost the war for Rommel.

and that

Stage Three Alamein and after :

Alamein shortened the

British supply routes

easier for the supply experts.

The

and made

flimsy four-gallon can

life

had

come near

to losing the war for us. Auchinleck estimated that 30 per cent of all petrol leaving base was lost due to punctures in them. Add to this the losses in water to see what those tins really

The Germans thought the British idea of a one-journey container too wasteful for them in terms of metal. They made stronger jerricans that would last indefinitely (see picture on cost.

174). Eighth Army used jerricans too, whenever they could hands on them, and this item subsequently became standard British equipment. Alamein, because it was a defence line, marked the end of victories by surprise. From now on it was a war of air-supported infantry, massed artillery barrages, engineers, sappers, and endless 'gardens' of minefields. The mines were ingenious, not to say diabolical. There were Teller mines like big plates, S mines that jumped up in the air and exploded ball bearings as far as 100 yards. There were double-prong French mines, long Italian N mines, hand grenades rigged to booby-traps and Luftwaffe bombs wired to anything you might touch. With the mines came the techniques for dealing with them - the electric mine detector to replace the prodder, and the Baron and Scorpion minesweeping tanks as forerunners of the long line of special purpose tanks which were to come later. The Hurribomber appeared. The obsolescent fighter took on a new lease of life in a ground attack role, shooting up supply columns with rockets, and bombing tanks. The powerful Beaufighter, the Wellington, and Fleet Air Arm Albacores were now bombing Rommel's bases and the ships which ran the gauntlet to bring him supplies, raf and Army were now co-ordinated as never before, with 8th Army and Desert Air Force h.qs. set up alongside each other. The Sherman tank from America was the most important new

page lay

57

Ht^i

^'Vlri'^

:-k£0.

#r^

'

^

of Alamein. The old Matildas had been withdrawn and the German Mks III and IV had to face up to one of the most interesting tanks of the war. The profile was lower than the Grant's and the stabilised 75mm gun was in a fully traversing, power-operated turret, placed high enough to fire arrival at the battle

while the tank remained concealed.

An s.p. gun based upon the Sherman chassis also appeared at Alamein. The gun was a big 105mm howitzer. There was a machine gun mounted upon a high 'pulpit' at the front so the British Army called this s.p. gun a 'Priest', carrying on an episcopal tradition for British s.p. guns which remains today. These guns were very successful. They were capable of 20 m.p.h., could move across any sort of terrain and could be in action within minutes. This changed the whole concept of artillery as a weapon. By now 4-5 and 5-5 inch howitzers were supplementing the 25-pounders, and a more powerful a/t gun, the six-pounder, had at last appeared. Some six-pounders were also lorry-mounted for greater mobility and this weapon - unique to the desert campaign - was called a Deacon. Although the Germans introduced far fewer new weapons after Alamein, some of them were remarkable. At Alamein the 75mm recoilless gun appeared. It could throw a 2^ lb shell up to distances of 7500 yds. There was a 105mm recoilless gun too. In the final reckoning, men were the decisive weapon. The Italians, despite mobile brothels and a diet of pasta, never adapted to desert life; and even the German eflftciency, their excellent food and high mobility could not reconcile them with the hostile desert sand. The Allies proved the most readily adaptable to the hot, dry atmosphere and the British, revelling in the informal discipline, evolved into what was perhaps the fittest army the world has ever seen. Left:

some of

the instruments

the water which the

of

phase were drums for 8th Army (1),

victory in the last

Navy brought

in

keeping abreast of the advancing troops; the Scorpion minesweeping tank (4) - its 'flails' exploded any mines in its path; the U.S. -built Sherman tank (5); and Wellington (6). Against these weapons in bulk, even the long-barrelled 50 and 75 guns of the Panzer Mark Ills (3) and IVs could not prevail. Nor could German minefields (2. 5 anti-personnel mine, and the ball-

mm

mm

bearings it scattered) halt 8th Army, even though 'Rommel's gardens' of mines were a major obstacle in the Alamein battle.

59

%m^^f-

The

battle of Alamein

by Field-Marshal Montgomery In early

May,

1967, Field-Marshal Viscount

Montgomery of

Alamein returned to the field of his most famous battle. With him to Egypt went Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese, who commanded 30 Corps during that battle, and Brigadier Hugh Mainwaring, who was one of the brilliant headquarters team which Montgomery assembled. Together they covered hundreds of miles around the battlefield, sometimes travelling by jeep along routes carefully marked through the minefields which still exist, sometimes leapfrogging over dangerous terrain by helicopter. The names of the features they went to are like a litany for veterans of the battle - Miteiriya Ridge, Tel el Aqqaqir, El Wishka, Ruweisat Ridge, Himeimat, Alam el Haifa Ridge, the Rahman Track and many more. At each spot maps, protractors, compasses were produced as Montgomery and his companions worked out again the ebb and flow of Eighth Army's crucial victory a quarter of a century earlier. This account of Alamein was mainly written after the Field-Marshal's return from his historic and virtually unprecedented journey of rediscovery.

now

25 years since that great battle was fought. I use the because my personal message to officers and men of the Eighth Army on October 23, 1942 contained the following sentences

It is

word

'great'

'The

battle

which

is

now about

decisive battles of history.

one of the be the turning point of

to begin will be

It will

the war."

Why did I

speak thus to the army? Some may say it was boasting. But the reader should cast his mind back to 1941 and the first half of 1942, when the Allies had suffered some major disasters, (Dunkirk in 1940 was bad enough) for example :The debacles in Greece and Crete in April-May, 1941. The setback in the Western Desert of Egypt in April, 1941 and the siege of Tobruk by Rommel. Left: at this time the battle of Alamein was raging. Montgomery talks with two of his three Corps Commanders, Lt.-Gen. Lumsden

of 10 Corps (back to camera) and Lt.-Gen. Leese of 30 Corps. Lt.-Gen. Horrocks commanded 13 Corps on the southern flank. 61

!

!

The 1

loss of the Prince of Wales and Repulse in January, 942 and the surrender of Singapore in February with its

75,000 troops. defeats of the

The

Burma campaign

first

in

March and

April, 1942.

Further setbacks

by

Rommel

in

in the desert,

and the capture of Tobruk

June, 1942 with 30,000 prisoners.

The continued menace of Rommel, and drawal of the Eighth

Army

to the

the forced with-

Alamein position

in

July, 1942 - followed by Rommel's army. It was a dismal story. The Russians had been reeling under heavy blows. The Americans had not yet gathered their mighty

war on December 7, 1941. was against this background that I took command of the Eighth Army on August 13, 1942 - having been serving in England since June, 1940 when the British Expeditionary Force had been driven out of Europe. To my mind one thing was clear there must be no more defeats. A degree of caution might be necessary, undue risks must not be taken; I would not engage in battle until we were ready; historians and critics could say what they liked, and have I was determined to have done with defeats in the desert and to go for victory, definite and complete. I knew that the soldiers of the British Empire who composed the Eighth Army were sick and tired of being pushed around by Rommel they were worthy of better things and I told them that together we would hit Rommel and his army for six - right out of Africa. I don't suppose it will be disputed that I on one side and Rommel on the other were the decisive figures in the battle of Alamein. We decided every move. It is sad that Rommel is dead; I would like to have met my famous opponent and discussed with him the battle. All that can now be done is for me to tell my story, but how much better would it be if we could tell the story

strength since they joined in the It

;

together

The desert Some who

read this story

may

not

know

the desert. There are

certain rocky features or ridges, escarpments with access for

vehicles only at certain places such as at Haifa ya Pass near Solium,

and depressions with steep perimeters. Apart from these the desert appears to the casual eye to be completely

not so to the experienced eye,

62

which

finds

many

flat but this is undulations of ;

only a few feet which provide cover from view by an enemy. In Western Desert of maybe 2,000,000 square few nomad Arabs are occasionally met, miles there is little life. the great Libyan, or

A

but no man

permanently, except for scattered settlements along the coast and a few oases far to the south. It is very hot during the summer months, when flies hold sway in the daytime; the nights are cool and can even be chilly, and the flies then cease their torment. Plant life consists of small prickly bushes of camel thorn. South of the barrier of the Qattara lives there

Depression, of which

more

later, the great

Sand Sea

stretches for

hundreds of miles; this is difficult 'going' except for a lightly loaded truck with desert tyres. But north and west of the barrier the desert is very different; close to the sea, sand dunes and occasional salt marshes abound, and apart from those the of rock and gravel with patches of soft sand which are Here motor traffic can move rapidly and at will. Water is scarce, but it is there for those who can find where to bore for it and have the means to move it. There are a few water holes used by Arabs. The main curses of life in the desert are flies, and sand or dust storms. But apart from these the soldiers found it, on the whole, a healthy life - but not a soft one. Despite the surface

is

easily avoided.

heat there

is

a quality in the air which gives the climate an

We who

and fought our way from Alamein to Tunisia were very fit, and in good heart. Except for a few special ailments such as desert sores, stomach upsets, and jaundice - this latter being confined chiefly to officers - there was exhilarating feeling.

little

lived

sickness.

Some difficult problems Many books have

been written about the battles fought by the

Eighth Army under my command, and about my handling of that army. These have mostly been by officers who were of junior rank in those days, or by Press reporters, or by military historians. But the whole story has never been told, and, indeed, could not be told by anybody but myself- because I kept entirely to myself certain highlights of the problems which confronted me. Now, 25 years later, the time has come to tell the story more fully, and to explain the reasons for much of what was done - and this I will do. When I assumed command of the Eighth Army things didn't look too good to me. Rommel had obviously been dominating the desert scene and nobody seemed able to cope with him. It didn't take me long to discover that the soldiers of the Eighth

63

Army

were magnificent material; but it is 'captaincy', or leaderis also needed in warfare and without it no great achievements are possible. The generals in command of corps and divisions were officers of personal courage and leadership in battle, and because of these qualities they had risen to their present ranks - in some cases above their ceiling. To my critical eye they seemed to me to know a good deal about fighting, but too little about 'war\ Then my Chief of Staff, de Guingand, told me that the morale of the army wasn't any too good; he said there was too much uncertainty, and 'the feel of the thing' was wrong; in his view the Eighth Army needed a clear lead and a firm grip from the top. I discovered in due course that this opinion about morale was not in all respects correct. The morale of the soldiers seemed to be reasonably good; in the words of Winston Churchill they were "brave but baffled". But it was higher up, in the staffs of formations and among commanders, that morale was not on the top line, because it was there that information became known as to ship in the higher sense, which

what was 'cooking' in the minds of the high command in Cairo. It happened in this way. Plans were being thought out as to what would happen if Rommel attacked the Eighth Army and his offensive could not be held - and this was definitely right as regards plans. It was considered that the Eighth Army must be maintained 'in being'. Certain reconnaissances were ordered to be carried out should a withdrawal become necessary, and in some cases ordered to be carried out by officers of Army Headquarters. But what bedevilled the situation was the 'dual control' existing in the command organisation. Auchinleck, besides being C-in-C with his headquarters in Cairo, was also Army Commander with his headquarters in the desert. He spent much time at Army Headquarters and the typing of highly secret corre-

spondence about 'withdrawal' was done there; clerks and cipher staff knew what was going on, also officers on the operations staff. Naturally rumours developed, and even subordinate headquarters heard about it. All thinking and planning about future possible action should have been kept in the utmost secrecy at General Headquarters, and if this had been done no harmful rumours could have spread. The highly unsatisfactory situation arising from dual control, most probably unknown to the C-in-C, reflects adversely on the staff at g.h.q. Dual command and control in the field in war is dangerous. It ceased when General Alexander

became C-in-C 64

in Cairo.

Insofar as war can ever be 'gentlemanly', the desert campaigns were fought out with that undertone. These New Zealanders were assisting a wounded German tank crew, despite being under heavy fire, during one of the many desperate encounters of early 1942.

Another point was a tendency in the different arms and blame for past troubles on others; this was particularly the case between the infantry and the armour, and the problem of co-operation between these two arms in battle had not been solved; hence the ill-feeling on both sides. Also, it appeared to me that the army and the air force were fighting two

divisions to lay the

separate battles, with their respective headquarters

many

miles

apart.

have always considered that morale is the most important on which war potential is built up, and the study of the past history of warfare proves this point. All through my military life the human factor has influenced me to a tremendous degree. Generals are meant to win battles; their raw material is men battles are won primarily in the hearts of men. When Britain goes to war the ranks of her armed forces are filled with men from I

factor

;

65

civil life

who

are not soldiers, sailors or airmen by profession -

Such men are educated, they can think, know what is going on, and what the general wants them to do, and why, and when; they want to see and decide in their own minds what sort of person he is. I have never believed in dealing with soldiers by a process of 'remote control'; they are human beings and their lives are precious. The only general the soldiers seemed to know by name was Rommel. I was determined to 'get myself over' to officers and men in the Eighth Army and there was little time in which to do it; but if successful the greatest achievements might be possible with such magnificent material. There was much to be done, and I set about my task without delay.

and never wanted

to be.

they can appreciate. They want to

The first thing to tackle was generalship. I needed three really good corps commanders, highly trained officers who thoroughly understood the conduct of war and had themselves had experience in battle against the Germans. I asked for, and was given at once, two from England - Oliver Leese and Brian Horrocks. These two had both served under me; they knew my ways and my methods of command, which is important when there is much to be done and little time in which to do it - as in this case. There was some discussion about the commander for my third corps. The corps d elite in Rommel's army was his Afrika Korps of two armoured divisions and a motorised infantry division, and this was the spearhead of his offensives. We had no such corps and I began to form one immediately. To command this corps, strong in armour, I wanted a really first class soldier and I did not see the man I wanted in the Eighth Army. Great pressure was brought to bear on me to give the command to a general who had commanded armoured formations all through the war in the desert up to date. The reasoning at G.H.Q. in Cairo was that unless you had fought in the desert for some time you could not know how to handle the particular type of fighting involved. I disagreed with this thinking; what was needed

good

in

high

soldiers,

command and

it

in the desert

were generals

who were

was immaterial to me whether they had indeed, I had not myself, nor had Leese or

fought in the desert Horrocks, and nobody could have served me better than these two. I really wanted a general from England who had not been fighting in the desert, and I asked for one I knew well - Dempsey. Of course there was a good deal to be said for the fact that it

66

in the desert army if all the senior posts were by new arrivals from England. So I gave in and accepted the G.H.Q. nominee - Lumsden, a cavalry soldier who had

might not be popular filled

commanded

the 1st

Armoured

That appointment proved, finally

I

got

Dempsey

commander has

in the

division in the desert battles.

end, to have been unwise, and

- but not until later on.

ever had three better corps

I doubt if any army commanders under

him than Leese, Horrocks, and Dempsey. The problem of the air force was solved when I moved Army Headquarters from a very unpleasant site in the desert back to Burg el Arab - on the sea shore and adjacent to the headquarters of the Desert Air Force. The Air Officer Commanding, Coningham, was invited to live in my h.q. Mess, and army and air force became welded into one fighting machine of great potential. Regarding morale, I was determined to introduce into the desert an 'army' esprit de corps. There was in each division a good divisional esprit; but that would not be enough to weld the Eighth Army and the Desert Air Force into a powerful war machine. We must fight as an army, and not as a number of divisions grouped into corps each conducting its own battle. So I laid it down that divisions would fight in battle as complete formations, and would not have their brigades and units taken away for long periods on particular tasks. If it was necessary during the course of a battle to take a brigade from a division for a certain operation, it would rejoin its parent division immediately that operation was completed. This order was an important factor in helping to tighten the grip from above - and therefore was an aid to morale. Possibly the greatest factor in raising morale was my declaration on the evening of the day I took over command of the army that there was to be no withdrawal from the Alamein position the defence of Egypt must be fought out at Alamein and not in the Delta; if the Alamein position was lost, Egypt was lost; if we couldn't stay at Alamein alive, we would stay there dead. I ;

ordered that all correspondence dealing with the subject of withdrawal was to be burnt at once, the gso 1 Operations to report to me before going to bed that this had been done - and he so reported. A great deal of reorganisation was necessitated by these simple statements; transport must go to the rear, stores and supplies be built clear to the

wanted to

up

army

- there

in the

that

it

forward area. The ironical fact became couldn't withdraw now even if some

was no transport 67

I

learned that, in the past, orders issued from

quarters had been the subject of discussion

and were often queried

knew

right

better than his superior.

down

Army Head-

among

the generals, the line - each thinking he

My Chief of Staff told me

generally needed firm action to get things done.

I

that

it

issued a very

order on this subject - orders were no longer to form the basis for discussion, but for action. I would not have commanders 'bellyaching' that is, inventing unsound reasons for not doing what they were told to do. There was no more bellyaching after that order went out! The firm grip from the top was now apparent there was to be no more uncertainty about anything. strict

:

;

The Alamein position We must now move to the

desert and examine the Alamein was occupied by the Eighth Army when I took over command on August 13, 1942. The position ran from the

position which

mound

of Tel el Eisa close to the Mediterranean sea shore, then almost due south across the western end of the long and bony Ruweisat Ridge, and on southwards to include Qaret el Himeimat - a very conspicuous landmark with its twin peaks, nearly 700 feet above sea level. This feature dominated the country to the north, and the side which owned it could observe all movement for many miles around. It stood on the northern edge of the great Qattara Depression. The total distance from the sea to Himeimat was possibly 30 miles or so in a straight line, and the position itself was about 60 miles west of Alexandria. The Qattara Depression is a vast salt marsh covered with soft

below sea level - how far below is mine in Cairo, who visited it in 1937, disputed. considered it to be, overall, at least 200 feet below sea level, and in some places more. About 4,000 yards to the west of Himeimat is a large spur running down to the depression called Minqar Abu Dweis ('the hill of the father of birds'); the top of the spur is covered with very large loose stones, making movement difficult sand and lying

Some

many

feet

friends of

even for a jeep the sides are steep, with a fall of many feet to the level of the depression. The entrances to the depression from the north lead through rocky defiles, and are few. The impassable area of the depression runs south-westwards to the Siwa Oasis, a distance from Himeimat of over 200 miles. The desert road which now runs from Mena House near the Pyramids northwards to Alexandria, and thence westwards to ;

68

*^'

.^

rrsrr^

i ''>^.^.... ''"

Debris litters the ground; a German gunner lies dead. This 88 mm gun was knocked out in Cyrenaica in late 1941 as Rommel was pushed back. A month later he passed this way again - heading towards Egypt and, ultimately, the final confrontation at Alamein.

Alamein and beyond, was not built until some years before the outbreak of war in 1939. Before that time visitors to the Western Desert from Cairo drove via Mena and then north-west across the desert to Fuka - the 'going' by the desert tracks being good. I should explain that the Alamein position takes its name from a tiny station of a few buildings on the single track railway from Alexandria to Mersa Matruh. Before 1935 the railway did not extend beyond Fuka. It was on the seashore to the north of the station that

Alamein

-

I

established

my Main

my

Tactical h.q. for the battle of

h.q. remaining next to Air h.q. at

Burg

el

Arab.

Rommel's army faced the Eighth Army at Alamein. It will be from what I have written that there was no open flank - on the north the Mediterranean, on the south the Qattara Depression. The problem facing me and my staff was therefore difficult - how to break into and through Rommel's position, which had no open flank. It would have to be a frontal attack

clear

against a defensive system about five miles deep, with a network of

whole sown with mines (500,000 learned later), and supported by a strong artillery. But I was not dismayed. Three points were pillars in my military philosophy mfantry defended

localities, the

we

69

(a)

When

planning a battle a general is faced with the fog of war. But provided he can catch a glimpse of the open ground through the trees (so to speak), the soldiers will disperse the fog.

(b) In the battle, victory will

trained, best led right

go

which is best the various echelons

to that side

down through

command, and of the higher morale. However good may be the plans of the general, there will come a time in every battle when the issue passes to the of

(c)

depend on the courage and will to conquer of regimental officers and men. must clear up one matter at this point. It has been indicated soldiers. Final victory will then

I

by many writers that when I arrived in the desert I was given appreciations, plans, and so on, for the future defensive and offensive operations of the Eighth Army and that my own plans were based on these papers. Such statements are totally untrue; I was given no such papers by anybody at g.h.q. in Cairo. If they existed at Eighth Army h.q. they were not shown to me. My military doctrine was based on ascertaining the facts of the situation at that time, and then making my own plans to deal with the problem - and that is exactly what I did. What had been done or written by others before my arrival didn't interest me, because operations carried out so far did not appear to me to have prevented Rommel from dominating the desert scene. And so, after I had got a grip on affairs in the Eighth Army, I started work on planning the battle which was to become known as the battle of Alamein.

Rommers last gamble: Alam Haifa Rommel intervened to have a last fling to get to Cairo - in opinion wrongly, since he was at the end of a long line of communications and his administration cannot have been in good condition. As one soldier has written - it was 'the gambler's But

my

last throw'.

My reconnaissance of the Alamein position had revealed to me the great importance of the Ruweisat Ridge,

which was strongly But there was another ridge a few thousand yards to the south-east of Ruweisat called Alam Haifa, and this was completely undefended; it seemed to me that these two ridges were the keys to the whole position, and particularly Alam Haifa. There were indications that Rommel might attack us before we ourselves were ready to attack him. So on the evening of August 13 held.

70

'^

•
Mf^A

J^,„3?-«**>«^"^

One ofthepre-Alamein disguises ordered by Montgomery with the aim of confusing Rommel. Posing as a lorry here is a Grant tank.

my

me

at once the 44th began to arrive on August 16 and I positioned the division on the Alam Haifa Ridge with orders to hold it strongly. I was convinced that if Rommel decided to have a last fling to get to Cairo and Alexandria he would attack my southern flank, make for the Alam Haifa Ridge, get in behind the Eighth Army and try to write it off. In fact this is exactly what he attempted to do, launching his attack on the night of August 31 - five days after the full moon. The battle which followed has been described by many writers and I do not propose to discuss it in this account. It was a good example of a defensive operation and is worthy of greater study than is usually devoted to it in staff colleges and suchlike centres of instruction. There is a full account of it in a book published by me in 1948, Alamein to the Sangro, and another in my Memoirs, pubHshed in 1958. Insofar as I myself was concerned, the battle established confidence in the high command throughout the Eighth Army - and this helped enormously. The soldiers had often been told before that certain things would happen, and those things had not always gone as stated this time I had told them, then shown them, and it had happened exactly as I had foretold. And from the showing came a solid rocklike confidence in the army command, which was never to be lost again. I

asked

C-in-C (Alexander) to send from England;

division recently arrived

it

;

I

should explain that when

destroy the Eighth

Army and

drew back towards

his

Rommel

realised that his plan to

get to Cairo

former positions and

had

failed,

he with-

then broke off the battle. But I left his troops in possession of Himeimat, which he had captured in his offensive, much to the disgust of General

Horrocks

who commanded

13

Corps on

I

my

southern flank. 71

Horrocks complained that Rommel would be able to look right into his corps area. I replied that that was exactly what I was anxious he should do he would see many signs of an impending attack, but they would all be dummy! The real centre of gravity of our offensive would be further to the north. Having 'seen off' Rommel, I, my staff, and my corps commanders resumed our planning for the much greater conflict which lay ahead. My ideas had already been disclosed to them; what now remained was to plan a battle which we all agreed must be the beginning of the end for the Axis forces in Northern Africa. ;

The

defensive position held by the Axis

army under Rommel

has now been described. I have written that the problem of how to break into, and through, that position was difficult; this was an understatement; it posed a terrific problem. It has been stated that I had an enormous preponderance over

Rommel in manpower, equipment, and all the essential means for waging war in the field. That is not entirely correct and we had better examine the matter. Rommel had 12 divisions, four German and eight Italian, together with some independent units such as the

Ramcke Parachute

brigade; his total

manpower

was about 180,000. He had 500-600 tanks and strong artillery. He held a defensive position some five miles in depth which had been strengthened artificially with about 500,000 mines and a network of defended localities; his flanks were strength

secure. divisions, about ,200 tanks, over Army I had and medium guns, plenty of petrol and ammunition, a short line of communication back to the base area (which Rommel had not), and a manpower strength of say 210,000. Thus I had a definite superiority on the ground, and the Desert Air Force superiority in aircraft was at least 3 to 1 But without some superiority, and mastery in the air, an offensive against the strong Axis position would not have been possible.

In the Eighth

1 1

1

1,000 field

.

It will

now

be useful to explain to the reader certain factors in mind as my staff and I began to plan military thinking had always been that an army is

which were continually the battle.

My

a fighting machine which discipline,

checked the leadership 72

is

controlled by leaders,

and fashioned or developed by

training.

in the various echelons

I

moulded by had carefully

of command in the

Eighth Army, and was satisfied. The discipHne, fighting spirit, and morale presented no problems; all were good. But the standard of training caused me some uneasiness. It has been considered by some writers that I should have delivered the coup de grace to Rommel at the Alam Haifa conflict, and, indeed, on September 3 I had directed the corps

commander on the southern flank to launch an attack to close the gap behind Rommel's forces through which his off'ensive had penetrated. The enemy reaction was immediate and determined, once that to press the attack would lead to severe casualties, which I was not prepared to suffer. Furthermore, I also became aware that when it came to a determined set-piece attack the weapon to my hand was blunt, and I decided to put the army through an intensive period of training in the set-piece battle - of the type which would face us when our turn came to turn over to the attack. This training began at once; it included

and

drill

I

saw

at

for minefield clearance; the actual training of infantry

working in close co-operation with tanks; infantry advancing close behind a creeping artillery barrage; and so on. My advice to all was "as you train, so you fight", and all in all the intensive training was to pay a good dividend on the day of battle.

knew very well that there comes a time a determined enemy when victory hangs in I

already said,

move; but

Rommel on

in

every battle against

the balance. As I have and I on mine decided every our power would pass to the regi-

his side

in the last resort

and men in the forefront of the battle. The issue would then be out of our hands and would go finally to the soldiers; victory would depend on their training, their courage, their refusal to admit defeat, their steadiness and tenacity in the struggle, their will to conquer or die in the attempt. It was for this reason that I had pinned up in my caravan during the long march from Alamein to Berlin the following quotation from Shakespeare {Henry V) mental

ofliicers

:

O God of battles! steel my soldiers' hearts. And so, having decided on the general plan of attack staff", I

left

with

the immensely complicated detailed planning to

very able Chief of

Staff"

(Brigadier de Guingand)

of the available time with

my

subordinate

my my

and spent most

commanders and

the

kept a careful watch on the training and at first progress seemed to me to be reasonable but the Eighth Army had suffered some 80,000 casualties since it was formed and little time had been spent in training replacements; I doubt if it had been under-

troops.

I

;

73

stood by unit

commanders

more you

fight the more you and specialists. I will now discuss the plan of attack, and will explain how, as the planning progressed, I decided to change the plan for a less ambitious one because I was not entirely satisfied with the

must

that the

train replacements for junior leaders

standard reached in the training. 4:

The

N(

4:

^

4c

up to date had been to the inland flank, and' then to swing up

traditional tactic in desert warfare

attack the

enemy on

towards the sea - the British to the right (i.e. a sort of 'left hook') and Rommel to the left as at Alam Haifa. In later battles in the desert I adopted this tactic myself, the 'left hook' as it came to be called. But in this case - a set-piece attack against a strong position with no open flanks and no room for manoeuvre - it would clearly be unsuitable. Furthermore, if our main attack was launched on the inland flank on the southern part of the front, the break-in force would have to swing northwards towards the sea and Rommel would know this. On the other hand if our main attack was made further to the north, having broken in we could swing right or left as seemed best. By this way we might gain a measure of tactical surprise; this was important since strategical surprise was impossible. Anything which could be done to mystify and mislead Rommel would pay a dividend. Therefore, having considered the problem from every angle with my staff", we decided to drive two corridors through the enemy defensive area; both corridors are shown on the map opposite, the northern and southern, and both are well to the north of the centre of the Axis position. Infantry divisions were to clear the mines and open up the corridors; they were to be followed closely by the armoured divisions, and I ordered that if the infantry divisions were unable to clear the corridors completely the armoured divisions would fight their own way out into the open. This order was not popular with commanders of armoured formations and units, and when 30 Corps commander, General Leese, gave it out at the conference with his subordinate commanders to tell them of the army plan. General Freyberg of the New Zealand division remarked in a loud voice "They won't", and was quickly followed by General Morshead of 9th Australian division with the same comment. (In the first part of this story I explained the mistrust which had developed between infantry and armoured commanders.) General Leese had been in the desert only a few days and he was somewhat startled by such

74

of October 23 1942. Four infantry of the Allied forward defended localities (FDLs) ; two corridors were to be driven across the Axis defences for Montgomery's armoured divisions to thrust through. Fighting went on for 12 days before victory was achieved.

The 'break-in' on

divisions attacked

the night

from

the edge

IS

:

statements by two very experienced generals, so he said, "Perhaps you don't know the Army Commander very well; what I have said

is

his order."

Both generals repeated "They won't"! General Leese then wisely suggested they should all have a break for coffee, and during the break he discussed the difficulty with his Chief of Staff, an experienced officer who was well aware of the discord between infantry and armour. When the conference reassembled General Leese laid it down that all would assume that planning would proceed in full accordance with the army plan - and this was done. It will appear later how nearly right the two divisional commanders were when both said "They won't".

*****

do not propose

I

to

go into every

detail

of the battle which

are discussing; a very great deal has been written about

we

and

much more

will be written in this 25th anniversary be a happy hunting ground for historians for years. Instead I will describe certain matters which may

doubtless

year; indeed

many

it,

it

will

not be generally known, and certain moments when I was faced with difficult decisions. (The battle is the subject of intensive study in Egyptian training establishments and staff colleges, and no officer can receive promotion in the more junior ranks of the

Egyptian with

all

Army unless he passes a stiff examination paper dealing Rommel and the Eighth

aspects of the struggle between

Army

at Alamein.) 'Grouping' for a battle, and re-grouping to meet developing tactical situations during the battle, is a most important attribute of generalship. My grouping of divisions for the coming battle

was 10

as follows:

Corps (Lumsden)

Armd. Div. 8th Armd. Div. 10th Armd. Div.

In addition

13

7th

1st

Corps (Horrocks)

Armd. Div.

44th Div. 50th Div.

I

30 Corps (Leese) 9th Australian Div, 51st (Highland) Div. 2nd New Zealand Div. 1st South African Div. 4th Indian Div.

had the following extra formations

Armoured Brigade. 23rd Armoured Brigade One Greek Brigade. 9th

Two One

(Valentine tanks).

Fighting French Brigades. Fighting French Flying Column.

There are some interesting points about this grouping. The main break-in battle was to be fought in the north by 30 Corps, under General Leese. His divisions are given above from right to left, the Australian division with its right on the sea and the Indian division with its left on the Ruweisat Ridge. It will be seen that 76

corps was, except for the Highland division, composed Dominion troops - and right well they fought, all 3eing experienced in desert warfare. The Highland division had not fought in battle before, and I placed it between two ex-

this

entirely of

perienced and very fine fighting divisions. The Greek brigade and the Fighting French formations were allotted to 13

rom

The Fighting French A'ill

which was responsible Himeimat. the extreme south faced Himeimat. It

Corps on the southern

flank,

the Ruweisat Ridge (exclusive) southwards to

be noticed that

in I

allotted 7th

Armoured

division to the

southern flank; this was necessary because the enemy had two irmoured divisions in the south, 21st Panzer and the Italian \riete. But I told 13 Corps commander. General Horrocks, that 7th Armoured division was not to be so engaged that it got K:nocked about since I would need it for the break-out in the lorth. And when later 21st Panzer division was moved up to oin 15th Panzer in the north, I moved 7th Armoured division up [lorth as

my army

reserve - to be allotted to 10

Corps

in

due

ourse.

Having grouped my forces for the battle, I made it very clear was to be an 'army' battle, fought on an army plan and ontrolled carefully from Army Headquarters as regards the

that this

naster plan.

Having driven two corridors through the Axis positions, my Man was that 10 Corps, under General Lumsden, would pass :hrough the corridors and position its armoured divisions istride the enemy supply routes; RommeFs armour would have :o attack my armour and would, I hoped, be destroyed. Mean>vhile my infantry divisions would set about Rommel's infantry at leisure.

was watching the training closely and it became clear to me my plan was simple but I it left a good deal to be desired decided it was too ambitious for the standard of training then cached by divisions. I did not want to allot tasks to divisions and anits which might possibly end in failure I must give 30 Corps jvery possible chance to succeed. I had no worries about 13 Ilorps on the southern flank General Horrocks had been given he task of doing what he could to penetrate the enemy defences, )ut his corps was not to suffer heavy casualties - particularly I

;hat

;

;

;

^th

Armoured

division as :(c

And

so on October 6

I

I

have already explained. :(c

made

:(e

:(c

%

a rapid decision and changed the

77

plan - a little over two weeks before the battle was due to begin. This second plan was built on to the framework of the first one given out on September 15, so none of the planning, preparation,

and training was wasted. But my new plan altered the whole conception of how the battle was to be conducted. In the changed plan my armoured divisions, having passed through the corridors, were to position themselves defensively at the western ends, and hold off the Axis armour while we carried out a methodical destruction of his infantry divisions holding the defensive system by what I described as a 'crumbling' process, the enemy infantry

being attacked from the flank and rear and cut off. I did not think could afford to remain inactive while the gradual destruction of his infantry was being carried out; he would have

Rommel

my armour in position, and we would then turn the minefields to our advantage so that the Panzer divisions

to attack

enemy

could not interfere with what was happening. I should explain that Major Williams of my intelligence staff had told me that all along the Axis front the German and Italian troops were intermingled - what he called 'corsetted' - and he suggested that

if

we could

placed, being then able to

without

much

difficulty.

separate them we would be well smash through a purely Italian front This brilliant analysis was a major

feature of the plan for the 'crumbling' operations.

We

dark but needed good moonlight what they were doing. Full moon was on October 24; D-Day was fixed for October 23. There was some discussion about zero hour. It had to be remembered that the foremost infantry would have to take up their assault positions out in front in slit trenches during the night of D-l/D, and lie 'doggo' (as General Morshead put it) all day on D-Day, waiting for the 'hard and bloody battle'. After dark on D-Day they must be rescued,. given a meal, and then get back to their forming up positions. All this was very true. So I fixed zero hour for 9.40 p.m. for the artillery, and the infantry advance to begin at 10 p.m. - which satisfied everybody. But all day on October 23 the sun and flies were a sore trial for the restless assault troops in decided to attack

in the

so that the troops could see

slit trenches out in front they stuck it out well. Everything was now set for the battle. And the deception plan

their

make

;

enemy think the attack would come on the inland was paying a dividend. I should explain that Rommel himself was not present when the battle began on the

to

the

flank in the south

night of October 23.

78

He had

not been well since the

Alam Haifa

late in September he handed over command to Stumme and left to recuperate in Germany. General von Thoma took command of the Afrika Korps - 15th Panzer, 21st Panzer, and 90th Light divisions. These two, Stumme and von

battle,

and

General

Thoma, decided armour and hold

shortly before the battle began to split the it

behind the front

in

two groups

-

one north

launched and one anywhere without a long approach march. Stumme died from a heart attack on October 24 and von Thoma assumed overall command of the Axis forces. Rommel arrived back from Germany on the evening of October 25 and was given a very gloomy picture of the conflict by von Thoma - who was himself captured by a patrol of 10th Hussars under Captain Singer on south - so that quick counter-attacks could be

4, when the break-out was developing. During the weeks before the battle the Desert Air Force had been engaged in gaining mastery in the air with its fighters and bombers. While this story deals mainly with the action of the Eighth Army, it must be understood that the two had become welded into one fighting machine. It is not too much to say that without the air power which supported the land forces, the battle could not have been won in 12 days - if at all. The action of the Desert Air Force and Tedder's bombers was beyond all praise. I should explain that a day or two before the battle began I addressed all officers down to and including the lieutenantcolonel level and told them what was needed in the coming struggle. In my notes for these talks I wrote that having broken in to the Axis positions we must organise ourselves for a 'dogfight' of a week, and added "Whole affair about 10 days (12)". Why did I cross out 10 and write 12? I had spent many hours in quiet thinking about what lay ahead and was well aware of the terrific problem which faced us. Just

November

I

Overleaf: pencil-written

notes

addresses to commanders

down

used by

Montgomery

in

his

rank before 13 Corps and

to lieutenant-colonel

the Alamein battle. He held three such briefings: to 30 Corps on October 19, to 10 Corps on October 20. He can't remember quite why the numerical order was changed at the end, but points out his second thoughts on the duration of the battle in paragraph 8. The figure of 10 days is amended to 12 - a correct forecast as it proved. He also admits that he got the name Rommel slightly wrong in the second paragraph ; he spelled it with two 'll's,

not one. In the document he also uses the code-name - Lightfoot.

79

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was not enough. I had told the army that together we would hit Rommel and his army for six - right out of Africa. This meant that having smashed him in battle at Alamein the victory must be immediately followed up. I came to the conclusion that we must win in about ten to twelve days, otherwise there would be problems of manpower and ammunition. Indeed towards the end of October my head gunner told me that unless we eased up the artillery fire there would be no shells in a few days. My reply was that I would go on until there were no shells win the battle

to

itself

left!

My "12 days" was not just a lucky shot in the dark;

it

was

the

of days and nights of quiet thought and of discussion with my Chief of Staff and the head of my administration, Sir Brian (now Lord) Robertson. It will appear later in the story that the battle was actually won result

on the twelfth day.

The night of October 23 was clear, with a brilliant moon. As we heard the bombers flying overhead to

zero hour approached

play their part in the conflict.

At exactly 9.40 p.m. the artillery opened with a terrific crash on the enemy gun positions and ammunition dumps, firing at a combined rate of over 1 ,000 rounds a minute air bombing of the positions added to the noise, and to the destruction wrought. At 9.55 p.m. the artillery fire ceased as suddenly as it had begun. ;

Absolute silence followed - a breathless stillness. In the sky, above the Eighth Army's hidden battle array "two searchlight beams pointed long still fingers into the sky". Five minutes passed. What happened next is well described in Barton

Maughan's brilliant book Australia in the War of 1939-45, Volume III, Tobruk and El Alamein: "At 10 p.m. the two beams swung inwards, intersected and stopped, forming a pointed arch dimly seen in the moonlit remote symbol of crossed swords. At that

vault, like a

opened a barrage of unimaginable performance, and to the urgent drumming of the guns the infantrymen stepped out from their start lines in slow, measured paces at the even rate of instant the British guns

intensity, eclipsing their first

75 yards per minute."

was on. Actually at 10 p.m. I was in bed. There was could nothing I do at that time the battle was now in the hands of my subordinate generals. I knew that a crisis would occur, and

The

fight

;

82

i

maybe get

several, before the 12

what

rest

I

could while

days were up.

this

was

possible,

I was determined to and was soon asleep.

There is no need for me to describe in detail the struggle which now began, since the story of the battle has been told by me and by many other writers in various books. I will merely explain the highlights, and the action taken by me at certain critical moments.

The battle developed as we had planned. In the south General Horrocks was playing his part in accordance with my instructions and I knew that battle could be safely left in his very capable hands. I cannot recall that I visited 13 Corps at any time during the battle, but I asked Horrocks to come and see me - at least once. My whole attention was fixed on 30 Corps in the north since it was in that area I hoped to break out into the open desert; General Leese established his Corps h.q. close to my Tactical H.Q. on the beach to the north of Alamein station.

By the early morning of October 24, the two corridors in the north had not been completely opened for the armoured divisions of 10 Corps to pass through to the open and take up defensive positions as planned. Maybe my plan asked too much of the

Anyhow

it was now up to the armoured divisions to way forward, but they showed some reluctance and I had to do some prodding, accepting the risk of tank losses from enemy guns and mines. The New Zealand division began operat-

infantry.

fight their

ing

to

the

playing

south-west,

its

part

in

the

'crumbling'

operations.

The major crisis in the battle occurred before dawn on Sunday, October 25. In the northern corridor the leading brigade of 1st Armoured division had fought its way into the open and was being furiously attacked by the enemy armour - which was exactly what I wanted. But things were not so good in the southern corridor with 10th Armoured division on the Miteiriya Ridge; it was suffering heavy casualties. A certain infirmity of purpose appeared in the mind of 10 Corps commander, and he was beginning to think that my plan was 'not on'. My Chief of Staff very wisely ordered both corps commanders (10 and 30) to a conference with me, after which he woke me up and told me Overleaf: early days

in

gaps have been made.

Montgomery' s Alamein

Now

infantry slowly fight their

tanks,

way through

transport

battle.

Minefield

and supporting

- facing very

heavy fire.

83

*

4-

t

;

what he had done arrived at

!

I

told

him he was absolutely

right.

They both

my caravan on the beach at 2.30 a.m. and I made it very would continue as planned - there would be people are not always feeling their best at have often thought that if I had weakened at that

clear that the battle

no change. 2.30 a.m.

I

Some

moment we might

well have lost the battle. Later that

the leading elements of

all

morning had fought its way into but we were now 24 hours behind

my armour

open as had been planned the time factor I had worked out. Later on October 25 it became clear that the 'crumbling' operations of the New Zealand division to the south-west were going to prove very costly and I decided to abandon them.

the

Instead

I

decided to switch the 'crumbling' operations to the

area of 9th Australian division working northwards to the coast this

new

axis of operations involved a switch of almost 180

enemy unawares. The draw everything on to themselves in order that events elsewhere might proceed the more satisfactorily. The stalemate had been broken. I began to catch a glimpse of the way ahead through the smoke and din of battle; but all now depended on the Australians. And how well that magnificent 9th Australian division carried out its task A terrific struggle went on between the Australians and the Germans, and names like Thompson's degrees and was intended to catch the division

was

told to

!

ever in our minds. day on October 26 in a detailed consideration of the situation, and by the evening decided to withdraw the New Zealand division and 1st Armoured division into reserve - so that they could rest and refit. I wanted them for the final blow that would be the prelude to the breakout which I now began to see

Post will I

spent

live for all

:

more

clearly.

Tenth Armoured division relieved the 1st in the battle area. A major regrouping was carried out during the night of October 27/28. 1 knew the final blow must go in on 30 Corps front, but did not yet know exactly where. So I turned my southern flank (13 Corps) over to the defensive except for patrol activities. I also it could get ready to take command of the break-out. I should explain that when it was known in Whitehall that I was pulling divisions out of the battle, there was consternation. Why were the soldiers bathing in the sea in back areas instead of fighting? Had I given up hope? Was the battle lost? The Minister of State in the Middle East (Casey) was told to go and see me and

pulled 10 Corps h.q. into reserve, so that

86

77?^

phase of Alamein: their tank knocked out, a surrender. The date was October 29 1942.

'dog-fight'

German panzer crew discover what

I was up to. I told him the battle was far from lost; was just about to win it. I doubt if he believed me. Anyhow, my Chief of Staff told him to go away and not to bellyache, because we were very busy I often wonder what telegram he sent to London. The action of 1st Armoured division in the northern corridor; and in particular the epic fight of the Rifle Brigade at the socalled Kidney Ridge (which was actually a depression) and the Snipe feature, where with their 6-pounder guns they knocked out some 40 enemy tanks and self-propelled anti-tank guns and I

!

;

the operations of 9th Australian division - all this

think

we intended

made Rommel

to break out in the north along the coast,

which was indeed my intention at that time. So dangerous would such a thrust have been to Rommel if successful that he pulled all his Germans up north to oppose it; they were no longer 'corsetting' the Italians. We had now achieved what Major Williams of my intelligence staff had recommended the Germans were in the north and the Italians all together in the south the dividing line between them appeared to be just to the north of our northern corridor. After discussion with my Chief of Staff, I changed the plan and decided to direct the final all-out blow at the point of junction between the Germans and Italians. I made this decision at 1 1 a.m. on October 29. ;

;

87

;

In order to keep the

enemy looking northwards,

I

directed that

the Austrahans were to attack strongly towards the sea

night October 30/31

ber

1

I

,

.

Then on

on the

the next night, October 3 1 /Novem-

would blow a deep hole

in the

enemy

front just to the

north of the original northern corridor. I had the necessary troops in reserve; they had been resting and refitting. What, in fact, I decided to do was to deliver a hard blow with my right (the Australians), and then follow it up the next night with a knockout blow with the left. I called the operation 'Supercharge'. The

knock-out blow would be under 30 Corps and I entrusted comof it to General Freyberg, a very gallant fighting soldier I knew that if anybody could make it succeed, he would For Supercharge he had his own New Zealanders, and I gave him two reinforcing infantry brigades (one from the Highland division and one from 50th division), together with a Maori

mand

and 9th Armoured brigade. Through the hole thus Rommel's defences I would launch 10 Corps with its armoured divisions, to be joined by the New Zealand division. On the morning of Saturday October 31 it became clear to me that the stage management problems in connection with the battalion

torn in

assembly of the Supercharge force were such that if launched that night it might fail. I therefore postponed it for 24 hours, and ordered it for the night of November 1/2. The depth of the penetration was to be 6,000 yards, and the frontage of attack about 4,000 - the whole under a strong artillery barrage. I must add that many in high places had doubts about Supercharge, and whisperings began about what would happen if it should fail. Such doubts were most unworthy and should never have been spoken. If ever a high morale was needed it was at this stage. I had no doubts myself and made that very clear to everybody. Supercharge would succeed. Indeed it must; and I intended to see it did.

November 2, Supercharge was launched and as the hours passed I knew we were nearly home. When the infantry objectives had been reached, 9th Armoured Brigade was to pass At

1

a.m. on

through, advance a further 2,000 yards and attack and destroy the last-ditch defences and gun line on the Rahman track and about Tel el Aqqaqir. First Armoured division with some 270 fit

enemy

tanks would follow up the attack of 9th Armoured brigade, followed in turn by 10th Armoured division. I also now had 7th Armoured division ready to slip, the divisional commander

and the 'dog-fight' - bloody encounters within the Axis defensive complex - were over. Now, on November 2, came Operation Supercharge Alamein s final act. By November 4, the armoured divisions and the New Zealanders had pierced Rommel's last defences; 8th Army thrust into the open desert. 772^

'break-in

,

89

(General Harding) being with me at my Tactical h.q. - waiting impatiently for the order to go. I must mention the magnificent fight put up by 9th Armoured brigade - 3rd Hussars, Wiltshire Yeomanry, Warwickshire started with 1 32 fit tanks when it passed through the infantry its strength had been reduced to 94, and when their task was completed the tank strength was 19. It had lost in all 113 tanks. The brigade had destroyed over 40 enemy

Yeomanry. The brigade

;

tanks and anti-tank guns in hulldown positions and had opened way for the van of 1st Armoured division to take up the fight.

the

armour owed any debt to the infantry of the Eighth Army, the debt was paid on November 2 by 9th Armoured brigade in heroism and blood. During the rest of the Desert War there was never any further discord between the two arms, armour and infantry, insofar as I was aware. The commander of 9th Armoured brigade was Brigadier John Currie, a gunner. When told of his task, he said his brigade would suffer 75 per cent casualties. General Freyberg said to him, "The Army If the British

Commander will accept and

it

100 per cent tank casualties for success",

was

suffered very nearly that percentage. Currie

Normandy

killed in

in 1944 - a very great loss.

The fight continued all day on November 3, and it became clear Rommel ahd his army were finished. At 2 a.m. on November 4, 1 directed two blows at the hinges of the break-out area where the enemy was trying to stop us widening the gap we had blown. The main blow was delivered by the Highland division, with 5th Indian brigade under command, in a south-west direction. The whole of that area was in a very fluid in the afternoon that

condition, and through the gap then created

Armoured

division

and

the

New

Zealanders, to

I

passed 7th

come under

command

of 10 Corps. Meanwhile further to the south two armoured car regiments, the Royal Dragoons and 4th South African, had courageously found a way out into the open desert, and were busy destroying enemy dumps and vehicles and cutting telephone lines. The Axis forces were in

full retreat. The battle had been won on The Italian divisions in the south could not get away because the Germans had taken all their transport; I told General Horrocks (13 Corps) to collect them in, and left him in

the twelfth day.

charge of the confused battle area - leaving everything in his capI ordered 30 Corps (Leese) to reorganise west of the and to be ready to move forward when called for. area, break-out able hands.

90

myself devoted my attention to the pursuit of Rommel's forces, with 10 Corps (Lumsden) in the van. But that is another story. I

Reflections

When

look back at the battle across this span of time, there to have been no moment up to about November 2 when victory seemed certain. I and my corps and divisional generals, and even brigadiers, could plan and direct, but in the end our power passed from us and it became a soldiers' battle. Rommel's army of Germans and Italians fought gallantly, but the dice were loaded against them, and he himself saw the army which he had created and led so gallantly smashed in battle. And I

would seem

he could not have

November

8,

felt

very happy about the future, because on

four days after the battle at Alamein was over,

Allied forces under General Eisenhower landed behind

him

at

the other end of northern Africa.

and clash of battle my task was to keep the conarmy moving steadily forward towards the desired goal. I was the general in overall command of the battle and I could make it swing any way I wanted. But once I had made a decision and issued orders, the power passed from me and ended up finally with the junior leaders and soldiers in the ranks. But it was such a tough battle that I knew well that if I weakened in my resolve, or showed the slightest sign of infirmity of purpose, even the soldiers could not win it; and in my prayers night and morning I prayed for strength to stand firm. I remembered the first

Amid

the din

centrated power of the

verse of a

hymn

in the

English

Father, hear the prayer

Not for ease

ojfer

that prayer shall be.

But for strength that we Live our

Hymnal

we

lives

may

ever

courageously.

There is no sealed pattern for generals we are all human and we all make mistakes. For example some might say that I was wrong to launch the armoured divisions of 10 Corps closely ;

behind the infantry and into the corridors before these had been cleared up to the end. Instead I should have driven the infantry forward again on the second night. But I knew the infantry would find it tough work in the corridors, and they did. Of the original attacking infantry divisions in the initial attack, only one, 9th Australian division, was in a fit state to drive forward in a strong attack on the second night. 91

:

Then

some may say the battle might well have been some other way - possibly by making a really deter-

again,

fought in

mined attack in the Ruweisat area, or even down towards Himeimat. My staff and I did not think so; we had considered every alternative, and finally decided to attack as we did - in the north. In general terms the battle went as we had planned. In the end became a battle of the type fought on the Western Front in the 1914-18 war - a battle of attrition rather than of manoeuvre, because this was not possible. But it made certain of victory and that was what mattered at that time. I had the resources for such a battle; Rommel had not. Many other criticisms could be made; hindsight is useful when planning criticism. For my part I am content. My only it

sorrow remains the casualties

;

in the

Those who died

1

2 days of battle these were

the great cemetery at Alamein, which I visited during my pilgrimage to the battle area in May of 1967. One further point must be understood. I had behind me in Cairo a C-in-C who trusted me - General Alexander. He gave me everything I needed for success; he never refused any request; he backed me up to the hilt; he agreed with all I was doing, at least he never told me if he did not. Without his help and backing we could not have done what we did.

13,500

(all

kinds).

lie in

Insofar as I personally was concerned the battle of Alamein was the beginning of a long period of high command which did not end until the 1939-45 war was over - and not even then. If it is considered that I was successful in such activities, including Alamein itself, I would attribute it to three basic reasons 1 1 chose good subordinate generals, and trusted them. 2. 1 built up a very high class staff, under a brilliant Chief of Staff. My staff was so good that once I had decided on a particular course of action, I could hand the whole matter over confidently to my Chief of Staff to implement, and get on myself with thinking about future operations. 3. 1 had a very clear understanding of the importance of the human factor in war, and of the need to preserve the lives of .

those under my

command to the greatest extent possible. «

*

«

«

*

This story of the battle of Alamem, October 23 to November 4 1942, is a very brief account of a very tough battle which marked

92

The price of Alamein: by inis day, November 5 1942, Rommel was retreating. These graves - of an ojficer and soldier of the Highland division - bore witness to the 13,500 casualties which 8th Army had suffered in the 12 days of this grim set-piece battle. the turning point of Hitler's war. To write it within the compass of a few pages has not been easy; I have tried to confine the story to matters which may not be generally known and which caused me considerable concern. Some may not agree with all I have written, in which case they will no doubt say so. My reply can only be that I was the commander of the Eighth Army at the time; only my staff and

I

were

in full possession

of all the factors involved.

described the battle, and the events leading

through

up

to

it,

I

have

as seen

my eyes - and that is what I wanted to do in this account.

When all did so well it would seem hardly right to single out any But I must say this - we could not have won the 12 days without that magnificent 9th Australian

for special praise. battle

in

division.

93

The face of

this

1943, shows

how

German

prisoner, captured in Tunisia in spring

the Afrika

Korps must have felt. Eighth Army

had driven them back over 1500 miles 94

in

a relentless 12 weeks.

The chase

to Tunisia by Barrie Pitt Rommel had been pushed back

across the desert before. But he had returned. Now, as Montgomery's onslaught at Alamein reached its climax, the Afrika Korps and its Italian allies began their final retreat, with 8th Army hounding them all the way to Tunisia.

Barrie Pitt describes this last act of the Desert

By

War.

the evening of October 30 1942, the AustraHans, in the

process of their 'crumbUng' operations at Alamein, had broken

through the northern sector of the Axis front, along the boundary between the German 164th Infantry Division and its neighbour to the south, the Italian Trento Division. They then swung north across the road and reached the coast, thus trapping the 164th

and some

Italian Bersaglieri against the sea.

Immediately,

Rommel

concentrated

practically

all

his

armoured and mechanised divisions against the Australians, in order to break through and release his trapped infantry. German 15th and 21st Armoured, with the Italian Ariete Division, attacked south of the road, while the 90th Light and Italian Trieste attacked along the road itself - and against these heavy and piercing thrusts even the Australians were not impervious. By the morning of October 3 1 the German armour was through the ring, and 1 64th Infantry was relieved and escaping back out through the channels cut by the armour - back westwards. The retreat of the Axis forces which was to end in Tunisia had begun. Rommel at this time was fighting two battles - one with 8th Army in front intent on destroying the Afrika Korps, and one with Hitler behind, apparently intent on preventing the Afrika Korps from escaping. On the same morning that Supercharge was launched (November 2), and when Rommel could already see quite clearly that the only hope for his men was a speedy extrication from the tightening grip which 8th Army was fastening upon them, he received from his master the following signal To Field-Marshal Rommel In the situation in which you find yourself there can be no other thought but to stand fast and throw every gun and every man into the battle. The utmost efforts are being made to help you. Your enemy, despite his superiority must also be at the end of his strength. It would not be the first time in history that

a strong will has triumphed over the bigger

95

As to your troops, you can show them no other road than that to victory or death. Adolf Hitler, As usual, there was no realisation in Berlin that even the most devoted soldier could be annihilated by bomb or bullet, and certainly no appreciation that troops who had served the Fiihrer as faithfully as had the Afrika Korps might deserve a better fate. Moreover, with the realism of the soldier on the spot, Rommel had already begun the withdrawal of some part of his army and the destruction of the defences they had occupied - so in view of this latest order, the unfortunate men must now return and try to hold positions they had themselves partially demolished. For the Axis forces before Alamein, November 3 and 4 were the days which spelled out their doom most clearly. But even Hitler could not hold back the flood of military power released by Supercharge, and by November 5 there was no battalions.

disguising the fact that the Afrika that day, a flimsy defensive line at

Korps was in full flight. On Fuka was brushed contempt-

uously aside by 8th Army and a long line of fleeing Axis transport, packed with depressed Germans and thoroughly disheartened Italians, snaked back westwards - easy targets for the raf.

Then on November 6, Fate relented. Heavy rain fell, relieving Rommel's hard-pressed men of attentions from the air, slowing the pursuit and thus giving the German officers time to effect a little reorganisation. By November 7, some sort of defence existed south of Mersa Matruh, and morale among the Germans at least rose sharply when the paratroops of General Ramcke's

who everyone thought had been wiped

out in the Ruweisat Ridge, arrived after an epic march across the desert. They reported, moreover, that the British did not appear to be attempting a flank march in the south to cut the Axis escape route. But this relief did not last long. Later that day came the news of the Allied landings in Morocco and Algiers, and Rommel knew that if anything were to be saved of his army, he must get it back as quickly as possible towards an escape port at Tripoli. Gone, therefore, were German plans to make a stand at Halfaya or Gazala - gone in fact were all ideas but to get back to El Agheila, twice already the backstop to which Axis forces had fallen. Rommel moved fast and efliciently. By November 20, his army was there - minefields in position, stores brought down from a gutted Benghazi before final evacuation, left flank on the sea, right flank on the deep gorge of the Wadi Faregh; and on Brigade,

fighting south of

96

The chase to Tunisia was on : this picture of British troops (with Vickers machine-gun) was taken during the mid-November drive.

December 12, the British attacked the outposts after a heavy bombardment, drove them in and followed with a hesitancy and caution both extreme and apparent. Hopes and speculations arose in German breasts - had the British outrun their supplies again? - and then one of the German recce planes spotted a column of almost 300 vehicles sneaking past down south of the Wadi Faregh, and Rommel knew that not only was his army being outfought, but also that he was being outmanoeuvred.

When

8th

Army

realised that

Rommel was now

pulling out of

El Agheila, their last remaining doubts vanished. This time they

were not to be sent reeling back, this time they were going forward to the end - and in a steady, methodical advance which brooked no resistance, 7th Armoured drove forward through mixed German and Italian armoured rearguards, 2nd New Zealand curved up from their flanking march, driving in Rommel's screens to reach the coast - while all the time the main Axis force retired, just as methodically, to the next defensive line at Buerat.

On

Christmas Day, 8th Army patrols pushed forward into Sirte. Here General Montgomery spent some time reorganising his supply lines and on January 15 he sent his divisions forward again - 7th Armoured and 2nd New Zealand swinging round the southern flank of the Buerat position, 51st Highland pressing in front. It was a repeat of the El Agheila tactic, and again Rommel held the flank attack until his main force was clear of the trap. But this time there was to be no let-up after the retreat, for

Montgomery recognised

quite clearly that behind

Rommel now

was an excellent defensive position in the hills of the Djebel Nefusa along the Homs-Tarhuna line - indeed Rommel had 97

:

wanted

from El Agheila, but Buerat at and thus again aided

to retreat straight to these positions

Hitler's interference

had kept him

the British.

Montgomery was determined not to be held up here and he tactics. As Rommel sent a screen southwards to

switched his

guard against the flanking attack which had so far manoeuvred him out of two positions, the weight of the British attack switched abruptly to the north. The 51st Highland Division with 22nd Armoured Brigade in close attendance smashed straight forward into Homs on January 19, and then on into Tripoli by the 23rd. Rommel had been 'bounced' out of a good position. This was almost the end of the road for the Afrika Korps as such. Rommel used every trick at his command to delay the inexorable advance of 8th Army, but despite the resolute efficiency of his rearguards, they were fighting losing battles and they knew it. At the end of January, they crossed into Tunisia and took up positions in the Mareth Line.

So ended the Desert War - the war which Rommel had dominated until he came up against Montgomery and the revitalised 8th Army, first at Alam Haifa, then at Alamein. From now on a larger German army then the Afrika Korps had ever been would battle out the last months in Africa with combined British and American armies, fighting in terrain far different from the sandy wastes of the Western, Cyrenaican and Libyan deserts. The war here would no longer be a contest between Afrika Korps and 8th Army, the pitting of wits and military skills between Rommel and Montgomery. Mareth marked the change, and it is fitting for the victors to allow last word to one of the defeated. After Mersa Matruh, Rommel's rearguards had been commanded by an officer of one of his paratroop units. Major Freiherr von der Heydte, who recently summed up the end of the campaign for me thus "The fighting in February 1943 seemed to us like the last giant duel between two generals who fought on different sides, and were different in their characters and their ways of fighting but equal in expertness and practical ability. Where Rommel had won by the acuteness of his perception, the suddenness and daring of his decisions and the audacity and quickness of his actions, Montgomery accomplished his purpose by his clear and logical thinking, his perspicacious and careful reflection, his systematic and resolute planning, and his constant steadiness in the realisation of his designs."

98

m

What makes an army? 'I'm but the son my mother bore, simple man, and nothing more But - God of Strength and gentleness, Be pleased to make me nothing less'

A

What makes an army? The quality of its generals is one major factor - and the Desert War saw some outstanding leaders.

Erwin Rommel

(left,

triumphant as he chased 8th Army June 1942) was, like

in

Montgomery, an

of troops. His death mask (right) lies in a inspirer

room cabinet the home of his

living

at

widow,

to the south

of Stuttgart (see also pages 121 and 125) and shows signs of his injuries in France three months before his death - the left

cheekbone was

destroyed.

Below

it is

an Afrika Korps sleeve band and bags which contain desert sand.

Normally the

lid

the cabinet

kept

is

closed. In the

that follow in

of

pages Part

2 of this book, many aspects of the character of the armies which fought in the desert

are

dealt with - their slang, their clothes, their songs, their

style: all

strange

100

of their

way of life.

Montgomery stands in the caravan-a converted army lorrycaptured from Italian general Bergonzoli which now rests, with

two other caravans he used during the war, at his Hampshire home. In this vehicle he journeyed from Alamein to Tunis during

102

Rommel. On the walls are pictures of German commanders he fought - from left to right, Rommel, Model and know and Kesselring. He has said that such pictures helped him

the pursuit of

inspired him. defeat his enemies. Also seen - quotations which 103

inis

war evolved

its

own

tashions

m

dress, formal

The desert style

8th

Army: corporal

Australian infantry

104

Afrika Korps: captain: infantry

and intormal.

Here are half a dozen desert

Italian forces:

captain: artillery

types,

drawn by Roger Coleman

Afrika Korps: private: panzergrenadier 105

8th

106

Army:

sergeant

Gurkha

Rifles

8th

Army:

Royal

captain:

Artillery

The badges of war

Army: formed in December 1941. Obvious No. 8th

1

in this selected

1st

7th Armoured Div.: the original 'Desert Rats' fought in almost every action of

War

Desert

The

Special Air Service formed :

by David

Stirling,

only 'private army' retained today

4th Indian Div. most experienced infantry division in the desert

list

Armoured Div.:

IstS. African

Rommel's second Div, in Crusader; push from El Agheiia at Alamein,includand fought at Gazala ing Supercharge faced

:

5th Indian Div. in action during retreat after

2nd

New

Zealand

Div.: fought hard from 1941 to 1943

Long Range

44th (Home Counties) Div. fought at Alam Haifa, Alamein

Desert Group: of famous 'private armies

first

SlstHighlandDiv.

50lh(Northum'n)

assault troops for

Div. escaped at Gazala superbly

advance on Tunis

:

Gazala, swept

away

in flood.

Later in

Burma

Free French Brig. 9th Australian Div. held Tobruk during siege

fame

;

won at

greatest

AJamein

heidBirHacheim

Pavia Division:

long fierce battle. Part of 3 Corps

Italian infantry,

1

at

Alamein

D.

opposed French at Alamein

F.-FOLGORE

Folgore Division the crack Italian paratroop unit

Four German emblems (1. to r.): 90th Light Div., not strictly part of Afrika Korps 15th Panzer Div. which arrived for first attacks on Tobruk; 21st Panzer Div., which advanced to Egypt in March '41 the Afrika Korps ;

;

107

^

r~*r^^r i*^-*'

ttwft

Of

rrs

KTHJ

1>

^^^^ ^^

3rd {Cheshire) Field r.mm^.r5 kept by members oj n...rr P^«r Desert ^^^ [^"'"\ /..,. jsJorman writes. Note the copy of

108

The

by Philip Eighth

Bad Element makes good Norman

Intelligent

Army was an army

of civilians in battledress: clerks,

grocers, university graduates, customs officers. This

how one group of civilians

is

the story of

learned to fight a desert war.

It is

partly

based on the diary kept by one of them.

There were millions of mines. Delicate German toymaking: the S mine was no bigger than a cigarette-tin but the softest touch on its wire horns sent it leaping in the air, spitting 360 'bullets'. These were for our infantry who walked on the minefields first, their feet tingling. Other mines were concealed with genius in the rubble of destroyed buildings or at the exact spot where the crew of a blast-buckled tank would jump down. Mines hid underneath mines or were wooden and impossible to detect. There were Teller mines, pressed to go off by a vehicle's weight, sometimes large aircraft bombs which killed a dozen men if one boot caught the trip wire. At Alamein Rommel had a garden of waiting explosions 38 miles long, in parts five miles broad.

sappers fought on hands and knees in

it,

The

with dainty fingertips.

One morning shortly before the battle Major commanding 3rd (Cheshire) Field Squadron re, found some of his sappers lying down on the Ruweisat Ridge, returning fire from a German machine gun post. They had just Often they didn't.

Peter Moore,

cleared a gap through a minefield, directed by Sgt. Brian Boag,

a tall, Continental-looking young man. But why, Moore demanded, hadn't the machine gun been cleared? He removed the pins from two hand grenades and ordered a sapper to drive him straight at it. On the way the jeep hit a mine; Moore was seen flying through the air, presumed killed. He came back a few moments later, carrying his wounded driver. The machine gun wasn't yet stilled but when he was blown up Moore kept his fingers on the levers of the two bombs, landed and wedged them under the rear wheels of the jeep. They would kill the Germans who came out to salvage it. Moore was the sappers' Victor Ludorum he was said to have been blown up three times in one day. He won a dso, his shirt and shorts were tatty beyond belief, he was the sort of officer who fought with a revolver at arm's length and wrestled with an enemy. Boag remembers his eyes, "they looked right at you like that, straight through you". In 1942 Moore left hospital to found ;

109

and School of Mine Clearance near Burg el Arab, garden. Rommel's across perfect a new way of clearing tank roads Now in teams using the new Polish detectors, the sappers could stroked move 200 yards in an hour instead of 100 yards when they or fingers. the sand for mines with their bayonets the first night's advance on when, command in was And Moore

8th

Army

Alamein, the 3rd (Cheshire) Field Squadron worked 10th Armoured cedure faultlessly, opening the minefield for only sappers to the were they corridor: Division in the southern his pro-

at

Ridge. Cpl. reach their objective that night, the Miteiriya Medal for Military won a Bromley Hotchkiss, a portly ex-joiner, wounded; or killed clearing a gap alone after all his section were lamps, as and for marking the gap with posts, then with bicycle had tanks only the a machine gun nest poured bullets at him. If grey they didn't arrive until the dish-cloth appeared on time anti-tank screen turned them light before dawn and the German to tank after tank, shouting, on desperately back. Moore jumped .

.

.

hoping to guide the armour across.

*****

Hughes the The Egg Man, The Speaker, Shorty Johnston, young men, Customs officer and others, cravat and Morris Eight around the became sappers a week before the war. On wirelesses and then took Liverpool pubs they heard the ta was mobilising, their time

on the

ferry to

New Brighton where they had

to report

slightly posh place, famous at the Rugby Club. It was a go-ahead, games. A good many open then and now for wonderfully a key party was in the Already recruits were members.

squadron

and living, it was clubhouse, sleeping in the bar on palliasses was Harold arrive rumoured, entirely on beer. One of the first to a drink) (with put on guard later Driver Flinn, a forward. He was in the

pay box.

*****

mimic but never comFlinn was freckled, long and thin, a fine companies, starting rifle missioned. To him, the New Zealand attack at Alamem, night's across the virgin minefields in the first the sappers When resembled athletes at the start of a race. the first perhaps was followed to clear up for the tanks, Flinn Then objective. man to take a vehicle beyond the Miteiriya Ridge German preparing for a he helped man a trench with Moore, noticed. "A couple hardly was Stukas counter-attack. A raid by

lot," said Flinn, "meant of dozen bombs in the middle of that nothing."

110

Quite a

lot

of racy types joined.

When

it

was formed

three

months before, the squadron had been billed as an officerproducing unit; it would also turn out to be a Military Medal producing unit. Formation at a rugby club was an attraction, naturally, and New Brighton was also handy for Birkenhead Park and Waterloo club players, and very handy for the Victoria, a yellow but obliging hotel. Some rugby people - like Donald Hill, later capped for Cheshire - had joined the squadron at once and been riotously to camp in Monmouthshire. Each of the three troops and the headquarters section had about 80 men, with a leavening of tradespeople; Fred Crook the painter and decorator for example, who, later in Greece, blew up a bridge with himself on the wrong side of it. There was a little sour talk against 'the effing rugby club' most of whom had their wages made up by their employers and who could blow their 14s. army pay on a Friday night in Liverpool huge mixed grills at Recce's and best seats at the Empire. The day before war was declared the recruits were taken in a collection of trucks to the Oval, Port Sunlight, the Lever Bros, sports ground, where they were enclosed for a month with three hours' leave a week, sleeping in the grandstands. Each evening they crowded the railings where families brought food parcels. :

In Greece in 1941,

when

the British

fell

back

fast across the

Plain of Salonika, the squadron calculated they destroyed a

bridge for every meal they ate

it

:

was the only time they could

stop to brew up. :(:

9|c

:|c

:|c

:|c

Almost immediately a gang formed inside the squadron of the young men truest to type in their fondness for beer and larks. Hughes, Johnston, Pat Campbell, Les Piatt (who resembled a young John Wayne), Allan Todd - the Todfish of the Midland Bank who used to look after the drink kitties - Bill Graham, christened the Egg Man by Johnston, and, occasionally, the Speaker, a silent fellow once seen washing and shaving in his greatcoat. Graham was tirelessly baited by Johnston and would at times be driven to reply "Shut up Tusker". He entered the gang at Pembroke where the squadron's One Troop went to build a revetment round a coastguard's hut to protect it from the tank range nearby. The sergeant, an ambitious ferret of a man named Peter Pretty, referred to them all as The Intelligent Bad Element; but most were eventually found commissions. Ill

There was training, a

of drinking and some packing of girls named The Lighting Set. At Crewe a detachment occupied six weeks in putting up three huts already in sections some of the Intelligent Bad Element joined the chorus of a pantomime on leave and presented the principal boy with a potted plant. Geoffrey Hughes met a pretty landlord's daughter named Joan in Dorset and she gave him a copy of Daudet's Lettres de Mon Moulin. The squadron trained in Cambridgeshire on land belonging to Hartley's Jam Allan Todd became Todfish by falling out of a punt. During encampment in Wicksteed Park, Kettering, Nobby Clarke from Birkenhead committed suicide. lot

into the back of an old car

;

;

On November

7 1940 the

squadron

sailed

SS Orcades, travelling via Freetown and

from Liverpool on to Tahag in

Durban

Egypt, where an advance party including the Todfish awaited them. They melted, according to Hughes' diary, into "mile upon mile of sand, tents, bath houses, water towers, latrines, shafts

and cinemas". One could scarcely hear the films. Hughes, Todd, Carter and the Egg Man began a nightly bridge school. Early in 1941 the squadron's XV played a team from the re base depot, beating them 29-0 in plimsolls. The CO., Maj. Kenneth Mackay (who later played a large part in devising the

new mine-gapping drill), was so

pleased with them that he bought of lightweight boots. Wearing these the squadron beat the New Zealand base hospital team even though the New Zealanders were said to keep their brawniest men at the base for rugby. When the squadron sailed to Greece on March 7, preparatory to their bridge-blowing extravaganza, the boots went the

team a

set

too, but failed to return. 4c

:|c

:|c

:(e

^

The squadron's two most dishevelled men were Carter and Pat Campbell. When he left on the advance party to Bawtry, Campbell took two left gaiters leaving Carter the two right ones. Brian Boag - the Bogey Man - always had splendid kit he would have made a guardsman and he carried two revolvers. Hughes was the reader, devoted especially to Damon Runyon and Runyon's expression 'being in the war business' but he some;

;

times had ungovernable rages. Harry Litherland, who lost a leg after the night's attack at Alamein, was quiet; Russell Booth,

squadron quartermaster sergeant before his commission, and Shorty Johnston, could always 'fix things'; in fact Booth fixed the boots without paying for them. Donald Hill was nicknamed 112

the

Gorgeous Beast because of all

who escaped unhurt from 4c

Back

in the desert, the

driving 3|c

:(:

He was one of the few Major Moore.

his hair.

:|c

:):

squadron was broken up for detached

duty, sometimes attached to Guards' flying columns striking deep

behind the

German

lines.

before coming back.

On one foray they held a church service

Boag turned

into a lethal spare-time commando. (Later he was commissioned and became a paratrooper.) In a night attack on a German leaguer he was credited with 1 enemies. One morning he won the Military Medal for shooting down one of six Messerschmitt 110s with the Bren gun he had gone to retrieve as the column was moving off". The pilot was shot in the head, 28 holes were counted in the aircraft (the Bren gun had 30 shots) and Boag also threw the magazine at it. During a

dive-bomber attack he threw himself into a slit trench with several other men and they landed in a pile, Boag on top. Then the man at the bottom began to have a fit. The tumult kept raising Boag's head above ground level, so he snatched up a tin plate to protect it. The plate was full of rice- pudding. 4c

4e

4(

4c

3|c

The squadron re-assembled in the Delta on October 15 1941. By November 18 they were through the wire to Libya, part of General Auchinleck's Crusader offensive.

"We

were gloriously

we had about 600 so." They watched

confident," wrote Hughes, "and had been told tanks, mostly Honeys, to the enemy's 200 or

from truck

tops, like

crowds

Below : Geoffrey Hughes

(left)

at a point-to-point, as the 8th

,

whose wartime diary records the

Bad Element's doings, and Major Peter Moore (right), who trained so many mine-lifters for their vital task at Alamein.

Intelligent

Hussars met and routed a German armoured column. Auchinleck succeeded in his three objectives: to take the pressure off Tobruk, to reconquer Cyrenaica and, by recapturing the airfields there, to restore air and naval support for Malta - but there were enormous losses in tanks and men. Then Rommel counterattacked in early 1942 and the squadron had to leave building airstrips at Agedabia and join the pell mell withdrawal to Egypt.

*****

The most

celebrated lieutenant in the squadron

who was

later

was the Earl of

appointed adc to

Oxford and Asquith (Oxo), Sir Miles Lampson, British Ambassador in Cairo. Boag and Fred Crook remember the Earl. "He'd had absolutely no contact with the working classes before in his life; he hadn't got much chin and was a sort of inverted S shape. He didn't know what nerve was. Some of us were there cowering under a lorry when a bloody pair of Me 109s were going for us. Someone had left the handbrake off," said Boag, "and we kept trying to shuffle forward and forward as the lorry kept moving. "Suddenly this voice says, 'What's going on here?' There he was, about six foot three, standing out of the top of his armoured once. car; never mind the bombs. 'Get this vehicle off the road at This

is

Then we *****

absolutely disgraceful.'

could take cover."

In February 1942 Hughes went to Tobruk for a commission interview. In that battered, sieged seaside hole "my appearance with gleaming cap badge, polished belt and shoes and new battledress caused a minor sensation". As he stood outside the inter-

Stukas flew over and scored direct hits on a petrol ship in the harbour. "The ship and sea were a mass of flames," he wrote afterwards, "the screams of the victims were terrible."

view

office 12

*****

There had been no leave for 1 5 months when the squadron had time off" in Cairo that August. Hughes took £50 for five days to realise it a pleasure-ground which "at this time didn't seem to Major saw slept, and ate was almost a front line town". They undergoing currently Barbara and met Hac Jones, the builder, Egyptian tramofficer training and saluting everything, even conductors. No one found a real girl friend although the Egg Man - "he was very keen on that sort of thing" - did persuade Hughes to spend part of his savings for a Dunhill pipe on a

French lady; a sacrifice, since she reminded Hughes of a wicket keeper wearing pads. 114

returned to the squadron "running, and this meant a sudden move"; they found themselves at Wadi Natrun, part of the reorganised 10th Armoured Division and next to the 2nd

Moore

commanded by Major Jack Perrott. Mine drill was practised endlessly. In his diary Hughes wrote "It was clear that the task of the sappers in the forthcoming battle was going to be of the highest importance. It was evident that, since the arrival of Generals Alexander and Montgomery, 8th Army and everybody seemed to feel the new spirit which they Cheshire Field Squadron

inspired."

Four days before the battle Boag, Pretty (then s.s.m.) and Hughes were called out of the line to begin pre-ocTU training. Shorty Johnston had begun his about a fortnight before. Moore's last words to Hughes were, "You'll have to put your back into it." Boag was at Arnhem, a star paratroop officer, Hughes taken prisoner with an re unit in Sicily. In Oflag 79 he helped put on ambitious stage shows, including lolanthe, and had a finger shot oflf

as he tried to escape.

The sappers had

*****

the simplest brief at Alamein's

first

night:

follow the infantry, clear the mines for the tanks. In the southern

New Zealand rifle companies went first that footwalk with eyes searching for horns and wires in the sand. Three sapper units would trail them, making four tank roads. The gaps code-named Ink and Boat were Moore's; Bottle and Hat gaps were left to a pair of Army field companies. The cre in charge of the sappers and supporting Military Police and signals detachments was Lt.-Col. Gilbert McMeekan, a big and vigorous officer who followed Moore's gap in his staff car "in order to see the troops". This route was earmarked for the Sherwood Rangers' tanks and General Gatehouse's divisional headquarters. The Todfish, Pat Campbell and Hill (the Gorgeous Beast) were in 3rd squadron's headquarters troop with the transport and had been rejoined just in time by the Egg Man, who went foraging for fuel. Fred Crook was in hospital with a fever. "All we could do was lie down among the guns and try to get a bit of sleep," said Todd. A few sappers seemed to be utterly alone in a fearful noise as the barrage began and the New Zealanders started forward. McMeekan found the noise "soothing". Dust hadn't blotted out the moon yet. There was a No Man's Land of perhaps a mile before the first belt of mines and the 3rd squadron gapping parties walked to within 500 yards of the garden, their sandbagged pilot corridor the

;

itching

115

Once men had needed to prod with bayonets to discover mines. At Alamein, though, electric mine detectors were used. This reproduction of a Terence Cuneo painting suggests what it was like for sappers during the opening attack. Mr. Cuneo painted it for the 116

Royal Engineers H.Q. Mess in 1950. "I used troops who'd been at Alamein. I wanted to get the feeling of men having to do this job utterly unprotected and exposed." In the mine squads had no screen; they protected themselves.

terribly meticulous battle,

117

Then they waited

vehicle driven by Sapper Bill Shaw.

for the blue

from the reconnaissance officer. They had no infantry protection. "We felt rather lonely and naked," said Moore afterwards. As they reached the fringe of the minefield, machine guns were turned to them and a few shells fell. The pilot vehicle blew up and provided a splendid target for about ten minutes. The advance was 20 minutes late and McMeekan found that his communications were valueless telephone wires were broken by the shelling and wireless was scarcely better. Moore's men worked at first without serious interference, then a heavy machine gun put in a word on their left. Lt. John Van Grutten, a former undergraduate, was sent to silence it. He did. light signal

:

*****

Bromley Hotchkiss, when he joined the squadron, felt 'a bit of outsider'. Now he was a corporal. In the gapping of the first belt of mines all his section had been shot away, killed or wounded. He moved the thousand yards to the next field by himself and marked his section's gap. A lorry bringing m.ps., wire and marker posts had failed to arrive. Hotchkiss found some wire and scrounged posts from the New Zealanders ahead. Then he hung the regulation lamps (green on the safe side of the gap) crouching down below the machine gun tracers, reaching up to the posts like a monkey. The first he knew of his Military Medal was an item in the Birkenhead News, sent by his mother. an

*****

At

the next minefield 3rd squadron were in the very jaws of the

assault.

The floor was

and with anxious

thick with

New Zealand and German dead

casualties. Here, too,

was a more elaborate

sowing of mines, Italian Red Devils, booby traps, wires inviting the feet. Moore went crawling to find a deviation and almost laid his hands on an S mine's horns. In the left of the two gaps Sgt. Bill Stanton, the St. Helens glassblower and strict disciplinarian, took the place of two detector operators who were hit. Moore was feeling a nostalgia for infantry support now, especially when a heavy machine gun began firing accurately from only 70 yards away, and halted the advance. Luckily an alert New Zealand officer noted this and wiped out the gun post with two of his men. The tanks were to use the gaps at 4 a.m. By 3, Moore's sappers were actually in front of the infantry. Bottle gap had been prepared on schedule and Col. McMeekan, his eardrum shattered by a shell's blast, was trying to get the delayed Hat gap open. He was now almost totally deaf and had to give up the driving of his 118

jeep after he failed to hear a Maori sentry's challenge. When another party of Maoris yelled at him McMeekan got out of his jeep and found a trip wire tangled on the back axle. It

was almost

six

when Moore saw

He raced back through

the last

marker

in his gaps.

the gap to the expanse between the mine-

where the Sherwood Rangers' tanks were lined, nose to tail. Moore jumped into the leading turret and shouted to the officer to Come On. The tanks moved immediately, up to the crest of a ridge before the second minefield where they could see Sgt. Stanton ready to wave them on. On the ridge, they became silhouettes; the German anti-tank guns in the enemy's main battle position opened up and there was a frightful clang as Moore's adopted tank was hit squarely. He ran back and guided the second tank round the disabled hulk. This one was hit. Moore ran to another. The guns hit it. In the first five minutes six tanks were burning, soon 16 were lost, and the gunfire knocked down marker posts so that more tanks, trying to open out to a flank, went into the minefield. fields

McMeekan

ordered the sappers back when

it was almost full mixed with columns of smoke from the deadened tanks. Moore, Driver Flinn and some other drivers and sappers had spent the last couple of hours

daylight; the approaching sun's red

ready to defend a captured trench against a German counterattack, and Moore had been to sleep. Flinn made three journeys in his Chewy truck to pick up casualties. A Honey rolled back, piled with wounded. The 3rd squadron was tired and consumed with thirst, but Moore's system and training had been so excellent that not one sapper had been blown up. "It was like the end of the earth," Campbell said, "a thunderous roar, the sky lit up like the Crystal Palace. We knew the second front had been opened." "There was something different about it," said Flinn, "we felt we were beginning a proper, organised war."

The squadron withdrew and began to brew up for breakfast. Harry Litherland was 22, a quiet youth who had been a driver in Wallasey.

He

sat in a lorry's shelter

with his 20-year-old friend he had not long before taught to swim. An Me 109 dropped out of the new morning, there was an explosion and, abruptly, Gallimore was dead. Litherland, whose leg would be amputated soon, thought: "There's a ruddy great hole in my knee." Bill

Gallimore

whom

119

The enemy

1

:

Rommel

reassessed

by Hans- Adolf Jacobsen and Antony Terry Twenty-five years after his defeat in the desert, Field-Marshal

Rommel

is still

regarded by the British with a respect, even an

by no other enemy officer since Von Richthofen. Germany, however, RommeFs reputation falls a long way short of the superhuman. Antony Terry, who sets the scene for this conversation about Rommel, was attached as an Intelligence affection, enjoyed

In

Officer to the

commandos and won

the

mc

before being taken

prisoner at St. Nazaire. After the war he interrogated high-ranking

German

prisoners.

He

is

now Central European Correspondent of

The Sunday Times of London

living in

Bonn.

In October 1944 Field-Marshal Erwin

Rommel was

given the

choice by Hitler of committing suicide or facing a rigged

trial

by

At

the

a Nazi 'People's Court' for his share in the Officers' Plot.

time that

Rommel swallowed

poison, ending a brilliant career, a

19-year-oId Hitler Youth, Hans- Adolf Jacobsen,

Wehrmacht near the Polar Circle. As Rommel had been earlier, Jacobsen was

was serving

Hitler's

still

convinced of

the rightness of Hitler's war.

In May 1945, shortly after being commissioned as an officer, he was captured by Czech partisans following his escape from a foray with Russian troops at Prague. During five years in Soviet camps Jacobsen says he had "a lot of very wide-ranging and interesting talks with the Russians".

Today Dr. Jacobsen is one of West Germany's best-known younger historians specialising in the Nazi period. He is Assistant Professor for Contemporary History and International Relations at Bonn University. Dr. Jacobsen came to admire Rommel for the Field-Marshal's 'inner purification' from Nazism and Rommel's readiness to sacrifice his

For many is

own

life

of the younger students at

to the anti-Hitler cause.

Bonn

University Jacobsen

already 'the war generation'. But this fact and his unconven-

make him a catalyst between the German youth of today and the world which was Rommel's. He denies that young Germans nowadays foster a 'Rommel image' or that they need a military hero to worship. Jacobsen: It's different in Britain. There you have a relatively unbroken tradition and images can get passed on. But in Gertional views

120

Rommel's widow and son Manfred in 1967 at her house in Zillerbach, a suburb south of Stuttgart. Before 1954 they lived at Herringen, near Ulm, where the Field- Marshal died. Frau Rommel is in her 70s. The house is packed with Rommel documents, paintings, maps and other military souvenirs. Manfred, the only child of the marriage, is now in business as a financial adviser.

many today

there is nothing Hke the Rommel image, the picture of the heroic dashing figure, which you still have of him in Britain. Certainly there are some Germans who have a definite and probably fixed opinion about Rommel as a soldier and strategist. It may be based on something they have heard or read, or even by having been in the Afrika Korps with him or talked to someone who had been, but it doesn't carry much weight. Even so,

Rommel was one

of the few

German

generals

we hoped would

we wanted passed on to Germans for 'X Day'. Ten years ago when build the new idea of 'civilians in uniform'

represent the kind of soldierly tradition the next generation of

we were

starting to

German Army I was asked for a genealogical tree German generals who could be used as examples for the young German soldier of today. The question which of course inside the

of suitable

arose immediately was which of the generals from Hitler's Third

Reich could we include.

and Rommel was

I

prepared a

list,

with historical reasons,

at the top.

121

Terry:

One of the questions which always plagues outsiders German scene is the actual point of no return at which

studying the

like Rommel decides that he can no longer go along with and the Nazis. A cynic would say that the change away from Hitlerism in Rommel took place when it became clear that Hitler's genius was an illusion and when Hitler tried to force Rommel to take military actions which he thought were idiotic and ruinous.

a

man

Hitler

Jacobsen: I admit that among the German generals Rommel is one of the very few who changed inwardly on the subject of the Nazis. We had a lot of officers who died after the July 20 Plot or

were subsequently hanged. But among the highest military leaders of the Third Reich Rommel is one of the very few who genuinely changed his spots. To see how remarkable this metamorphosis was, we have to look at Rommel's background. Bom 1891, awarded several high decorations in the first world war including the pour le merite, he was an officer who formed his judgment of developments under the Nazis from the standpoint of a German nationalist. A liaison officer between the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht - the armed forces - Rommel was convinced of the rightness of certain Nazi ideas. He approved of National Socialism and its successes, such as the annexation of Austria, like an observer who views things only from the outside. Rommel was a soldier who looked at things solely from the angle of increasing the power of the

Rommel

German

state.

approved of Hitler's actions and did all he could to further them, but he was still only a colonel in those days. Later, as commander of the Fiihrer's armoured train during the certainly

invasion of Poland, he

came

into close contact with Hitler.

He got

was regarded as an officer favourably disposed towards the Nazis. The first time anyone in Germany really heard of Rommel was during the blitz across France in 1940 when he broke through with his 7th Panzer Division and reached the Channel coast. This was the beginning of his reputation, later to be repeated in North Africa, for being a spirited, ambitious divisional commander who by his drive and dash carried his troops with him. In 1941 Rommel's career began to rise to its real climax. Because of his success and his close personal relations with Hitler, and his favourable attitude to National Socialism, he was sent to North Africa as the head of the first German troops to land there, the job because he

order to help out the Italians. Rommel's rise was meteoric five promotions in rank to Field-Marshal by July 1942. in

122

How far was Rommel really a military genius and what is modern German assessment of his capabilities as a commander ? Jacobsen: Modem historical research shows Rommel to have been neither a major strategic planner nor to have had a real Terry: the

capacity for large-scale military operations. field-marshal like

operative brain,

Compared with a

Von Manstein, who was Hitler's most brilliant Rommel was just a commander with an im-

pressive manner and a capacity to carry his troops with him by dramatic personal example. Given a good commander-in-chief and placed in the right spot at the right time, Rommel had proved that he could win battles. He never had to be part of a grand concept of a really large-scale military operation. The assessment of Rommel as a dashing adventurous commander is borne out by the fact that during the decisive phase of the North Africa campaign in June 1942, when Rommel reached the Alamein line, he supported Hitler's hare-brained scheme for an immediate breakthrough to Alexandria. Opinion was divided among the generals and the controversy ranged from Rommel's breakthrough plan to a proposal that the Afrika Korps should

on the Egyptian border while the Germans safeguarded by first capturing Malta - the so-called Operation Hercules. Rommel's misjudgment of the real situation caused him to influence Hitler in the belief that the Germans were already on the march, storming their way through to be in Alexandria by July, that they could overcome all British resistance and that Malta could wait. In fact the German failure to capture Malta led eventually to Rommel's defeat, since 50 per stay put

their sea-borne supplies

cent of his supplies were destroyed en route.

This decision was Rommel's biggest single mistake. It showed that he was basically a dashing divisional commander, and not much more, and was carried away by British losses and his own success. It was not a balanced military appraisal. The result was that Rommel eventually turned up at the Alamein line with his tongue hanging out, with hardly any tanks or fuel left, and was forced to stabilise the front. By the time Montgomery attacked, the British had overwhelming strength and air support, while the Afrika Korps supply system had collapsed completely. Rommel was in no state to hold an attack carried out with this force and with Montgomery's tactical skill behind it. There are some scathing comments on Rommel as a commander in the war diaries of General Haider, Chief of the German Army Staff. In 1941 he sent General Paulus to Rommel in 123

the hope, as Haider says, of "putting a brake

Rommel". Paulus

soldier

on

this

reports back to Haider on

crazy

May

11

Rommel is not capable of carrying out his task." Later Haider writes: "The command situation in North Africa is clouded by the idiosyncrasies of General Rommel and the fact that he is pathologically ambitious. Rommel's faults of character show him as a particularly unpleasant type of person with whom no-one wants to quarrel, because of his brutal methods and his support from 1942: "Situation in North Africa unsatisfactory.

above"

- a reference to

lam still not

Terry:

Rommel's

close ties with Hitler.

clear where the first change

came

in

Rommel -

from what point he started to change his spots? Jacobsen: The first big test for Rommel came on November 3 1942, when he rejected Hitler's demand that the Afrika Korps should 'be victorious or perish'. Even allowing for the fact that Rommel was in a strong position because of the propaganda value to the Germans of his previous victories, he was one of the very few generals who had the strength to refuse to carry out one of Hitler's orders. Instead of submitting himself to a modern Thermopylae, Rommel says merely that he is responsible for his troops and leads them back - unlike the similar situation in Stalingrad a few weeks later where Paulus does not have the courage, nor perhaps the strength, to break out and obeys Hitler's orders to the end.

To

prevent him being associated with the North Africa

debacle. Hitler ordered

Rommel

The process of Rommel's

to be flown out before the end.

'inner purification'

increased after the end of 1942.

was gradual and

By then he began

to realise not

only the appalling crimes of the Nazis but the insanity of Hitler's method of making war and his senseless sacrifice of troops. The process was speeded by Rommel's contacts with the circle of conspirators

culminated

who aimed in

to overthrow Hitler. Their influence

Rommel's telegram

to Hitler after the Allied

to

draw the

necessary conclusions from the hopeless situation of the

German

invasion,

on July

The

15 1944, in

which he called on Hitler

was borne in on documentary proof of the massacres of the Jews were shown to him by the anti-Hitler conspirators in 1943. As the officer who had conducted a 'gentleman's war' with the British in North Africa he simply could not believe that they were true. When he was finally convinced he showed the moral courage which singles him out from the majority of other troops.

criminal nature of the Nazi regime

Rommel when

124

the actual

X Some of the mementos in Frau Rommel's house, which has the air ofa shrine to her husband's memory. The Leica camera was heavily used by him during the desert campaigns. It is still in perfect working order. It lies across sketch maps made by Rommel on the battlefield, which show quite clearly his various lines of attack

German generals who took refuge behind the argument that "our is to obey and make war". Terry: But Rommel must have seen a lot of what was going on in job

Germany

in the years before the war. Jacobsen: It's difficult to say what he knew. A man like Rommel was only interested in military things, so that Germany could again win the battle for a place in the sun. These numerous incidental side-effects which only really became widespread and acute during the war were regarded as unpleasant but subsidiary. Rommel, who considered the massacres as a terrible crime and

conduct of the war an^ateurish, was anxious to end the Germany still had the strength to negotiate a peace treaty. But he was against a physical assassination of Hitler. Rommel wanted to take Hitler prisoner and put him on trial later before a German court. There was no German general who was so absolutely convinced at the start of the rightness of Hitler and the Nazis and who later went through such a process of inner change. The unique thing about Rommel was that he was the only German at that time with the prestige to end the war in the West and also prevent the outbreak of civil war in Germany. Hitler's

struggle while

125

The enemy 2 what by George Perry :

the generals think

A quarter of a century has passed since the Desert War was fought. What do Axis commanders

think of the campaigns now? Here are some of them, who were photographed by Horst Baumann, a German who was a schoolboy in heavily-bombed Aachen during the years when the North African battles were the views of

being fought out.

General Fritz Bayerlein (below) now runs a carpet business in Wiirzburg. He began his military service in the first world war, won the Iron Cross Class I, and was later commissioned. When Germany entered the Desert War he quickly became Chief of Staff of the Afrika Korps. "I was more or less an orderly officer to Rommel. I went everywhere in his command car from the days of victory in 1941 to the days of defeat. I had the rank of colonel. The toughest troops were the British. Then came the New Zealanders, Australians and South Africans. The Free French were a tough lot too. Some of the Italians were good. The

fought to the bitter end after all their tanks had been destroyed. The Italian tanks were pitiful little things. When von Thoma was captured towards the end of Alamein, Rommel and I talked it over and we decided not to carry out Hitler's order. To stand and fight would have been mass suicide. Rommel said 'I will give you command of the Afrika Korps' although I A.riete division

was only a colonel. I carried out the whole German retreat. I became a general after that - shortly before Rommel went away from North Africa on March 1 1943." General Berahard Hermann Ramcke (below left) was commander of a crack parachute brigade. He is almost 80 and lives at Kappeln, near the Danish border. He still refuses to shake hands with Englishmen. "Britain and Germany are still at war - there has been no peace treaty." In late 1942 Ramcke's brigade, left far behind in the Axis retreat, carried out a daring withdrawal by day and night, capturing British vehicles in raids and regaining the body of Rommel's forces. In 1944, he made a fanatical last stand at Brest; the highest Nazi decoration was dropped by parachute to him. Today his contacts with the Afrika Korps have lapsed. Its members regard Ramcke as a political general, a staunch Hitler supporter. General Siegfried Westphal (below right) is a director of a German steel firm in Bonn. He was on Rommel's staff for most of the desert campaigns. "Auchinleck in North Africa was very capable, but he did not have the means at his disposal that

Montgomery had. When the British started their last offensive we knew they had much bigger forces and the benefit of much careful preparation. We knew that Alamein was going to be the turning point - it was now or never. Montgomery impressed

me

mainly with his extreme methodicalness and his minutely By his careful tactics and slow advance he undoubtedly saved the British a lot of blood. What really defeated Rommel in the end was lack of supplies."

detailed planning.

,>

Commander

Luigi Durand de la Pemie

sits in

the Italian parlia-

Genoa. On December 19 1941 he led two-man midget submarines into Alexandria harbour the third attempt they had made. The craft were so small that the crews, in frogman equipment, sat astride them like cavalrymen. De la Penne was caught swimming in the water alongside HMS Valiant. The commander. Admiral Charles Morgan,

ment

as Liberal m.p. for

three

suspecting that charges were attached to his ship, had de la Penne incarcerated near the water line. After nearly three hours the prisoner indicated he was ready to talk. He told Morgan that any moment the ship would blow up, but he refused to say where the explosives were. He was put back below, and all the watertight doors were closed. A few minutes later there was an explosion and the ship sank slowly to the bottom of the shallow harbour, with a huge hole blasted in her hull. There were no casualties. The same night another battleship, hms Queen Elizabeth, was similarly sunk. Later de la Penne escaped four times from prison camps. After the Italian armistice he took part in the British action on Spezia, this time under the command of Admiral Morgan who was so impressed by the gallantry of his former young enemy he tried to get a British medal for him. Regulations would not permit this, but Morgan did pin the Italian Gold Medal (equivalent to the vc) on de la Penne's chest. "It was a critical time. It was important to sink those ships," he said in 1967 of his Alexandria exploit.

he said: 'T 128

am

still

in a condition to accept a British

Of

Spezia,

medal."

General Gunther Lungershausen (above left), now living in a Hamburg suburb, began his career with the Kaiser's Hessian Dragoon Bodyguard Regiment. In the second world war he served in Poland and Russia, then went to Tobruk in July 1942 to command the 164th Division. "The first I knew of the Alamein offensive was an incredible artillery barrage which went on nonstop for three hours. When it began I thought it was a golden strip on the desert horizon but it was the dust cloud from Montgomery's guns. Had Rommel been in Montgomery's place he would have made a big encircling movement to surround and wipe out the whole Afrika Korps. But Montgomery preferred to use his material superiority to save lives rather than gain a quick victory." General Guiseppe Mancinelli (above right) lives in

Rome. He was

liaison officer

is

now in his 70s and Rommel and the

between

Italian desert army. "Rommel was the best soldier in the war because he understood the essentials of modern war. He had a sixth sense. He would find himself at the dead centre of action at the very climax of battle. Montgomery was the best organiser, but not of conception. His Alamein offensive battle was not particularly brilliant considering the weight of material. Judgment has been passed on Italian troops compared with German. Lacking motorisation we had to be static while the Germans could be mobile. They say we always arrived late on the scene. That was due to lack of vehicles. We had 14-ton tanks, the Germans 20-ton ones; we had much smaller guns too."

129

The private armies by Len Deighton The heroes of the desert tended to be the generals - the Montgomerys, the Rommels. But a unique feature of this war, which captured the public's imagination as successfully as the Battle of Britain air aces,

was the emergence of the private armies, the

irregular guerilla units designed to create as

possible in sharp, highly mobile thrusts behind

much havoc as enemy lines. Len

whose familiarity with post-war cloak-and-dagger demonstrated in his novels {The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, An Expensive Place to Die\ examines the origins and the effectiveness of the secret patrols of the Desert War. Deighton, intrigue

is

Goodness knows exactly when

the British middle class began

love affair with the desert, but the final passionate embrace was

its

undoubtedly from T. E. Lawrence. Driving to Damascus in the Duke of Westminster's private Rolls Royce, T. E. disabused us of the notion that wars must become the smelly mayhem that reports from Flanders would suggest they were. With Lawrence, when Allenby entered Jerusalem in 1917, walked Wavell. Later they became friends, and theories of irregular warfare were a favourite topic of discussion between them. Wavell was open to new ideas no matter how revolutionary. In the Army Exercise of 1935 Wavell's sympathy to original ideas encouraged a young subaltern in the Durham Light Infantry to write him a letter about the use of guerillas. Lt. Fox Davies to A. P. Wavell 1st Oct 1935 It is my suggestion that far more attention should be paid from the outset towards destroying the "brains", that is the commanders and headquarters, from within rather than on wasting time, men and ammunition on a formal attack on their external lines. Destroy his supplies, cut his wires, kill his commanders, and the object is half achieved before battle is

joined at

all.

is all this to be achieved? My answer is: by employing well-trained guerilla troops. Wavell replied to Fox Davies agreeing that army thinking was too orthodox. He did not fully agree that the trained guerilla was the answer, but one paragraph of his letter was significant:— A problem I have often considered is the motor guerilla, who may be a prominent feature of the next war. This

And how

130

i

unlikely to be invaded

but if it was, consider or on motor bikes men in motors corps of young what effect a with a uniform coat and a rifle automatic might have on the

country

is

;

enemy's communications. Wavell remembered the letter from the keen young subaltern and the following year he sent for him during a large army exercise and told him to attack the enemy communications and headquarters. Fox Davies's irregulars were so successful that the whole army went home to barracks a day early. Six years later Wavell again sent for Fox Davies and put him in charge of a Long Range Desert Patrol. Fox Davies won a medal, but from his second patrol he did not return. Men had been driving motor cars across the desert ever since the motor car was bom and in the late Twenties small groups of 'weekend explorers' began desert motoring for fun. They were a mixed bunch of men and women, some of them army people and some from the civil service. The leader was R. A. Bagnold who was later to complete a complex work entitled The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes. They used the stars and the sun for navigation and learned to recognise the thousand varieties of sand and the shapes of its dunes. By the late Thirties their trips

had become 6000-mile expeditions. When the war began Bagnold was not the only man

to fear

that the Italians might send motorised raiding parties to cut the

communications between Cairo and Khartoum. Had Wavell had enough reconnaisance aircraft available, the Long Range Desert Group would perhaps not have come into existence, but as it was Wavell gave Bagnold permission to form the force, intending that it should keep an eye on his southern flank. Bagnold could take anything he wanted from any department with absolute priority. He gave his old weekend explorer friends instant commissions and recruited ncos and men from the New Zealand Division. He had already invented 'channels' for getting cars out of soft sand and perfected a sun compass. Now theodolites came up from Nairobi and Cairo was scoured for machine guns and wireless sets. The Egyptian Army supplied the 30-cwt trucks that Bagnold selected and the Chevrolet depot in Alexandria sent more. The tyres were 10.50 x 16 that would enable them to carry two tons across even soft dunes. For the war had changed desert motoring for the heavier. Constant contact meant wireless sets and men to operate and repair them. There were gunners, and guns to keep free of sand; Bofors, Nile

131

Browning and Vickers and even some Boys anti-tank rifles. There must be ammunition too, and all that weight meant better springs. The men had to be adapted too. They learned about radios, guns, cars, navigation, intelligence, signals and ciphers. The first patrol set out in great secrecy at the end of August 1940. It was so hot that the crews vomited constantly (the animal life of the interior lives largely on birds that die from heat exhaustion).

The

patrols discovered the air staging post for

They destroyed the fuel and ammunimovements were watched and reported and when an Italian convoy from Kufra was destroyed the official mail was captured. It soon became clear that the Italians were not going to raid the Upper Nile. The lrdg was ordered on to the Italian flights to Abyssinia.

tion there. Italian

offensive to hinder Graziani's build-up for an invasion of Egypt in the coastal part of the fighting zone.

The patrols

laid mines on roads hundreds of miles in the Italian and brazenly drove in full sight of the enemy only to be saluted by unsuspecting Italian sentries. The lrdg began building supply dumps on the far side of the Great Sand Sea. Vast distances were covered by the patrols. One, commanded by Major Clayton, went right across Libya to meet Colonel Leclerc's Free French who were coming from Lake Chad. The combined Anglo-French forces attacked Murzuk and some other oases in S.W. Libya. On March 1 the Italian garrison in Kufra surrendered and asked to be reviewed in full dress uniform. The LRDG threw bombs into car parks, shot-up tented camps and roared down main roads with headlights on and guns blazing, but these activities were extra-curricular. These bearded brigands knew that their most important function was the collection of intelligence. Watching, waiting and burying each spent match, they meticulously amended the maps that until then had been plain white linen. It wasn't a job that appealed to everyone and, many young men in the army fancied that time behind the enemy lines would be better spent shooting up everything that moved. Such a man was David Stirling. Stirling was a wealthy young man from Stirlingshire. His brother was in the British Embassy in Cairo, his cousin was Lord Lovat of the Commandos. When war began he joined the Scots Guards, and when Captain Robert Laycock raised No. 8 Commando from the Brigade of Guards, recruiting many of his officers in the bar at Whites, Stirling was one of the men who joined. Layforce - as Laycock's commandos were called - had

rear

132

been sent to the Middle East theatre as a raiding force but the Navy hadn't enough ships to spare for them. Stirhng reasoned that if they couldn't go by sea, why not go by air. Sixty men should be dropped by parachute the night before the next big attack. Their mission to damage and destroy enemy aircraft on the ground, using bombs and small arms. Stirling put the plan before Auchinleck, who promoted him to captain and gave him the go-ahead. British intelligence had been using parachutes and dummy gliders to persuade the Germans that :

there was a large Allied airborne brigade in the region. They had even invented a name - the Special Air Services Brigade - which now they gave to Stirling's little force of 66 men which he recruited from the remnants of Layforce. Their first operation took place on November 17 1941, the night before a big Allied offensive. Five Bombay transports were to drop the sas men in a zone from which they could attack five Axis airfields in the Gazala-Tmimmi region. On the day of the drop the weather was appalling, the wind was at gale force and Stirling was advised to abandon his plan, but he decided to go ahead anyway. The transport aircraft got lost and eight out of ten supply containers were never found, including one with the fuses. Another unit found fuses but no bombs. One of the transport planes, hit by A.A. fire, was forced to land in enemy-held territory. It took off again, only to be shot down by an Me 109. Of the original 62 officers and men, only 22 got back. The LRDG brought them. After this the sas gave up the idea of parachuting to war and became in effect a raiding force of the lrdg, sharing bases and using the lrdg as a 'taxi-service' for raids.

For

their next mission Stirling's sas

went to war

in

seven

30-cwt trucks painted rose-pink and green. In one week 21 men destroyed 61 aircraft standing on airfields, shot up officers messes, airfield huts and transit camps without suffering a casualty.

Perhaps the most bizarre personality Overleaf: these pictures

sum up

the

armies. Cecil Beaton took picture

in the

mode of

whole war was a life

of

the private

which shows the bizarre clothing of the L.R.D.G. Patrols sometimes met in the desert (2), but you were likelier to have to get your truck out of soft sand alone (3), using the tracks which were standard equipment. These armies operated very much in the wilderness (4) ; the rum ration (5) was (1),

comfort against cold nights, which were so typical of the desert. 133

-«*.^«0«^.^;^-

.

If^JW"^*^

I 111 '^':

.-\

^.-

'**

.•sab

&

man named working

Vladimir Peniakoff. Between 1925 and 1928 he was

in a

sugar mill in Luxor in Upper Egypt.

Palgrave, Burton and Lawrence and set his

He had

read

mind on Arabian

was excited by the journeys of Bagnold and equipped himself with the Nautical Almanack, an expensive theodolite and a sun compass, and in a Ford two-seater made

discovery. Peniakoff

lone journeys far across the desert.

When

war began Peniakoff obtained permission to form a home-made badges and the official title Popski's Private Army. It was a group that worked very closely with the lrdg and yet had a glamour of its own. The summer of 1940 had seen the creation of lrdg, the following year the sas had got into the fight. By 1942 the bars of Cairo were echoing with schemes that would play havoc with the enemy rear and leave their front line troops to die of boredom. There was Haselden's scheme to drive into Tobruk with 80 British soldiers while German-speaking men in German uniforms pretended to be pow guards. Once inside Tobruk they would capture the gun batteries while the navy used destroyers and MTBs to seize the port and liberate 4000 British pows held there. On this same night - September 13 1942 - Stirling's sas planned to attack Benghazi, release 16,000 pows, arm them from the German dumps and hold the town until relieved by sea. A critic of this plan remarked that there were no pow cages in Benghazi, they were far to the south. Very well then, we'll bring them up from the south. Two men survived Haselden's raid and the navy lost two destroyers and several mtbs. Stirling didn't get into Benghazi. It was later found that enemy intelligence had had many details of these raids and three others for about ten days. The night of September 1 3 was indeed an unlucky one for the private armies. The operation against Tobruk - Operation Daffodil - was the most conspicuous disaster. Acting on the assumption that the town was held by only a few low-grade the

military unit which rejoiced in

soldiers the attacking force consisted of three units:

Italian

Force A (400 men of the 1 1th Royal Marine Commando) was to land north of the harbour from two destroyers, hms Zulu and small inlet to the east was meanwhile to be taken by HMS Sikh. Force B (40 sas men plus sappers etc. for demolition, bringing

A

the unit

of the the

way

was a 136

to 80 men). Yet another force - Force C (100 men Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) was travelling all from Alexandria in 1 8 mtbs. The sas part of the operation

up

1st

success.

They captured

their objectives to the east of the

harbour, but were not joined by Force C which succeeded in landing only ten men and, having lost five boats, returned to Alex. The two destroyers, affected by the heavy swell, were very

slow in landing men of Force A, and the commandos committed piecemeal were captured when they used up their ammunition. During the landings hms Sikh was hit by the shore batteries and although taken in tow was eventually scuttled. The other destroyer was lost later to air attacks.

The

total Allied losses for

Operation Daffodil was 700 men, of which about 100 were killed. Stirling's attack on Benghazi - Operation Snowdrop - which involved a gruelling journey around the southern edge of the Great Sand Sea, suffered the same lack of security. For weeks rumours of it had been going around the Cairo bars. The sas men ran into a classic ambush and although they managed to withdraw skilfully they were unable to get near any of their objectives and were under continuous air attack by day. The attack upon Barce - Hyacinth - was the only successful raid that took place that night. It was led by the lrdg's Major Eason-Smith together with Major Pen iakoff (otherwise Popski) and his private army. They did a great deal of damage to 30 enemy aircraft on Barce airfield. The result of these operations was that Montgomery was convinced, now more than ever, that these private armies were all part of the tendency to commit units piecemeal instead of in strength. He had never favoured these attacks and was in no way surprised by the failure at Benghazi and Tobruk. In the first world war the authorities had endorsed the idea of heroes as a propaganda weapon. Air aces were seized upon by the press. For the second world war the unit-hero idea was devised. Ideally its function should not be too far removed from that of infantry. Mums and Dads from Adelaide to Aberdeen could read about these private armies and feel they were composed of men very like their sons and brothers and husbands. Even more important was the morale building job these private armies did among the fighting men. They wore home-made badges and modified uniforms. They were every soldier's idea of what a hero should be.

137

The Gaberdine Swine - and

others

by Peter Sanders Language can identify an army as much as its dress or its way of fighting. The men in the desert evolved their own slang - a strange compound of many tongues including, of course, Arabic. Peter Sanders,

who

put together the vocabulary that follows, describes

He assisted Eric Partridge in compiling the renowned sixth edition of ^ Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, He served in the desert from 1941 as himself as "an amateur of slang".

Inspecting Ordnance Officer to Western Desert Force, later to

13 Corps, and finally to 8th Army.

"A

strange job," he says,

"which only a few artillery types would have heard of." In 1943 he was badly wounded in Sicily. The glossary given here, culled from the Desert War's own language, is not totally comprised of words first used during that war, for British troops had been in the Near East for several generations, and some words had been with them for almost as long. The spelling is arbitrary.

more sophisticated areas this became 'to liberate', but there was little to liberate in the desert. The explanation of acquisition was 'it stuck to the truck'. Ash Wednesday: the day in 1942 when g.h.q. burnt many of its secret files ahead of Rommel's advance and Cairo was treated to acquire, to: to steal, to scrounge. In

a rain of ash. Ayrab, a genoowine bedoowine: a Bedouin Arab. A jocular elaboration of the American pronunciation of Arab. Beddo, a: a Bedouin. bending drill defecation in the open. Also 'going for a walk with a :

spade'.

Benghazi cooker, a sand soaked with petrol used for cooking. The crews of T. E. Lawrence's armoured cars used the same method. Benghazi Stakes (or Benghazi Handicap), the: the annual advance to, and, until the winter of 1942, retreat from Benghazi. :

The

Blue Train', the train from 'Alex' of the Germans, as far as Tobruk. There was probably a greater concentration of hangovers on this train than anywhere else on earth. brew up, to: to make tea but also to catch fire. 'The tank brewed up and the crew baled out'. 'Bale out' was borrowed from the raf. brothel creepers: desert boots with thick rubber soles. blue, the: the desert,

hence

into the desert - eventually, with the help

138

bully splog: a desert dish - a ragout of bully beef

and crushed

biscuits.

bush artillery: captured Italian guns manned by odds and sods in the siege of Tobruk. Camel to Consumer: C. to C. (Cape to Cairo) cigarettes. Not a criticism; they were good. debollicker, a: a small British anti-personnel mine which fired a bullet

upwards when trodden on. Expressive of the

result desired.

desert chicken: bully beef.

Desert Rats, The: the 7th

Armoured

Division. Their sign

was the

jerboa (desert rat). desert rose, or desert

lily,

a: a perforated tin ('flimsy') let into the

sand for a urinal.

men or equipment) fit for the trying conditions of the desert. The opposite, 'undesertworthy', became to mean

desertworthy: (of

unjustly, by 8th Army to 1st Army. Egyptian or Palestinian. Electric Whiskers: the Italian general Bergonzoli captured at Beda Fomm after a long chase. (It. Barba Elettrica).

useless

and was applied, most

disasters: piastres,

Eye-tie: Italian,

noun or

adjective.

fartarsing around: 'swanning less idea

about the blue'

(q.v.)

but with even

of one's position.

Flap, The: the retreat

which ended

at

Alamein.

flimsy, a: a four-gallon tinplate petrol can.

Even when packed

in a

wooden crate it could not stand up to cross-country travel and much petrol was lost by leakage. Eighth Army's biggest headache until

enough

'jerricans' (q.v.)

flying dhobi: the

were available.

mysterious Arab

who would

camp, wherever it was and however provide a one-day laundry service.

far

turn

from

up

at every

civilisation, to

Gaberdine Swine, the: staff officers in Cairo, from the material of their uniforms, with a pun on Gadarene. Gippy tummy a form of dysentery very common in the desert. :

Gippy = Egyptian. going reeky, a (or going shufty, a) : reconnaissance to find out the

going (terrain) ahead. goonskin: battledress (from the Popeye cartoons). The temperature in the desert could fall from the hundreds to the thirties in a few hours and the dress of Jon's (Capt. W. J. P. Jones) 'Two Types' was not exaggerated. In winter the old hands wore golfing jackets, sheepskin coats, and thick scarves. Groppi's Light Horse: base troops in the Delta. Groppi was a state of

139

famous confectioner in Cairo. Sometimes 'Groppi's Hussars'. grounded: stranded for lack of petrol. Borrowed from the raf. Hellfire Pass: Halfaya Pass up the escarpment in the desert.

A

'natural' translation, but

caught under jerrican, a: a

was a very unpleasant place

it

to be

fire.

German

highly prized by 8th

pressed-steel

Army.

and welded

fuel or

Later, exact copies were

water can

made

in this

country retaining the name. (Gerry or Jerry = Germany can). Jock Column, a: a small offensive patrol of vehicles and guns named after General Jock Campbell vc who originated them and not infrequently led them. lavatorial bombing: the dropping of bombs from a great height by Italian aircraft

which preferred staying out of range of the aa guns

They 'pulled the plug'. Marble Arch: the Arco Philaenorum near El Agheila. Unlike such places as Knightsbridge and Piccadilly Circus (which were to accuracy.

originally nothing but

was

built

map

references) this really did exist

by Mussolini on the

site

of an ancient

Roman

and

shrine.

quick-shits, the: dysentery.

red devils: Italian noise but caused

hand grenades painted little damage.

red.

They made

a lot of

sand happy: odd or eccentric as a result of long service in the desert. Scruff, The: the Desert Air Force (a combination of scruffy and RAF). Eighth Army thought that men of the Desert Air Force

were dirtier and scruffier than themselves. A debatable point. Short Range Shepheard's Group, the: g.h.q. in Cairo (from Shepheard's hotel + a play on Long Range Desert Group). Slice of Cheese, the: the monument erected by Mussolini on the road west of Tobruk. It was wedge-shaped. spade, to go for a walk with a: to defecate in the open. sparrow fart, at: at first light (from Australian). Spitfires: ration cigarettes with

raf roundels on the packet.

A fair

description. Stalin's Barrel

Organ: a six-barrelled rocket launcher used by the

Germans but copied from the Russians. Coming through the the rockets made a truly 'trousers-filling' (terrifying) noise.

air

Stella: Egyptian beer, from a well-known brand of that name. Stones, The: a 20-mile belt of desert between Mechili and Msus

entirely covered with boulders; the in Libya.

sunshade, a: a superstructure

was 140

most uncomfortable

'going'

A classic piece of understatement.

on a tank to disguise 'ditched' before going into action.

it

as a truck.

It

swan about the blue, to: to drive aimlessly with more than a suspicion that one was lost, ('the blue' = the desert). Expressive of all journeys in the desert as few drivers knew exactly where they were at any given time. ticking: the ultimate in disgruntledness. Various degrees included 'brassed

off',

'browned

off'

and 'cheesed

off'.

thermos bomb, a: an Italian aircraft bomb which did not become 'armed' (ready to explode) until after it had landed. Then it would go off if moved or trodden on. It was shaped like a thermos flask. Tripoli Gallop, the: the race for Tripoli before 8th Army ran out of

and food.

petrol

Tunisgrad the position the Germans ultimately found themselves :

in in Tunisia. (Tunisian- Stalingrad.)

unstick, to: to extricate vehicles

from the sand.

eddy (morse letters V and E): the night signal given on the headlights (if working) or horn by a truck 'swanning' round a 'laager' but unable to find it. The reply was anything friendly. Wire, the: the frontier entanglements built by the Italians between Egypt and Libya. It kept out nothing but the gazelles. woggery, a: an Arab village. 'Wog' had long been the army name for Arab and for many other races (from 'Golliwog'?) Wolf of Tuscany, a: an Italian soldier. Derisory (one of the Italian vie

formations in the desert was the Wolves of Tuscany Division).

ARABIC, ITALIAN, HINDUSTANI, ETC. ackers: money. Originally piastres, then any money (from lingo of Egyptian beggars).

Still

the

used.

aiwa: yes (Ar.) aqua: water (It.) bahdin: later (Ar.) bint, a: a girl (Ar.). Still survives. bokra: tomorrow, in the sense of the Spanish 'maiiana'. burka, a: a brothel (from Sharia el Burka, a street in Cairo).

chai: tea (Ar.)

domani: tomorrow felooss:

money

(It.)

(Ar.)

gharry, a: an Egyptian carriage, hence any vehicle (from 'gari' cart,

=a

Hind.)

laager, a: a concentration area for tanks, etc. at night.

Also a verb.

(Cape Dutch, being a camp enclosed by wagons). iggri:

hurry up! (Ar.)

imshi: go

away!

(Ar.).

Perhaps the most commonly used 'Arabic'

word. 141

= "Won't it be grand when we can back

get

into civvies"

"The Two Types" of Jon (Captain W. J. P. Jones) were the classic cartoon figures

of the Desert War. They appeared chiefly

in

8th

Army News;

the suede boots, neck-

scarves, fly-whisk truly reflected the gear

of the desert army

mahleesh: indifferent. 'I'm mahleesh' = mungaree: food (It. mangiare) moya: water (Ar.)

mush: not, negative. As niente: nothing

in

'I

couldn't care

less'

(Ar.)

'mush quiess' = no good, bad. (Ar.)

(It.)

good capital 'Quiess kateer' = very well, the answer to the question 'enta quiess ?' = you well? (Ar.) saida (pro. sah-ee-da): Go with God! greeting much used by troops when addressing Arabs and among themselves. Known quiess:

!

!

A

to

Arabs

in

Egypt and parts of Libya but farther west

it

was taken

to be English. (Bedouin Ar.) scarper, to: to

move

quickly, to clear out.

alternative explanation:

(It.

scappare).

Cockney rhyming slang

An

- scarper

Scapa Flow = go. schwaiya: a

little,

as in 'stana schwaiya'

= wait a

shufty: look (Ar.) especially in the imperative. shufty-kite, a: a reconnaissance aircraft,

little.

(Ar.)

Hence:—

shufty-truck, a : a scout car,

door in the cab of some trucks through which a passenger could keep a lookout for enemy aircraft.

shufty-hatch, a: a trap

shuftiscope, a: a medical instrument used in cases of dysentery (also, later, a

probe used by Customs

officers for searching cars).

come here! (Ar.) German (It. Tedesco)

tala hinna:

Ted, a: a

wadi, a: a watercourse usually dry but sometimes a torrent. (Ar.) yimpkin: perhaps. Expressive of extreme scepticism. 'When Tunis falls we're all going home, yimpkin!' (Ar.) Acknowledgements to: A Dictionary of Forces' Slang: J9jl9 1945 by Eric Partridge, Wilfred Granville, and Frank Roberts. 1948. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by Eric Partridge, 6th edition, 1967.

142

Desert newspapers: a grassroots press

by Susan Raven morale-builder, an information centre, a reminder of home, pure a sympathetic echo of soldiers' complaints and as relaxation Eighth and simple, the army newspaper was invaluable. Without News and Crusader - and the remarkable man who wrote,

As a

Army

edited and printed both of

salvaged British,

them on a nightmare selection of Italian machines - the Desert War

German and

would have been very different for the fighting troops. In 1941, during the long, melancholy retreat to Egypt, a major disin charge of salvage in the Libyan desert was so staggered to general cover that half the troops did not know the name of their that he considered putting up notices along the road saying:

Think of a general - no, not Rommel, Ritchie.' "To say that the army was ill-informed is the

biggest under-

now. of." heard ever had "Rommel was the only general some of them Caswell had no chance to put his educational campaign into more practice, but he later became legal adviser to the man who, statement of

all

time," the major

- Eric Caswell - says

than anyone, was 8th Army's own information service. That man was Warwick Charlton, who from September 1941 edited and indeed printed the daily news-sheet Eighth Army News, and from late April 1942 brought out its much more ambitious stablemate Crusader, an eight-page illustrated weekly.

Not content with that, he was also Times and two companion civilian

responsible for the Tripoli papers, one in Italian and

Arabic. Later, in Italy, there were to be others. Actually, there were dozens of forces newspapers, from the divisional typed sheets like the 9th Australian's Tobruk Truth: The Dinkum Oil or the 59th's Pit Press to the properly printed paying propositions like Parade, published in Cairo from 1940

one

in

and based on Picture Post. But Eighth Army News and Crusader were created with the Desert Rats in mind. Charlton was a journalist in his early twenties who had joined the Royal Fusiliers from the Daily Sketch. One of the top desert p.r. officers, Geoffrey Keating, says he had more than a touch of genius, and there were plenty who agreed with him. to 1948

always did everything off his own bat, never waited for the rubber stamp of approval. This was part of his genius, but it constantly brought trouble on his head. At one point he was

He

143

court-martialled (and got off) for jumping feet

first into a power Monty's entourage and those who disapproved of the General's promotional activities. Eighth Army News and Crusader were both produced without permission. Charlton himself says it all goes back to Randolph Churchill, who was officer in charge of army publications in Cairo and editing World Press Review at the time. In fact, Charlton unerringly drew Churchill's attention to his gifts by producing, virtually single-handed, a Lilliput-stylQ magazine called Middle East while he was hanging around in Cairo, bored. "Only one issue appeared," says Charlton. "Randolph rang me up to say that I mustn't print another, but that privately he was delighted. Then he said there was a new army forming called the 8th Army. He said they wouldn't want me, but that I was necessary to them." The official brief was for Charlton to send material from the front line back to Cairo for a slip-page in the English-language Egyptian Mail, a 'Desert Page for the Desert Army'. It didn't really work. The troops for whom it was intended were the last to see it, if they saw it at all, by which time the news was stale. Warwick Charlton could do better than that. He began distributing a duplicated typed sheet, hastily prepared by himself from broadcasts and any news he could get. Then he had a stroke of luck. Military intelligence, retreating with the rest of the British army, abandoned their mobile printing unit. Charlton found it, appropriated it, and managed to wangle permission to hang on to it. He kept it until Monty recaptured Tripoli. Eighth Army News was now really in business. By June 1942 it was appearing every day except Sundays; by August it was appearing on Sundays as well. "I didn't have a staff - perhaps myself and one other. I used to borrow people. I discovered I could do a four-page daily with two or three people, but it was only a single sheet in North Africa, sometimes just a single page. It was distributed from the front line backwards, so that the further back you were the later you

struggle between

got

it.

By

Monty used

to deliver bundles himself

sometimes."

time he was also producing a weekly version. Like Eighth Army News, Crusader was bom out of wedlock. Charlton had gone to Cairo with General Robertson's permission to produce a dummy only; he returned with 60,000 copies (Keating this

remembers there was a terrific row about the cost to the army, it was too successful with the troops to kill).

but after one issue 144

Crusader was printed in Cairo throughout the African campaign, but Charlton edited it and set it up himself in the field. The issue of December 13 1942 carried this proud announcement: ^Eighth Army News thanks its readers for capturing, practically intact, the presses on which Die Oase, the German Afrika Korps newspaper, was printed. Your news is now being printed on one of these presses.' Charlton supplemented the initiative of his readers with his own. "When Winston Churchill came to see us at Tripoli we got the story of his visit into his hands as he left. The ink wasn't dry. Once, when the Italians' block-making machinery had been destroyed, I used enemy pictures; no one noticed."

Another time, much more disastrously, he used enemy maps of Europe which showed no Poland. General Anders, believing this to be a give-away of secret Big Three plans for post-war Poland, threatened to take his Polish troops out of the line. Charlton was summoned to h.q. to be sacked; only the most strenuous pleas from Monty's Chief of Staff, Francis de Guingand, and Geoffrey Keating saved him.. But since Charlton had not known why he had been summoned, his deputy used the guilty map again in the next Eighth Army News. That was one issue de Guingand and Keating kept away from Monty. By a happy chance Anders also missed it. The African issues o^ Eighth Army News, which concentrated on news of the day, have gone stale, but Crusader remains fascinating reading. Charlton's job was to put the army in the picture, and Crusader supplemented the day-to-day news with excellent background articles; maps and photographs of the desert campaign even historical snippets on the land the army was going through. Crusader kept men in touch with home news and, perhaps more important, the trivia of life in Britain football scores and the shortage of barmaids, show news and radio programmes, the rigours and comedies of rationing. There was always one or more photographs of children and nearly always a calendar view of Britain 'Outside the old forge at Stapleford Tawney' or The Lane that leads to the Moors'. Entertainment was not forgotten. Every issue carried Edgar Longman's 'Crusader Cutie', and one or more pin-ups of rising film actresses, as well as pictures of ats at war or sweethearts at home. There was a crossword, and cartoons, above all Robb's famous 'Little-known Units of the W.D.', and 'Jeff's' cod cookery column, Cookery Nook. ;

:

:

145

It was also a magnificent house magazine for 8th Army, a splendid platform for letters from the troops - or messages from the general. "We knew it was important to get our generals' personalities across," says Warwick Charlton, "but for instance I couldn't get anything out of Ritchie. When I went to his caravan

with the news that Tobruk had fallen, he just said 'very interest-

and went to sleep again. Then Monty came. He threw the men cigarettes. He used us intelligently to put himself across. One day I was there when he was wearing his tank beret for a ing'

photographer. Wonderful bit of modelling. Geoffrey Keating suggested waiting for another shell burst behind him to make a better picture, so he did.

But all those pictures went like a bomb. Even the Beatles would have been envious." Not that Charlton was ever Monty's man, or that any of his publications were exactly the voice of officialdom. He wrote a by-lined 'The Rat' which was outspoken and amusing.

column

"I got at everyone." He campaigned against brief visits of stars to the troops, singling out Gracie Fields for special scorn: it

roused a storm of protest at home. He attacked Winston Churchill when he came out against equal pay in the House of Commons, he complained when the Americans let too many Fascists go free, he openly criticised the British Government's policy in Jugoslavia, even getting Tito to write articles for him.

"Monty always supported me, he even allowed me to criticise He did tell me not to

the army, though other people objected.

General Patton after the soldier-slapping incident - but was another issue which was kept from Monty. Charlton's outspoken left-wing views began to be too much for some people. There were questions in the House of Commons, criticise

I

did." That

was a move to rationalise army newspapers. The War him a list of do's and dont's. "I promptly published them; they castrated the whole idea of what a paper should be. there

Office sent

My

supply of newsprint then began to dry up." Eventuhe was hurriedly promoted to major and sent home. Before he left, he and Eric Caswell removed the front-page banner A FREE PRESS FOR A FREE PEOPLE. Warwick Charlton sees his achievement as having given 8th official

ally

Army 'a grassroots press'. stodgy, because

''Stars

and Stripes,

for instance,

is

very

superimposed. If the American troops in Vietnam had my kind of paper you couldn't actually have the war. You're in real trouble if you have free papers." He looks back on his years as editor: "Bit of luck, really. Marvellous." 146

it's

Marlene a song by Derek Jewell

Lilli

:

for all armies

Army

Apart from weapons and men, 8th

also captured a song in

originally German, but Desert provided Western the Allied soldiers who took it over in the made it the only the impetus which gave it world-wide currency and Tipperary and Pack Up real competitor in the second world war to grown up Your Troubles of the first. Since then, many myths have

campaign against Rommel.

their

It

was

Marlene. Myths are unnecessary, for the unvarnished war. Here are the story is one of the most bizarre in music or in the woman who it, created real facts about the song, the men who

around

first

Lilli

sang

it.

Every three months a plump statement of account plops It through the door of Norbert Schultze's house in West Berlin. to accrue still which royalties in sums lists the not insubstantial him from Lilli Marlene {Lili Marleen in the original German) for which he wrote the music. were played, In the first quarter of 1967 recordings of the song according to the account, in Austria, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the U.S.A. (several hundred dollars worth of Spain, royahies) the u.a.r. (a mere 17 pfennigsworth), Holland, Sweden, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Belgium, Norway, France,

and a score of other years ago it Twenty-five countries. Lilli Marlene has lasted well. had a similar worldwide appeal, though Schultze was not at that withtime collecting the proceeds. Royalties from the song were various in Property Enemy of Custodians the held from him- by Switzerland, Peru,

West Germany,

Britain

years after the war too. Only in the last 15 has years has he received the full rewards. He estimates the song great a owes he and for this brought him in around £50,000 countries for

many

Korps and 8th Army. Before they stepped in, the odds against Lilli Marlene becoming 1939-45 virtually the only memorable song to emerge from the

deal to the

combined

offensive of the Afrika

war were ludicrously long. The poem which inspired

it

was

written,

and half-forgotten, by

When, 20 years later, the words were set by Norbert Schultze to the tune we know around which was by no means the first - the song was hawked

a

German

30

soldier called

German

The

first

Hans

publishers before

record of it

made

in

Leip, in 1917.

it

was unenthusiastically accepted.

1939 by Lale Andersen, daughter of 147

a shipwright,

bom

Bremerhaven, sold 700 copies. Then

it

was

burst out of obscurity, by accident, in 1941

it

was

in

forgotten.

Even when

it

nearly buried again. Goebbels hated

it

so

much he ordered one of

two master matrices to be destroyed the other, fortunately, in London. The authorities in Britain weren't very keen on the song either. It was, after all, German. And the woman in the song seemed to be - well, some sort of trollop, wasn't she? So they said, anyway, maybe for propaganda reasons. But at least they didn't ban it, unlike an American war music committee, which believed it would harm soldier morale. Equally oddly, this is a song whose sense demands that it be sung by a man. Yet the notable recorded versions among the many dozens made of it have always been by women - from Lale Andersen, through Anne Shelton, Vera Lynn and Marlene Dietrich, to Connie Francis. Nobody associates it with Bing Crosby or Hank Snow or the Band of the Coldstream Guards or a pianist called Honky van Tonk, all of whom also recorded it. Perhaps the biggest piece of luck which both Schultze and Lale Andersen had was that her record of Lili Marleen was lying with a few others in a cellar in Vienna during the summer of 1941. Radio stations for Axis propaganda were being set up, and in Belgrade a studio was prepared to beam programmes to the Panzer armee Afrika. The station had an announcer and a whole wad of news and propaganda - but no records. A soldier was sent to Vienna to find some. There have been many claimants to the role of the war's most inspired pop-picker. Not even Schultze knows for sure who did him the favour - but he thinks it was a corporal named Kistenmacher. Frankly, Kistenmacher hadn't much choice in that cellar. He brought back to Belgrade the handful of records he found. An officer played them over and liked the bugle-call intro which had been written for Lale Andersen's Lili by her accompanist. He thought it would be great as close-down music. Radio Belgrade played it first on August 18 1941. Within a week there were several thousand requests (demands, rather) from German soldiers in North Africa for it to be played again. Soon it became a fixture on Radio Belgrade at 9.55 p.m. - the the

;

was

last

record of tho night.

On

only three nights

in the

next three

and haunting air not heard - immediately following the smashing of the German armies at Stalingrad, when Goebbels banned entertainment of any sort. From 1941 to years

148

was

the soft

Lale, alias Lili: for her, a million fan letters within a single year.

1944 a dozen

German stations were playing it up to 30 times daily.

was soon singing it. Within a had become the second world war's classic. Eighth Army quickly picked it up in the Western Desert, partly from their radios, partly from Axis prisoners. It became a song for marching But, ironically, the whole world

year

to,

it

a song for sitting

down to - the property of virtually every From German soldiers, Lale Andersen

nation engaged in the war. received an estimated

1

,000,000 fan letters, usually addressed to

149

:

Marleen', during the first year or so after the song crept on to Ultimately, versions in many languages were written.

'Lili

the

air.

The first verse in the German version, roughly translated, went "In front of the barracks, before the heavy gate, there stood a lamp-post, and it still stands there. Let's hope we meet again and stand beneath the lamp as we used to do, Lili Marleen". The message was given an idiosyncratic twist by every nation

there

which provided

lyrics. For the Italians, one verse (undiscoverable began "Give me a rose, and press it to my heart". The French ("£"/ dans la nuit sombre Nos corps enlaces'') disguised nothing. The English went squarely down the middle. Underneath the lantern

in the original)

By the barrack gate. Darling I remember The way you used to wait: Twas there that you whispered tenderly. That you loved me. You'd always be

'

My Lilli of the lamplight My own Lilli Marlene. The man who wrote those words, Tommie Connor, is a who has had around 3000 songs published. I Saw Mummy

lyricist

It's My Mother's Birthday Today, Who's Taking You Home Tonightl and Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree were some of them. "L//// Marlene is far from my favourite song," he said in the summer of 1967. "Frankly, I took it as a work of propaganda. I was rung up and told that both the bbc and the Government were desperate for a lyric that would go to the hearts of people. There was plenty of controversy over the song, which had been sung out in the desert to amateurish lyrics which were, to put it

Kissing Santa Claus,

bluntly, dirty

and

risque.

I

knew about

couldn't use that. Wasn't

the

German

version, but

about a young prostitute who wanted to give as much for her country as the soldiers - so she gave her body. Can you imagine that in English-? "I had to write a song imagining the girl was a daughter, a mother, sister or sweetheart - a song that wouldn't offend the hearts and morals of people. Honestly, I was stumped - so I said I

a prayer,

made

and the

lyric

was

a great record of

it

it

all

finished in 25 minutes.

in Britain,

and

it

Anne

Shelton

sold a million."

Parodies of the song abounded in every language, as every soldier in the Western Desert well knew. These were, of course, 150

I

Norbert Schultze, composer of the Lilli Marlene music, and his wife Iva, perform the song at a German troop concert in 1941. In 1945 they were to sing it during a dinner attended by Montgomery.

and often bawdy. One desert version of Lili had a refrain which went "We're off to bomb Benghazi, we're off to bomb B.G.", but the best-known emerged after the Desert War when 8th Army, fighting a slow, foul and bitter war in Italy, heard a rumour that a woman politician back in England had referred to them as "D-Day Dodgers". They reacted like this:

the true ballads of the war, usually cynical in tone,

We're the D-Day Dodgers, out in Italy Always on the vino, always on the spree. Eighth Army scroungers and their tanks

We live in Rome, among the Yanks. We are the D-Day Dodgers, way out

in Italy.

There were far more sombre overtones to other parodies, however. In Denmark and Norway one ran "In front of the barracks, beside the heavy gate, there stands the lamp-post, but now it is too late. Who is it I see hanging there? A little man, with wayward hair. You know, Lih Marleen, you know, Lili Marleen". In all such parody versions, Lilli Marlene was the undoubted successor to Mademoiselle from Armentieres. But it was the straight version which, along with the carol. Silent Night, was heard along both front lines as the Germans and the men of 8th :

151

Army wearily

mud and snow of Italy was the same version which, some time

faced each other across the

at Christmas, 1943.

It

waafs near London were forbidden to sing within earshot of German pows - because it might lead to fraternisation. later,

4c

4:

He

4:

About 250 women like to think they were the original Lili Marleen, according to Hans Leip, the poet. He was a fusilier in the Kaiser's army, and while he was on an officers' course in Berlin he got involved with two girls. One was Lili (real name Betty, the greengrocer's daughter downstairs), the other Marleen, a doctor's daughter whom he picked up in an art gallery. Lili was really a friend's girl, but one night on his way to sentry duty she begged him "Stay, stay". With Marleen, a part-time nurse, he was much more involved. The same night of Lili's invitation, Leip was on guard duty. It was rainy, the street lamp glowed on the wet pavement. Then Marleen passed by, in feather boa. She said "Bye-bye, so long." Later, on an iron bed in the guard-room. Leip wrote his poem. "My thoughts clung anxiously to the forms of the two girls, as though one were not enough to engage fate to bring me safely home", he has said. "Their names could no longer be coupled together with an 'and'. They melted into one, not too shapely, as a single pleasure and pain."

The poem little

the

that Leip wrote

love-song", he calls

it.

is

a sad touching piece; "a private

Why

the general idea

woman was a prostitute (which

is

the least

versions of the genesis of the Lili original)

emerged that

of several fantastic

is

unclear.

Was

the

notion encouraged by Allied propagandists who instinctively disliked the notion of a German song becoming the rage? Leip is mystified that the idea should have taken root in England. "They were both very proper girls," he says. And his verses are a straightforward love story, about the sadness of parting in wartime. The last stanza is metaphysical in tone. The man sees himself 'dead ("in earthly depths, my dear") and returning to meet the girl under the lamp as a ghost. But in 1917 there was no literary mystery. Leip went to the front and never saw the girls again. The poem was, ultimately, published in an anthology of Leip's works. Sales were modest. Norbert Schultze first heard about Lili Marleen in 1938. He was a young composer of light music making his way in Berlin. He was working on his first movie score {Moroccan Romance). He had recently had his children's opera, Black Peter, performed.

152

A tenor in

the chorus asked Schultze to turn out some songs for jobs - and handed over the Leip book. Schultze set ten of the poems to music, but the tenor didn't hke Lili Marleen. "Today he is still angry not to have sung it," says Schultze, now a well-preserved sixtyish, with a shock of grey hair. So he gave it one day to Lale Andersen, whom he had known around his radio

and Munich for several years. "In those days she had a dreary, moaning voice. But she looked marvellous. Blond hair, white sweater, white teeth. I liked her." Lale Andersen didn't care much for Schultze's work either. She already had another composer's version of Lili Marleen in her repertoire. But she sang both versions in clubs to see how they went, and when audiences preferred the marching rhythm of Schultze's tune, she stuck to that. She sang it once on Radio Cologne in 1939, then put the song on record - the first she had ever made. But its sentiment was against the tide of feeling in the cabarets of Berlin

Hitler's

Germany. Much more

martial, nationalistic, rabble-

rousing airs were in demand. Lili Marleen sank out of sight.

But

if

his tune

was quickly

forgotten, then Schultze

was

not.

Unknown to him, he had been placed on the Nazi list of creative artists who would be excused military service. They were needed to hymn the achievements of the New Order at war. Towards the end of 1939 he received his first commission: the music for Baptism of Fire, a propaganda documentary about Poland. "For the first time," Schultze recalls, "I saw the horror of war. The bombing of Warsaw, the holes in the houses. I thought, my God, I feel sorry for these people. What can I write? The Air Ministry people said there would be a voice coming out of heaven saying 'For all this misery, all this horror, you will have to bear responsibility one day, Mr. Chamberlain.' I thought that only a solemn march like Eroica would do. So that's what I wrote." Schultze, richer by £1 50 for his

first

propaganda

score,

was now

launched on his wartime career. Soon Hitler wanted a song about the new enemy: Schultze turned out Bomben auf Engelland. In the next four years or so he wrote 25 war songs to order - "Songs of the Nation", as the Germans called them - including Panzer rollen in Afrika vor. And in 1941, when the demand was for a song to go with total war on Russia, Schultze turned out Fiihrer Befiehl - with Goebbel's help. Beside all this, the sudden success oi Lili Marleen in late 1941 seemed to the Nazi bosses, and even to Schultze, almost incidental. But it impressed Rommel enough for him to send an 153

laden with boxes of coffee and brandy, to see Schultze. Could he compose a song for Rommel? "I could scarcely refuse," says Schultze. The result, recorded by the Luftwaffe orchestra, was called Forward with Rommel. "But by the time I'd finished it, Rommel was going backwards, so it was never used." Schultze knew nothing about the resurgence of Lili Marleen until friends told him it was being played on Radio Belgrade. The first that Lale Andersen knew about it was when she began to receive letters addressed to "Lili Marleen, Radio Belgrade, Berlin, Germany". She had been singing, relatively unsensationally, in German clubs. Suddenly, everyone wanted her. And if the troops couldn't get her, they settled for Schultze and his wife Iva Vanya, the Bulgarian-born actress he married in 1941. "I made some money from the record," says Lale Andersen, "but my life didn't change much because of the war. I had the whole world before me, but I couldn't enjoy it." Her life, in fact, swiftly changed for the worse. Goebbels became very interested in the woman who meant so much to the Afrika Korps and who sang a song of which he disapproved strongly. He discovered that pre-war she had acted in plays directed by Rolf Liebermann, a Jew. She seemed still to be friendly with Liebermann, who was in Zurich. So though she sang for troops in Germany and other occupied countries, beady eyes were watching her. officer,

In 1942, she travelled to Italy to sing to

wounded German

and was unwise enough to write to Liebermann asking for the addresses of people who might help her get to Zurich, via Milan. The Gestapo intercepted the letter and she was brought back to Berlin. "They told me it was the end of my career, that I would be sent away to a camp. The night after that interview I thought, I'll finish the whole thing. I took all the sleeping pills I had. It was three weeks before I knew anything. I expected the Gestapo to finish me off. But a British broadcast saved me. "The BBC put out a report that I'd been taken to a concentration camp and died. Goebbels saw it as a golden opportunity to prove that the English radio told lies. He needed me alive. He soldiers

put out a broadcast that I wasn't dead, but that I'd been very ill, I couldn't sing again for a long time. They didn't send me to a camp, but I had to report to the Gestapo twice a week." Lale Andersen stayed in Berlin until 1944. The Gestapo seemed slowly to lose interest in her. One night she slipped away to Langeroog, a small island in the North Sea where her grandparents lived. There she remained until the war was nearly over. that

154

One of the early song-sheets t>/Lilli Marlene (left) and (right) Hans Leip, author of the original poem, as he was in 1915. He based the title on two girls he knew while serving the Kaiser. ,

For Lale Andersen, the end of the war meant the resumption of a career, which, though never world-shattering, was underwritten by her wartime fame. In 1945 the British Forces Network in Germany invited her to sing at the Musikhalle in Hamburg. There followed years of tours in Europe, America, Britain; a film based on the song which featured Lale in 1952; a steady flow of records, many of whose songs today sound strangely outdated. In the spring of 1967 Lale Andersen was back in Hamburg's Musikhalle, still slim and blonde, with a pink mink and dark glasses, in her fifties, on her final farewell tour. She sang, of course, Lili Marleen, in a sad sort of whine, after introducing

"my

it

an audience of the faithful, very middleaged, 500 in number in a hall that can seat 2000. The past seemed alive for them. After almost every number, someone rushed on

as

fateful song", to

stage to give her flowers.

"Five thousand, 10,000, 20,000 times I have sung it," she said "Who knows. I am never tired of it. The lyric is never routine. It is too strong and too good." For the other two people who created the most popular song in German history, peace was rather diff'erent. In 1967, Hans Leip was still a poet and novelist, living in Switzerland. In 1945 he lived near Innsbruck. One evening when Eisenhower was visiting U.S. troops there he asked to see Leip. At the time, Leip afterwards.

155

was sleeping - because, according to the locals, he had been going to bed before ten for years to avoid having to listen to Lili Marleen on Radio Belgrade. Eisenhower, Leip says, ordered that he was not to be disturbed, "because he's the only German who has given pleasure to the world during the war." Norbert Schultze and his wife were trapped in Berlin as the Russians blasted their way into it. Sometimes he hid in attics; at others he sang with his wife at Russian concerts; twice he was pushed into a detention camp. Finally they managed to move to the American Zone of Berlin, where they began entertaining at officers' clubs. In December, 1945, an officer invited them to come and sing Lili at a dinner which Montgomery was attending. "So Iva and I sang it. In French, German, English. I can still see him sitting there. Perhaps he thought of all that this song meant. But it seemed to make no impression on him. He clapped, got up, and went away. "Later in the evening a British war correspondent came up and asked me hadn't I written Bomben auf Engellandl Next day there were newspaper reports about how I had wormed my way in to sing in front of Montgomery. There were very anti, very says he

terrible stories. I was called up to the o.s.s. office and told I was on the black list. I was not to be allowed to perform". For two years Schultze worked as a labourer - on building sites, in gardens. In 1948 he moved to his hometown, Brunswick, and slowly picked up the threads of being a composer again. He was officially 'denazified', though even today Berlin papers call him a 'Nazi composer'. He is now modestly successful, writing operas, film and television music.

"I can't," said Schultze in 1967, "regret that

I

wrote

all

those

was the time that governed it, not me. Other people shot. I made songs. Our enemy in those days was England. What was I supposed to do? I composed with a clear conscience. "But I can understand how people feel today. They remember they had to sit in shelters and listen to my marches on the radio and now they say 'My God, that's the man who composed all

war songs.

It

those bloody marches'.

"They don't

sing Lili Marleen

When

anywhere much

in

Germany

Iva? Maybe 1951? It's all past. In Germany it's associated with the war, and it's all unpleasant. Maybe a pianist in a bar will play it around one in the morning when a group of old officers full of beer demand it. Then with a bad conscience he plays it - but he hates it." today.

156

.

.

.

did

we

last sing

it,

The

fringes of

conflict 'A disguise of ordure can't hide her beauty, succumbing in a cloud of disease, disease, apathy'

,

t'nn

on ^m-f

-'"•"

4

.•

pp^^l j«y^i^-.. ^^SjHf

i

V

Cairo back from the Blue by Olivia Manning :

Cairo was the eternal backcloth to the Desert War: the only place whose homelands seemed very far away.

to spend leave for troops

Olivia Manning,

wartime,

is

who has

a novelist, and a

written this portrait of the city in

woman -

but not a

'woman

novelist'

she is limited to the subjects women are conventionsupposed to write about. From her experiences in Rumania and Greece as the second world war erupted, she gained the background for her brilliant and panoramic Balkan Trilogy - The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, Friends and Heroes. From the Balkans, in the sense that

ally

she

moved on

to

Egypt

.

.

We

were evacuated from Greece on April 18 1941. It was the Greek Good Friday. We fasted during our three days' journey across the Mediterranean. We had been told to bring our own food but in Athens there was no food to bring. For weeks we had been living off wine and oranges, exaltation and the spring.

When we docked

we saw British soldiers on the quay and someone shouted down "Got anything to eat?" "To eat?" The soldiers were surprised by such a simple request. They went behind the cases of ammunition and came back with a branch of bananas. They made a game of throwing the bananas up in ones and twos but we jumped and scrambled in earnest. I at Alexandria,

caught one, a small one, green outside, pink inside and smelling of honey. I have never tasted another like it. The military vetted us, let us ashore with our bits of hand luggage and useless money, and took us to the canteen. We had eggs and bacon and tea so sweet and strong the flies could walk on it. Real food. It brought tears to our eyes. We had to sit all afternoon in the hot, tea-smelling canteen so we f-.)lded newspaper and killed time by killing flies. Egyptian flies: unnaturally large, greyish and greasy-looking.

When we

pushed

Left: for leaves in Cairo there was a popular routine. Rides in horsedrawn gharries; a visit to eat rich cakes at Groppi's or another

emporium; trips to see some of the hundreds of ancient Cairo monuments like the Pyramids or the Citadel, in whose shadow this group was pictured in 1942 ; and then, maybe, an open-air night club to watch the nonstop performance of the belly dancers. 159

them and carried them away. It was early evening before we were settled in the Cairo train and could look at Egypt. On one side of us was the Nile delta, on the other the desert. Though unlike any other place I had known, it was suffocatingly familiar. While other countries have an ethos never quite caught by the artist, Egypt is exactly like an old-fashioned colour supplement: The Land of the Pharaohs. The Finding of Moses. The evening was as oily rich as a Victorian oleograph. The weight of heat, the heaviness of the sandy air, made the delta fields seem static, yet they were full of life. Green as a jungle, lush with beans, -flax and barley, tobacco, cotton, vegetables, date palms and pomegranate trees, they formed a great flat plain cut up by irrigation channels. The peasants were leaving their work. The road beside the railway held a slow procession of men, women, children, buffaloes and, once, a camel. We crowded to look at the camel. As the sun sank, the green grew as deep as malachite and the sand glowed orange and burnt umber. We left the desert and swung into the heart of the delta. We came to a town that seemed to be made of mud, and so, in a way, it was. At Alexandria, where it rains, the bricks had to be baked, but here they were raw. A Greek girl gasped and said "My God, look at Tanta!" We had come from a city of marble and now we stared at the mud houses, the rickety balconies, hung over with washing, and the fat men, newly awakened from their siesta, who came out in striped pyjamas to stare and stretch and scratch. Could Cairo be like this? Beggar children thumped the windows of the train and screamed "Muskine' and their bare, dirty feet ran beside us as we drew out. At sunset the feathers of foliage and the domes and minarets of mosques became a flat fringe, black against the uproarious sky. A brief twilight, then dark came like a hand clap. We dragged in to Cairo. The train was stuffy but we expected fresh air outside. Instead, the platform was hotter than the train. the bodies off the table, streams of ants seized

A

sergeant led us through the seedy purlieus of the station to a requisitioned 'hotel'. Cairo was half blacked out. The street

had been painted blue, but there were no restrictions on houses and shops. White-robed men flickered, unfamiliar, lights

through the blue darkness. We could smell the heat of the spicy, flaccid Cairo night. Our 'hotel', when we found it, was a sort of doss house with 160

one dormitory for the men, another for the women, and a single cold shower to be shared by both. It had been a brothel until closed by some temporary upsurge of public morality. As soon as the British Embassy gave us an advance on salary, we asked for our bills and found it would have been cheaper had we gone to Shepheard's or the Semirimis.

Soon

the tattered exaltation that

had

the sea began to change to irritation.

trailed with us across

The Egyptian

brings his

philosophy of ma'alesh - 'What does it matter?' - to help him bear with the heat, dirt, flies and chicanery of Egypt. The European has nothing to keep him going but irritation. We wondered how soon we could get away. We could no more imagine living in Cairo than living at a railway junction. Egypt had become the final bolt-hole of European refugees. Among them were kings and princes, courtiers and the hangerson of royalty free governments and the hangers-on of government, and everyone who was committed to the Allied cause or imagined himself marked down by the Axis. Existing on credit, or the British Government, they moved in a cafe society of crowded emptiness, seething with rivalries, petty scandals, squabbles, hurt feelings and exhibitions of self-importance. Those who had no status had built up fantasies of past grandeur. They all believed that pre-war conditions would return intact but, for the moment, no one was happy, no one secure and no ;

one knew what would happen

When we

next.

we were on the edge of this group. Unnerved and confused, we could be certain of nothing. Prices first

arrived,

varied according to whether a customer spoke Arabic, Levantine

French or English. We needed light clothing and found, when we went to the shops, that English speakers came off" worst. The Egyptians and Levantines could beat the salesman down, but let us argue and the material would be thrown aside in contempt. The Germans were advancing in the desert and we could only hope to be evacuated again. We might be sent to Palestine. We might be sent home. But the advance came to a stop and in next to no time the British had retaken Solium. We would not be evacuated and civilians were not sent home. Here we were and here we had to stay.

A

friend offered to share his

from our

flat

with

us.

When we moved

bsLck-stTect pension to the spaciousness

we

left

In

Garden City

of Garden City,

the polyglot refugee crew and joined the British colony.

there really were gardens; there were

mango 161

:

and myrtles, citrus trees always in season and banana palms with purple blossom. Our room overhung the lawn of a rich businessman. We could look down between the dense, dark trees

mango

trees and see grass and we could hear the constant hiss of water drawn from the Nile. Sometimes we would wake up to the sound of reed music played by a snake charmer who was supposed to keep the garden free of snakes. Our safragi said the old man never failed to produce half a dozen snakes but they were always the same snakes, for he brought them with him. The dry herbal smell of foliage filled the flat like a potpourri. The gardens were green but not fresh; they were, in a way, embalmed. If the sprays failed during the day, the brutal sun at once sucked up the moisture and the grass turned to straw. Though the water preserved them, it was treacherous. Some European children who paddled on their Nile-soaked lawn contracted bilharzia, the disease that enervated the Egyptian peasants so they had not the spirit to revolt. The large Garden City houses, nondescript and gimcrack, might have been in any sub-tropical town, but looking from the window, one sometimes saw a camel being led past, its great soft feet plashing in the sandy dust. It could be a poor pack animal or it could be a Senussi with splendid tassel-hung haudaj, but whichever it was, it would carry its head high in protest against the insolence of the human race. ;

;

When the boulevards became familiar and the crowds sorted themselves out, we saw that, apart from the Egyptians, most of the men were British privates. They were always at a loose end, wandering about with little money to spend, looking much alike not tall, pink-faced from the sun, their hair and their khaki cotton shirts and shorts bleached to a similar sallow fawn. Suffering

from the

glare, the pestering flies, the beggars, the

salesmen who pushed things in their faces with cries of "Hi, George. Look'are, George", the yelling, the hooting, the screeching brakes, the clanging of tram-cars and howl of tramhorns, they seemed always to be in the bored querulous state that army men called 'browned off"'. They had been brought up to believe that the British had brought justice and civilisation to those who dwelt in darkness. Arriving in Egypt, they had expected to be treated as benefactors. Instead those who could make money out of them cheated them. The rest wanted only to street

see the

To 162

back of them.

the troops, the cinema

was a

Home from Home. The main

cinemas were air-conditioned - so efficiently that one usually caught a cold - and on the screen the men might get a glimpse of

Mum

or Dad, or a nice English girl, or a known someone like loved place. Then, at the end of the programme, there was Cairo's joke piece: the national anthem. The tune was by Verdi who,

commissioned to write an opera for the Cairo Opera House, had produced Aida. When the messenger brought payment and mentioned baksheesh, Verdi dashed off the vacuous tum-tumte-tum which, 70 years later, inspired some army poet to compose an indecent comment on Farouk's private life. It began - more

or

less:

We're poor black bastards but we do love our king. you can hear us all sing. The rest is unpublishable but was, I think, the only genuine piece of folk verse to come out of the Middle East campaign. As an inspiration, the second world war suffered from being a repeat performance. At troop concerts one heard only traditional army songs like The Quartermaster's Store and Bless 'em All (which, like the 'long purples' in Hamlet, had 'a grosser name'). This time there had been no one to proclaim "Now God be thanked who has matched us with His hour", but all over Cairo there were disgruntled soldiers singing war is over, Oh how happy I shall be" and "When this bringing an especial depth of feeling to the last two lines, which were "No more asking for a favour, no more pleading for a pass. You can tell the sergeant-major to stick his passes up his arse." War no longer gratified the fighting man. The Happy Warrior now was any autocratic nonentity who could get himself into a position of power. The creative force of the early '40s was nostalgia. Cairo's civilian poets, Terence Tiller, Larry Durrell and Bernard Spencer, had started a poetry magazine which chiefly expressed longing for times past, places lost and friends who would not come again. The civilian's position in war-time is not inspiriting. If he is not to be cowed by his irrelevance, he must make a lark of it. Perhaps that was why Cairo gave such an illusion of gaiety that and the fact that men on leave were avid for normal life and the amusements that go with it. Friends in from the front would arrive at one's door sticky with desert dust and ask for a bath as for an almost unheard-of luxury. Scrubbed and changed, they always wanted to know "What's on? Where can we go?" There was the Sporting Club with its crowded swimmingIn the flicks every evening

:

163

pool and the Anglo-Egyptian Union where we drank after sunset, sitting on a vast lawn that was sometimes flood-lit, sometimes white with moonlight. The g.h.q. officers went to the Turf Club but men on leave, looking for excitement at any price, preferred the open-air night clubs where belly dancers rolled their velvet flesh and drinks cost much too much. There was always a party

somewhere; usually the disorganised don't-forget-to-bring-abottle sort of party, full of emotional crises (the English rapidly

aplomb in the Cairo heat), gossip and boredom, with one of the poets putting his head in for a moment to say "If the wife starts looking for me, I've been here all night." But there were grander aff'airs, usually given within Embassy circles, lost their sexual

where one could meet the young men of the Long Range Desert Group or commandos returned from a raid behind the lines or some English politician flown out above gun range or the fat playboy who treated the throne of Egypt as a day-bed. The rich, English and Egyptian, would play till dawn at the chemmy table. One night a single black chip was mislaid and, asked to help look for it, we unimportant juniors were awed to learn it was worth £5.

The social atmosphere was one of ostensible equality. People coming from war-time England had brought the idea that we were 'all in it together'. If this theory did not work out in fact, at least the officers, civilians and women were all in it together. The other ranks were in it at a different level unless they happened to be poets or intellectuals. The very grand - senior diplomats, cabinet ministers and the like - conformed to the new Christian name convention and were free with their smiles, but managed, in spite

of everything, to keep within the margins of privilege.

None of the army men cared to admit to a title. Young dukes and earls preferred to be known as, say, Bertie Lanarkshire or Peter Lisdoonvama. Levantine hostesses were

distressed

by

this

reversal of nature but English hostesses, united in delicious

understanding, would say how really nice Bertie and Peter were in spite of their aristocratic disadvantages. It was a great time for girls. They had their own equality. Not only were the poor on a level with the rich but, demand being far in excess of supply, the plain were as sought after as the pretty. In the face of this adulation, most of them remained balanced and charming, but some, alas, were quite overthrown. One could

hear distressingly ugly girls become as tiresome as prima donnas, while some were so contemptuous of the competing males that they made a habit of referring to men as 'meal tickets'. 164

RAF corporal drinks tea with cobbler in a bazaar - another of the great Cairo magnets of the tourist round for troops on leave. Welfare workers were concerned for the other ranks at a disadvantage against officers who not only had rank and money but uniforms designed to enhance, rather than detract from, their looks. The Egyptians took advantage of this situation, as of most others, and small boys had learnt enough English to say "Hi, George, you wan'a bint? My sister very nice, very clean. All pink inside like white lady." And there was always the Burka, the notorious red light district which the Australians had burnt down in the first war. Second war Australians were always saying "Me old dad burnt down the Burka, an' Oi'm goin' to bum down the Burka," but the Burka survived, a seedy area full of ancient ladies in gay clothing who leaned out of windows to beckon in the frustrated soldiery.

During the great days of Empire, it was believed that no European - certainly no female European - should be asked to 165

bear the heat of a Cairo summer. The embassies moved lock, stock and barrel to Alexandria where the sea breeze was cool and an occasional shower laid the dust. This move came to a stop in wartime. The American Embassy, where I worked as press officer, not only stayed in Cairo but kept to winter hours, return-

work at 2 p.m. when the sky was molten brass and nothing moved except the crested hoopoes that played through the rainbowed water sprays on the Embassy lawn. We would wake each morning to light that splintered and dazzled in through every crack in the blinds. The city was already muffled with heat and the heat grew until it pressed like a physical force upon the head. Walking in the downpour ing to

of sun, one could smell one's hair frying. All the waste lots of the city gave out a curious odour, a sweetish distillation of urine, ordure and vegetable decay, that, were I to smell it again, I would recognise at once as the smell of Cairo. At midday there was a rush to get home for the siesta. The trams were so packed that an overflow clung about the doors like swarming bees and several men always fell off as the vehicle took comers at speed. Workmen would lie against house walls and sleep with their arms over their eyes. Everyone - except the Americans and me - went to bed in the afternoons and awoke to a sense of nightmare and a taste like iron in the mouth. The evening was reward for the day. The sunset was never less than dramatic and from Garden City, looking across the sound between the islands of Roda and Gezira, we could see the pyramids, small triangles, black against the gold and crimson of the sky. When the sun was setting and twilight falling grey-green in the streets, the Egyptians would come out on to their balconies, or put chairs on the pavements, or just

sit

down on

the stone to

eat a meal that might be nothing but a small saucer of beans.

This was the time to walk by the Nile or to take a drive in a horse-drawn gharry. The boys who made jasmin necklaces came out to sell them and would jump on the gharry step and swing the heavily scented flowerets into one's face. As the fog of twilight settled over the broad, grey river, the garden island of Gezira seemed to float upon it like a basket of ferns. Evening began with a single star; then the sky, changing from turquoise to a pure and brilliant indigo, became crowded with stars. Darkness revivified the city. People threw open their windows, not because the night was cool but because it was less hot than the day. Buildings, shabby and inconspicuous in sun166

light,

became, with

all

their

windows open and

alight, full

of

mysterious life. For those who had no invitation to a party, there was always Groppi's. Groppi's was a continuous party. The main door with its bead curtain led in to the lusciously sweet atmosphere

of the confectionery; beyond was the famous Garden. The Garden, a sanded area planted with tables, chairs and fringed umbrellas, was enclosed by the walls of neighbouring houses. Creepers were trained against the walls and their greenery was as much as one could expect in a garden so far from the river. Waiters, each with a fez and a red sash round his white galabiah, pushed round trolley-loads of cakes. At night, when the umbrellas came down, strings of coloured bulbs lit up and all around, intimate and glowing, were windows from which people looked down on the animation below. At first these windows, all the uncovered windows of Cairo, filled me with terror. How could the enemy resist such a brilliant target? An air-force pilot explained that a black-out, even if it could be enforced, would be no protection because the Nile, which shone in the moonlight like a river of silver neon, marked the position of Cairo. But the

come and as time passed, my nerves were restored. So months later, when the German radio kept warning us that we would be bombed, I knew the answer to air-raids. It was raiders did not

ma'alesh.

There was always excitement in Groppi's Garden. The women used to meet there and the air was full of their chatter while British officers, hungry for female companionship, went searching among the tables. It was a place for incipient romance, assignations, gossip and gaiety. Shepheard's was not. At Shepheard's the officers, who had to sleep two or three to a room, drank in surroundings as ponderous as a Pall Mall club. One night the vestibule was invaded by two Australian privates wearing potted palms on their heads. The civilians watched with delight as the Australians weaved about, stumbling against chairs and tripping over feet in suede desert boots, but the owners of the feet saw, heard and felt nothing. They stared at each other or at newspapers, knowing that no British officer in his senses would try and discipline an Australian drunk. These may have been the same Australians that I once saw boating in a bath during a rain storm. Rain comes once a year to Cairo and as there is no main drainage, streets are flooded. Every middle-class Moslem caught out of doors on this dire fashionable Levantine

167

occasion protects his fez by covering

it

with a pocket hand-

kerchief.

Shepheard's used to stand back from Esbekiah Square, on the site of the Mameluke palace which housed Napoleon during his Egyptian venture. The once splendid square had become raffish with pox doctors and cheap dentists who hung out bloodied ply-wood teeth, and it was a noisy centre for tram-cars. The tourists' bazaar, Al Muski, ran from it and to the east was the Oriental city with all its mosques, bazaars and flat-roofed houses washing like a curdled, cream-coloured sea against the Mokattam hills. Saladin's Citadel stood on the hills, but trying to see it through the dazzling, dusty light, one usually saw nothing but Mohammed Ali's alabaster mosque, uniquely white in a city that seemed to be made of sand.

Under the cinderous hills was the Mameluke cemetery, the City of the Dead. Napoleon had stopped the Cairene habit of burying the dead immediately outside the family house, so the houses around the beautiful, paternal Mameluke tombs. When taking one of their number for burial, the relatives also took food and bedding so they could richer families

had

built other

with the departed spirit until it had accustomed itself to the The City of the Dead was a place to visit at full moon when the white, diamond-sharp light picked out the traceries of mosques and tombs. Driving over the silent sand, live

strangeness of death.

we would houses.

lamps flickering up from the floors of occupied would wonder how the dead were disposed and at

see oil

We

times caught a whiff" of mortality that brought the imagination to

a standstill.

Disease - there was every had a medieval virulence; and a friend with whom one drank at supper time might be dead and buried before next day's breakfast. Out in the battle area the dead were not buried so quickly. When someone said the desert was beautiful, a man on leave replied "Not where we are. It's full of booby traps and it stinks." The new year of 1942 was the most dismal of the war. The to and fro of Libyan hostilities, inconclusive and exhausting, had taken the heart out of 'the men. When the Germans re-entered Benghazi, the army began to lose faith in its leaders and to look elsewhere for heroes. Rommel was favourite, but there were those who preferred Stalin and Timoshenko. One of the army poets brought out Maurice Craig's song about Uncle Joe who

Death could come rapidly

sort of disease

168

known

to

in Egypt.

man

-

Tahia Carioca (left) was wartime Cairo's top belly dancer (see Page 174). At service clubs, entertainment was more decorous. Lady Lampson, British Ambassador's wife (right), takes tea with

South Africans at

their

own

club one afternoon in

May

1942.

showed himself imperturbable by smoking a pipe and wearing a New verses were constantly added and sung to

taxi-driver's cap.

the tune of the Lincolnshire Poacher

To say that Hitler can't be beat is just a lot of cock. For Marshal Timoshenko's boys are pissing through von Bock. The Fiihrer makes the bloomers and his marshals take the rap, But Joe he smokes his pipe and wears a taxi-driver' s cap. Bad as things were at that time, most of us believed we would somehow scrape through to victory; but the Egyptians saw no reason to think so. The war was not their war we had dragged them in to it and now we looked like losing it. Farouk began to show contempt for old nanny Britain. Stories went round of Sir Miles Lampson, the British Ambassador, in full fig, waiting hour after hour in a palace ante-room while the king amused himself with his latest odalisque. Farouk decided to call a government that would seem, when the time came, to have been pro-German all along, and the ambassador felt he had had enough. We awoke one morning to hear how British tanks, with Lampson - later Lord Killearn - in one of them, had smashed through the gates of Abdin palace and trained their guns on the palace windows. Farouk caved in at once. He agreed to place Nahas at the head :

169

of a government that would actively collaborate with the Allies The British colony was impressed and talked about great consuls of the past, but the Egyptians resented Lampson's high-handed action and there are those who believe that the night's work was the beginning of the end not only for Farouk but for British influence in Egypt. Winter in Cairo was delicious. In the cool early morning a delicate mist would hang over the riverside gardens and midday was as mild as an English June. In Garden City, amid all the perpetual foliage, a little bare tree put out white blossom and I remembered the spring. There was no more spring than that, but by then we had become like the trees, conditioned to a climate where it was always summer. The cool season was short. Soon the heat flooded back. Tobruk fell and in next to no time the Germans were over the frontier again. This time they were not stopped at Solium or even at Mersa Matruh. As the enemy advanced, news from the against the Axis.

desert

became confused and

uncertain.

day, were denied the next so, at

first,

Rumours, spread one

the English colony felt

little

more than unease. The realisation

that the situation was serious came very husband had been appointed director of the Palestine Broadcasting Service and we were arranging to move

suddenly.

My

to Jerusalem. On the evening before our departure, as we walked by the Nile with a friend from the Embassy, some pieces of charred paper came trundling towards us on the breeze. One piece was a half-sheet, typed, burnt only at the edge, and our friend, with a look of concern, picked it up and pushed it into his pocket. The twilight was full of the smell of bonfires. Papers were

being burnt not only at the Embassy but at g.h.q. Next day everyone knew that the Germans were less than 80 miles from Alexandria; everyone, that is, except an old Englishwoman, a tiny, dried-up twig of a woman, who had lived for years in Egypt, keeping body and soul together by selling

oddments of haberdashery. She would come one day a week to the flat and lay out her tape, cottons, needles and pins, then sit down and wait first for luncheon, then for tea. While we were getting ready to leave, she arrived and arranged her little shop, unaware that all the other English residents of Cairo were in a nervous anxiety. in Cairo that became known as the Flap did not long. There was acute tension on our last day but we saw

state of

The period last

170

sign of panic. We heard there was a run on the banks and it probable that, as rumoured, the Alexandrine businessmen were organising a committee of welcome for Rommel (they were, after all, on no side but their own). Some people may have gone round bargaining for a car or aircraft to take them to safety, but our own friends kept up a brave show of equanimity. We were all telling each other that things were probably not as bad as they

no is

seemed. There was so little apparent agitation among the British that we were amazed to find uproar when we reached the station. The train, on which we had expected to travel in style, for the first time in our lives, was packed with every sort of European refugee. They had learnt from experience that survivors were those who got away first. Later someone told us that next day trains had left so crowded that people were sitting on the carriage roofs. The Egyptian porters entered into the excitement, slinging the luggage

aboard with roars of laughter and shouts of "Germans coming, eh? You go. Germans come." Over the radio the Germans had been making all sorts of promises to the Egyptians and Egyptians live largely on promises.

They say ''Bokra fil mish-mish''* laughing, yet somehow believing it. They had been ruled by outsiders for two thousand years and were still ready to believe that a new master could mean a good time for all. And now the old master was on the run. Speeding us away, they shouted their derisive amusement. They ,

could have behaved a great deal worse.

Most of our friends stayed where they were. One told us that Alexandria they had been able to hear the bombardment which preceded Auchinleck's counter-offensive. As the weeks passed and the Germans got no further than Alamein, the British relaxed. The Egyptians ceased to expect some radical and delightful change. Those who had started to learn German gave up and went back to the British Institute, saying, as they always said,

in

ma'alesh. It was a long time before any of us had much idea what happened during the July struggles along the Alamein line. We know now that when Montgomery's battle began in October the Germans were low both in supplies and morale. The British retook Tobruk and soon it was General Montgomery's boys who were pissing through Rommel. They saw that they, too, could have victories and Rommel lost his hero image among the

British troops.

*" Tomorrow there'll be apricots." 171

Though the end was still far away, I think the tenor of the war changed from that time. When we went to Cairo on leave, Cairo, too, had changed. The old bug-ridden Kasr-el-Nil Barracks still housed British troops but most of the men had been given weapons and now were advancing westwards into Libya, into Tripoli, into Tunisia. With the fighting men gone, Cairo was left with its armchair brigade preoccupied, as ever, with the problem of how this officer or that could climb to the rank of lieutenant-colonel by fitting another major or captain into his triangle of support.

Twelve months later and even the old familiar faces at g.h.q. were moving off to Bardia. The year after, we began to talk of going home - an unnerving possibility, for Home now seemed remote and strange to us. An English hostess said "You do know Lord Lisdoonvama, don't you?" and I knew we were

no longer

When

'all

in

it

together'.

was no doubt about who would win the war, the Egyptian Government brought its treasures up from the cellar and unlocked the doors of the Museum. In the central hall were displayed the splendours of Tutankhamen's tomb. There were the simple personal possessions of the young king. The sandals. The ivory walking-sticks. Flower wreaths worked in gold to the delicacy of a skeleton leaf. Furniture of ivory and gold. The immense golden sarcophagus. The hall glowed with gold as the English soldiers wandered round and we wandered round with them. The display was a gift for us. A farewell gift, I think. there

Right: inside the cafe of Hag Fahmy Ali el Feishawy, which scores of thousands of Allied troops visited during the war. It lies in the heart of Khan el Khalily - the big Cairo bazaar - and is around 250 years old. The decor looks almost as ancient. Open 24 hours a day, it is a very lively spot, full of mirrors, ornate woodwork, dust and old postcards and pictures going back to the last century. Tea, the standard drink here, is taken from glasses which come containing hot water; the custom is to tip

out the water on to the brass table before pouring in the tea.

Hag

Feishawy (see Page 174) is in his 70s and likely to be a millionaire. He keeps dusty scrapbooks containing signatures of wartime 8th Army clients and in the last 25 years has had a constant stream of them returning. Frau Rommel visited him in 1953; Hag el Feishawy presented her with an inlaid brass tray. 172

el

\

-i-v

ml^%

War

leaves

its

marks 25 years

relics like these rotting boots,

The Western Desert is full of found on the Miteiriya Ridge.

on.

There are also millions of mines, which have been killing or at the rate of one accident a day since the Desert

maiming Arabs

War

ended. This victim (top

eye,

came carrying a German

left),

who

lost right

forearm and draw

jerrican, vintage 1942, to

water near Tel el Aqqaqir in early 1967. In Cairo, too, are reminders of war. Hag el Feishawy still sits outside his cafe welcoming customers {see Page 173), while Tahia Carioca (bottom left) is still in show-business-in acting now, though, not in belly-dancing, whose leading modern exponent is Nahed Sabry (bottom right). Carioca holds the inscribed shooting stick presented to her by Allied soldiers in 1942 one gift among hundreds.

—

175

'

.J^'

,mv-

n^A"

Top: The Battle of Egypt 1942, Bombing Up by Anthony Gross. The shark'' s head motif was first seen in the desert in 1941, painted on to a squadron of Tomahawks by airmen in the unit. Bottom: On the Road to Tripoli by Edward Ardizzone. It was painted after the Alamein battle. Today Ardizzone recalls: " You were passing scenes like this all the time. Little burial parties, burying Germans or Italians as well as our own side. I think that I came across this scene at Homs, near Leptis Magna.''''

176

The canvases of war by Susan Raven Correspondents and photographers were not the only ones recording tiie war. There were also artists in the desert, recreating its scenes with their special insight. Susan Raven, who writes about them here, is chief researcher of The Sunday Times Magazine of London. She has finished a book on the Romans in North Africa,

due out

in 1968.

In the spring of 1939 a high-ranking civil servant in the Board of Education went to see the Director of the National Gallery. Between them they hatched up a scheme - partly inspired by a similar one during the first world war - for the Government to

make

use of artists during the

When war broke out,

E.

war

that

was coming.

M. O'Rorke Dickey and

Sir

Kenneth

Clark went to the Ministry of Information with their idea, and in November got a government grant of £10,000 - "not bad, after three months of war," says Mr. Dickey truthfully - and the War Artists' Advisory Committee was in business. Kenneth Clark was chairman, E. M. O'Rorke Dickey was secretary, and their fellow members were Muirhead Bone (a war artist in both wars), three heads of art colleges, and representatives of the War Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the Home Office, who tackled all the red tape and issued the necessary permits, even handing out secret advance information to enable artists to be where the

would be. They also wrote

action

commanding officers, asking them to work of any artists under their command. Mr Dickey says they got some of their best artists that way. The committee commissioned Henry Moore's famous tubeshelter drawings, John Piper's bomb damage paintings, and let

to

all

the committee see the

Stanley Spencer's series of shipbuilders on the Clyde, to give only

hundred or so artists who were asked to do works or were sent on special assignments. A couple of hundred more sold their work to the committee by submitting it independently. But there were also 30 artists employed on a fullthree examples of the

specific

time salary for a period usually of several years. Nine, including Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and Eric Kennington, were paid for out of the committee's Treasury grant; the remainder were actually in the forces as honorary officers, and paid by the various Services.

civilians,

177

Three war artists who were honorary Army captains in Egypt and the Western Desert in 1942 were Edward Ardizzone, Edward Bawden and Anthony Gross. At the beginning of the war, Ardizzone had been "a miserable second lieutenant on a gun site, at Dartford

I

think,

when a wonderful telegram

arrived, abso-

had a lot of little exhibitions before the war. It must have been Sir Kenneth who put me up for it." After some weeks in France, and a year or so in Britain, he was sent out to Cairo. He was with 8th Army throughout Montgomery's campaign and went with it to Sicily and Italy. He enjoyed it. "Desert battles aren't terribly pictorial, but Alamein was the most exciting thing in the world, because you knew it was won. I was with the Rifle Brigade, but I'll never forget the 10th Armoured Division going by and General Gatehouse saying, when I asked if I could go forward, 'The desert is yours'. Everybody had broad grins on their faces, and everywhere there were great crowds of prisoners. "I was attached to Public Relations, but I never lived with them. I messed mostly with Geoffrey Keating and the Army Film Unit; they were in the field all the time. Monty always used to lutely out of the blue. I'd

refer to

me

The greatest everyone knew you. And

as Geoffrey Keating's Italian friend.

thing about being an oddity was that no one resented you. "I would stay so many weeks in a forward position, making notes and sketches in little books, and then retire to Cairo, or even just a tent, with my drawing board. Then I'd roll up the results in a shell case, and hand them to the p.r. people to send off home. "You could do your own jobs, you were free as air. Quite frankly if I'd disappeared for six months no one would have noticed. You fended for yourself At Cairo I was told they could only land me in Sicily on D-Day plus 23. But dear friends in the

50th Division said Ted, come along with us, so I did. Geoffrey Keating and I took Taormina. I waved my stick, and an Italian platoon with machine guns all surrendered. We ordered a champagne lunch and sent a message to the colonel, and he and hundreds of soldiers in the barracks surrendered. He and his

ADC joined us

at table.

I

never carried a gun.

A

revolver

is

only

for intimidating civilians."

Several hundred watercolour sketches both of soldiers and

of which the majority are

civilians

were the

Imperial

War Museum. Edward Bawden was

178

result,

now

in the

less fortunate:

a

Edward Bawden: Benghazi. Sunken

shipping

Ingram: Breaking through the October 1942.

last oj the

A.

J.

in the

harbour.

German

minefields at El Alamein,

of his paintings were blown up, or sunk, or lost. He overlapped with Ardizzone, but he'd been with the army during the retreat to the Egyptian frontier. "I was in Benghazi with Auchinleck. I never met him, I never met any generals. The troops were very friendly, especially corporals and sergeants. The only rank I didn't get on with were second lieutenants. Colonels were often delightfully eccentric. I remember once when enemy aircraft were reported and turned out to be a flock of birds, the colonel was delighted that he could identify them. Colonels were often bird-watchers. lot

briefly

'T carried

all

my

from time to time Desert.

Our

supplies in a shell case, and replenished

in Cairo.

tents

But

I

lost all

were pitched by the

them

my paints in the Western sea,

and one high

tide

flooded us out.

"The P.R. department fixed all my transport, but otherwise I was a free agent. No one said you must draw this, you must draw that. I didn't make notes, I did everything on the spot, so I wasn't in the front line. You can't draw under fire. And there were so

many big bangs,

I didn't like them. I did a lot of hospital drawings Cairo and at advanced dressing stations. One shouldn't say so, but a lot of them were rather good. "I was also in the Sudan and Abyssinia, following 'Tiger Tim' the Emperor. I walked most of the way from Rosares to Addis Ababa. That was very enjoyable, 50 miles a day. Later I went to live with the marsh Arabs in Iraq; and I went across Arabia on an anti-locust expedition. It was a nice way to spend a war, as long

in

as everything went

all

right."

Anthony Gross enjoyed his war too. 'Tt was always interesting. My first job was the shelling of Dover, then I was all over the Middle East including Egypt until Alamein, and then India. The you went, the nicer everybody became. I just up my easel and did drawings and watercolours on the spot. Everybody was absolutely delighted to be taken notice of, so happy it was unbelievable. The only people who didn't like it were the fighter pilots. It was a bad time for them because their planes weren't, then, as good as the enemy's. They thought I was putting the evil eye on them. I did hospital drawings too, but most of them were censored at the time because they would have demoralised people at home. I don't know where they are now." He, too, produced several hundred drawings, usually pen and wash. Most, as in the cases of Ardizzone and Bawden, have been inherited by the Imperial War Museum, the remainder distrifurther forward set

180

Edward Ardizzone : Troops

in the

Burka.

museums and galleries elsewhere in Britain and the old Commonwealth. The willing and generous help given not only by the Army, but by the Navy and the raf also, to their resident artists was an encouraging instance of the survival of humane values in the buted to

stress

of war.

It

enabled the

artists

"to go on painting with a clear

conscience", in Sir Kenneth's words, and to keep art

itself alive

were closing. To do this had been one of the committee's primary aims. The work of war artists could not replace that of the photographers. Yet although, in Bawden's words, they too were "observers - journalists of a kind", they were usually looking at different things, or abstracting, with an artist's eye, clarity from confusion. Their work records the unregarded human detail, the half-forgotten incident, the flavour of the time and place. at a time

when museums and

galleries

181

Farouk and the night of shame by Barrie St. Clair McBride At the beginning of 1942, Egypt was shared by

all

in the unenviable position

countries over which opposing armies do battle. She

was thoroughly distrusted. Loyalties, in government and among the people, were divided; with Rommel in the ascendant. King Farouk's support for Britain was open to question. This was the background as Britain^s Ambassador to Cairo marched into the Royal Palace and demanded the installation of a new, more proAllied prime minister. Was the Ambassador's action vital to Britain's interests in the Desert War, as it was then hailed? Or was it a high-handed piece of gunpoint diplomacy, lighting the slow fuse which was to explode in Nasser's Egyptian revolution and the seizure of the Suez Canal? Barrie McBride, who sets out the facts here, is the author of a new biography, Farouk of Egypt.

The climax came on February 4 1942. On that day Sir Miles Lampson, British Ambassador in Cairo, drove angrily to the Abdin Palace. There he demanded an audience with King Farouk and complained that propaganda for the Axis was still rife in

Egypt, that pro-Axis elements continued to act freely, that

students were shouting encouragement to

He

Rommel in

the streets.

King should summon Nahas Pasha, leader of the nationalist Wafd Party which was supported by majority public opinion, to lead the Government. The confrontation had been long threatened. If Britain's position, in occupation of an increasingly hostile country, was insisted that the

then that of Farouk, steering through the diplomatic rapids with British occupation on one side and - at the time -

difficult,

probable German conquest plus Italian occupation on the other, was well-nigh impossible. The British, moreover, had not made things easy, even for their Egyptian sympathisers. By 1941 Nahas Pasha, who had signed the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in 1936, was indignant that it seemed to favour Britain far more than Egypt. British occupation of Egypt was painfully obvious to the Egyptians, g.h.q. was in Cairo. Wavell and Auchinleck wanted

move it into the desert west of the Pyramids, but the priorities of war never allowed the time. The physical expression of British military occupation remained in Cairo in a house named Grey to

182

Pillars,

known

to those

as "the grey pillars of

who

appreciated the ill-feeling

it

caused

unwisdom".

Shepheard's Hotel - g.h.q.

Napoleon's troops - was Cairo for officers who sumtheir gin adams, SBs (suffering bastards) and limoons, waiting an interminable time for them to come. "Wait till he gets to Shepheard's," they said of Rommel. "That will hold him up." To the British soldier, the Egyptians were 'wily oriental gentlemen'; for short 'wogs'. The words of an 8th Army poet. site for

now the unofficial headquarters moned the suffragi and ordered

in

J. Broome, summed up the Howling hell of every breed.

Private

feeling

Every colour, every creed. Indigo Nubian, Swarthy Greek, Overall that garlic reek Shouting vendors seeking trade Beggars sleeping in the shade; Clanging tram

Raucous horn "Backsheesh!" from the newly born General Neguib, later the figurehead in the 1952 revolution which overthrew Farouk, wrote "Of no country did the British demand more than they did of Egypt during the war, and of no country's interests were they less considerate. Their troops marched through the streets of Cairo singing obscene songs about our King, a man few of us admired but who, nevertheless, was as much of a national symbol as our flag. Farouk was never so popular as when he was being insulted by British troops." In March 1941 Sir Anthony Eden, as Foreign Minister, was in Cairo for conferences with British officers. Smuts, and the Egyptians. Churchill sent him a telegram that week: "While you are there on the spot you should deal faithfully with the Egyptian Prime Minister, Farouk, and any one else about our security .

.

.

:

requirements.

It is intolerable that the Rumanian Legation should become a nest of Hun spies or that the Canal Zone should be infested by enemy agents."

May

1941 the Germans invaded Russia. The Egyptians looked both ways and saw an Axis nutcracker which would squeeze them from the west and from the east. Until this time the Egyptians seem to have supported an Allied victory, but with the advent of the nutcracker there were second thoughts. FifthIn

183

column whispers sowed suspicion between Farouk and the British. To remain loyal to Britain and to honour the AngloEgyptian Treaty demanded much of the King. He must be popular with the people in order to continue as monarch. And he could not achieve by showing too much allegiance to the British. He could scarcely, however, be hostile to the occupying power - and in case that power became the Italians, as seemed imminent, he must also show sympathy to the Axis cause. It this

was, to say the

least, tricky.

Lord Chandos, then Oliver Lyttelton, British Secretary of State for Middle East Affairs, wrote of this period "The King kept himself well informed on politics and the movement of opinion, and was shrewder and more serious than is usually supposed. I should judge that he was far from sure that we would win and that he kept open some line of retreat to Mussolini and the Axis." It was just this shrewdness, and sympathy for the Axis cause (the Palace radio was in touch with Rome - British intelligence later recruited the operator to revise messages in a manner best :

to serve the Allies) that

concerned the British early in 1942. students in the streets of Cairo were

Rommel was advancing and shouting

Maher"

"We

are

Rommel's

soldiers"

and "Long

live

Ali

who had been and Rome, a man

being an Prime Minister in 1940, with friends in Berlin who was encouraging the King to maintain diplomatic relations - the latter

ambitious politician

with Italy despite British objections.

Egyptian governments came and went with that facility well to the Middle East. In January 1942 Hussein Sirri Pasha, a friend of Britain, was in power, but his Cabinet was beset by a series of crises which reached a climax that month in a food shortage. Hussein Sirri had also fallen into disfavour with Farouk for severing diplomatic relations with the Vichy Government, an act scarcely likely to please the Axis powers. Probably Farouk planned to appoint Ali Maher as Prime Minister and to come to terms with Rommel should the Afrika Korps capture

known

the Nile Valley.

This was the political scene on February 2 1942, the day Hussein Sirri resigned. For Sir Miles Lampson it was imperative that Nahas Pasha should succeed him. Nahas, a lawyer by profession, had been .associated with the nationalist Wafd Party since 1919. His personal qualities and character were never questioned, and the party of this generally likeable, attractive

184

jj '

man was

influential in all sections of the

community.

unity of purpose, broadly in favour of Britain, that

sought.

Farouk showed no

It

was

this

Lampson

sign of co-operation.

A

showdown was due. "The Ambassador advised the King that we feared for the security of our base in the Delta and pressed him strongly to send for Nahas Pasha," wrote Oliver Lyttelton. "The King flatly refused. The Ambassador favoured strong action. It was clear that words would be futile and that a show of force would be necessary if we were to get our way. .

.

,

The abdication and removal of the King might be involved." On the morning of February 4 the British Ambassador asked to meet Ahmed Hassanein, Chief of the Royal Cabinet, and handed him a warning which read "If I am not informed that Nahas Pasha has been invited to form a Cabinet before 6 p.m. King Farouk will have to bear the responsibility and the :

consequences."

The

British

W. H. make the

R. G.

drew up plans

for military

action.

Lt.-Gen.

Stone, G.o.c, British Troops in Egypt, was asked

necessary arrangements. If the King was to be deposed, someone sensibly asked, what should be done with him? to

The Navy off"ered to put him on board ship and cruise in the Red Sea with him until the politicians sorted out the situation. The two opponents in this conflict could not have been more diff'erent. Farouk, destined to become one of the most notorious figures of the century, was a descendant of that Mohammed Ali who massacred the Mamelukes and founded the dynasty. His ancestors, successive sultans and khedives, had committed various excesses as rulers of Egypt until his father Fuad brought a professional and stable touch to the monarchy. Fuad's untimely death cut short the education of his son. Farouk, as a

Overleaf: Farouk,

Queen Nazli;

from

the beginning ... (1)

with his mother.

age of nine, also with Nazli (whose signature is on picture) and two of his four sisters, Fawzia and Faiza; (3) on duty, when aged 13 ; (4) with his first wife, Farida, after their wedding in January 1938; (5) part of his pornographic collection; (6) visiting the theatre in April 1943 - by which time he knew whose side he was on in the war ; (7) his sister Fawzia, whose marriage to the Persian Crown Prince (later Shah) he arranged in 1939 ; (8) now an ex-King, with Narriman his queen, on Capri in August 1952; (9) the man who forced Farouk' s hand on February 4 1942 - Sir Miles Lampson, later Lord Killearn. (2) at

the

185

handsome prince raised in a world of women, came to young to struggle against the overwhelming odds of a sycophantic court, a marriage which was on the rocks, numerous affairs, and now conflict with the British Ambassador. The Briton in this power struggle. Miles Wedderburn Lampson, was an Etonian who had been with the Foreign Office since beloved,

the throne too

1903. After service in the Far East, particularly in China, his

wife died in

Hong Kong and

first

he then married Jacqueline Aldine

daughter of the Italian, Professor Count Castellani. In 1933 he was made High Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan, replacing Sir Percy Lorraine, a post he held for over two years, becoming the first Ambassador in 1936. He was a charmer, a conversationalist, a good diplomat for the East. Some who knew him well thought very well of him. "Lampson's diplomacy was the art of practical adjustment based on fair dealing, shrewd instinct and tenacity", wrote one. And Leslie,

another: ''He disliked appeasers, levellers and petty officialdom, his broad shoulders shrugged off criticism from them." Others who knew him well did not particularly like him. They have said he tended to act like a bully to Farouk. He frequently talked about the King as "the boy" and treated him as such, condescendingly, which chagrined Farouk greatly. Lampson, said his critics, could not adapt himself to the diminished position of diplomat after having been High Commissioner.

and

Lampson and Nahas worked

in close co-operation with one and purposes, Lampson was regarded

another and, to by Churchill as King of Egypt. He stood nearly 18 inches higher than any member of the Egyptian Government. He was overbearing in manner as well as in size. He was a man who enjoyed being unpopular with Egyptians, with the British Army in Cairo, and with the Government in Britain. He may have been suitable for Egypt; but he was unsuitable for the 22-year-old Farouk. At 3 o'clock on the afternoon of February 4, three hours all

intents

before the time of expiry of the ultimatum's notice, Farouk entered a conference room in Abdin Palace preceded by his

Chamberlain, Ahmed Hassanein. Around the table were the King's uncle, Sherif Sabri; Ali Maher; Nahas; Hussein Sirri and other ministers. After an appeal by Farouk, everyone agreed to form a coalition - with the single exception of Nahas. One of the ministers, Ismail Sidki, proposed that a note of protest should be sent in answer to the British ultimatum. It was written there

and 188

then.

But Lampson dealt summarily with the long-winded comHe repeated his demands for a popular government, and demanded an audience. After dinner at the Embassy on February 4, the ladies retired, leaving Lyttelton and Lampson in earnest discussion. Originally planned for 7 o'clock, the visit to the palace was delayed until 9 p.m. The principal question to be resolved was whether, if the King complied, he should still be deposed on the grounds that he would by then be three hours past the ultimatum deadline. Lyttelton regarded this as too small an excuse to depose Farouk

plaint.

Lampson

reluctantly agreed.

Shortly before 9 o'clock three cars and an escort

left

the

as a blind. Immediately after this Lampson and General Stone drove to the palace with an armed escort. Stone, the only man still alive who was present, summarised

Embassy

events during the next hour as follows: "Immediately before the audience took place British troops, of about a battalion in strength with a section of

armoured

cars,

had sealed

off all

exits from the palace perimeter. 'The Ambassador, accompanied by myself and our two ADCs drove to the palace at the appointed time in the Ambassador's car through the outer gateway and up to the front door. A specially selected platoon from the Training School

approaches and

followed and waited in the courtyard in case any unpleasantness should occur. All this passed off as arranged without incident. "The Ambassador and myself were admitted and conducted to the waiting room from which, after a few minutes, we were

taken along the corridor to the King's study where we found him with his Court Chamberlain, Hassanein Pasha. We were invited to sit down with him at the table."

(Farouk claimed later - with true Faroukian bombast - that he had three Albanian guards hidden behind the curtain of his study door at this moment, each armed with a pistol.) "After a few preliminary words the Ambassador read out his prepared statement which presented the King with the alternatives, Nahas or abdication. At the same time he handed to the King a form of abdication which had previously been drawn up at the Embassy." This had been drafted by Walter Monckton. "The King took it all in a calm and dignified manner, but was obviously a bit shaken on reading the abdication. It looked for a moment as if he intended to sign it, but Hassanein came round behind him and they had a short consultation which I could not 189

hear.

The King then

Prime Minister and

won

summon Nahas to be own cabinet. The Ambassador had

said he agreed to

select his

his point."

Farouk's version was that he replied to Lampson "When I am ready to abdicate, Sir Miles, I shall do so at my pleasure and in the language of my people. I shall not sign this paper. I shall appoint Nahas Pasha as my Prime Minister, but I shall do so only to prevent blood from flowing in the streets of Cairo. But, you. Sir Miles, will regret this deed for ever." These events gave rise to the wildest rumours of what had actually taken place. It was said afterwards that when Farouk heard Lampson was on his way to his office he took his revolver from his desk and said "I'll shoot him as soon as he walks in". Rumour also said that the telephone lines had been cut, the palace radio seized, that tanks had surrounded the building. Lampson's action was undertaken without the knowledge of the Foreign Office. When Farouk agreed to appoint Nahas the Ambassador looked a little taken aback. It seems he had anticipated that he would be able to depose the King. W|ien Hassanein leant over and whispered caution, the course of Farouk's life was altered, as was the history of Egypt. :

Gamal Abdel

Nasser, then a young

officer, recalled a letter

he wrote to a friend on February 5 "What is to be done now that the blow has been struck, and we have taken it lying down? Yet I believe the imperialists hold a weak one-trump hand - they are simply bullying." In the Egyptian Army, Nasser said, "the event wrought a radical change in both the spirit and disposition of the officers. They were grieved that they had not intervened." The wife of a British official who saw Queen Farida on February 5 had to console her. She wept at what had happened and asked "Why do you treat him like this?" Farouk was shocked, stunned and angry. He claimed that next day he received a personal note from General Stone. "Your Majesty, I :

regret very realise that

much what happened yesterday. I know you will am a military man and had to obey orders." Stone

I

denies that any such note was sent.

government was viewed for some time with suspicion by the Allies, and for more than a month German radio continued to treat the change as a serious Strangely, after

all this,

the change of

setback to the British.

The

action taken by

troversy ever since.

190

Lampson has remained

At the time

it

a point of consecured the government the

British

wanted, but in time

it

brought

down

the very party

they had installed, and it was the final inspiration and confirmation of their cause to those forces in Egypt working to rid

themselves of both Farouk and the British. Anwar el Sadat, a Free Officer colleague of Nasser, judges the affair as "one of the crucial incidents in contemporary Egyptian

The King lost face. now the King had been synonymous with the patriotic and the violation of the Royal palace was regarded by all

history.

"Until ideal

an outrage against Egypt herself. But from utterly, and Egypt began to despair of severe shock, which was followed by chronic nervous depression. Unstable and anxious by temperament, Farouk became the prey of psychological inhibitions. He suffered from persecution mania. He was irascible and violent. He lived at night and slept during the day. It became gradually apparent that he was a paranoiac. He underwent a physical change at the same time. He became very fat and prematurely patriotic Egyptians as

now on Farouk changed him. He had suffered a

aged."

Other interested parties were watching closely. Four days after

"The reconstruction sensational changes. brought no Government has of the Egyptian Nahas Pasha declared that he intended to carry out the Treaty the ultimatum Goebbels wrote in his diary

with England without any reservation ... act more favourably for us."'

:

I still

hope

that he

may

It was to Nahas Pasha's credit that through the following months up to July 1942 he and his Wafdist Government remained loyal to the British when their fortunes were very low and Rommel's offensive towards the Nile looked like succeeding. Meantime Egyptian officers of the revolutionary group met at Zamalek to discuss what action was needed to counteract "the

British insult" of February 4. "This latest affront to our country gave a new stimulus to the revolutionary movement," one of them wrote. "Abdel Nasser and Abdel Hakim Amer determined that Egypt must never again suffer such a humiliation. The real revolutionary conspiracy dates back to this time." In July 1942 British civilians made preparations to leave Cairo and Alexandria. British officials burned their papers, the ashes drifting over Cairo. The plan of the young army officers' revolutionary group was to overthrow the Wafd government under

Maher, and join against the British with the Axis forces when they arrived. But they never arrived.

Nahas Pasha,

reinstate Ali

191

A portrait of Brother Ahmed by Charles Avite Egypt meant for the Allied troops not only its King. With its people, milling around the fringes of war, the servicemen established a special relationship. Despite that unpretty and insulting word 'wog', which is now moving into the limbo it deserves, it was by no means a sour relationship. There was affection and loyalty in it, as well as disrespect and despair.

The scenery along There were,

in spring

the Canal, 1

I

gather,

is

a bit different now.

967, those pictures in the papers of white-

shirted Egyptians throwing their shoes (shoes!

American

My

God)

at

But in 1942 the scene from the decks of troopers as they ghosted along was somewhat different. Against a background of dirty-yellow sand - where-ever along the length of the Canal you might be - five or six characters in long grey nightshirts and decidedly off-white night-caps would caper up and down, going through an exhaustive repertoire of obscene and high-suggestive gestures. As they were always aircraft-carriers.

grinning hugely while the pantomime proceeded,

it

was taken

-

performance was more in the nature of a dance of welcome than of insult, and although there were those amongst us who were somewhat shocked, a certain air of cheerful irreverence about the proceedings established what might be known as an early bond between inhabitants and troops. For some reason known only to Whitehall, every attempt was made by officialdom to block this bond from the start, and before we left the ships we listened to interminable lectures about The Wog - what a thief he was, how he was almost certainly in the pay correctly - that the

of

Rommel

or Cavallero,

how

he could

steal the

paybook out of

your blouse pocket without undoing a button and remove all the contents of your haversack without undoing the straps. (On one occasion some peasant prolonged the ordeal for half an hour by asking how!) Above all, we were stringently warned to have nothing to do with his sister. Not only would she remove the last acker from the inside lining of your shirt (if th^t was where you had sewn it), but she would also immediately inform Hitler of your name, number and unit, adding gratuitously all relevant details of the career of the next chap to command 8th Army and his plans for the future. Needless to say, she would also infect you with a variety of nameless diseases at the same time. 192

As a result, when we landed we had a tendency to veer sharply away from any harmless fellaheen who even looked like moving in our direction - not that many did immediately, for they knew time all about the indoctrination of newly-arrived troops. They just stood and grinned at us, and especially at our attempts to shake off their much younger brothers and sisters who clung around our knees screaming for baksheesh with a tenacity

by

this

unequalled except by Egyptian flies during mealtimes. So it took a bit of time to get to know Ahmed. (They were all called Ahmed very conveniently). My own eyes were first opened to his merits about a week after arrival at Helwan. A bunch of us had gone into Cairo for the evening and I missed the 3-tonner back, eventually finding myself about midnight occupying the ;

front seat of a rickety single-decker bus, full of Ahmeds and their bints

all

vociferously telling

Ahmed

the driver which

way

to go.

As he spent most of the time turning round to argue back without taking his foot off" the accelerator, the course pursued was erratic and those Ahmeds clinging to the exterior of the bus were brushed off" against walls and lamposts, adding thereby to the simple pleasures of those within.

Then we sped

past the outskirts of Cairo and plunged into the

on all and naught could be heard but the wheezing of the engine and the slobber of the Ahmed behind me, chewing what appeared to be a gigantic leek. Every now and then the bus would stop to decant some of its cargo, most members of which would favour me with a maniac grin on the way out, mutter what sounded like a sinister objurgation and lope off" into the night. By the time we reached Heliopolis I was sober and very cold inside - which was odd considering the amount I was sweating; but I sweated even more when I suddenly realised I was the sole remaining passenger. Ten minutes later when I hadn't a clue where we were, Ahmed the driver brought us to a shuddering halt in the middle of nowhere, climbed out and vanished. night, silence descended

The night was black as Ahmed's soul, but I managed to make out some white-painted ruins close along each side of the bus. camel was grunting obscenely somewhere close, vague shadows

A

and everywhere reeked of garlic and sinister with all the clag we'd had from the officers, I was in a fair state of panic and resolved to sell my life dearly - so I sat still and stared fixedly through the windscreen and door. As a result, when bony fingers prodded my shoulder from behind (I'd forgotten the back door), I rose through the roof like

flitted to

and

happenings.

fro,

What

193

my tongue severely. When I finally touched down again, it was to find yet another Ahmed standing in the gangway, regarding me with some alarm and holding a cup of coffee in the hand he hadn't prodded me with. This he now offered with a sickly grin, backing away rapidly when I took it from him, and I'd half finished it before I began worrying about all the drugs it ought to contain. Two minutes later Ahmed the driver climbed back in, took the cup, announced cheerfully "Ten minutes to Guardhouse, Jacko!" and off we went. He gave me the right change when we arrived, and the only note in the proceedings which bore much relation to all the lectures was his apology for the fact that his sister had been busy. By the time our knees were brown, Ahmed was as essential a part of our lives as the officers and much more popular. One of them woke us each morning in barracks with tea, another made the beds, God knows how many of them did the dhobying, and the cookhouse was full of them all arguing at the tops of their

a rocketing pheasant, biting

Drawing by Roger Law.

Of

course they were a lot of miserable thieves - and all but apart from this we seemed to have an awful lot in common. Ahmed was a natural philosopher, easy to talk to once we had mastered the basics of each other's lingo, and nothing was ever missing from anyone's kit. Whenever one left to go back to voices.

that -

having first installed his brother in be a whip round amongst the lads for him. his village (after

Mind

office) there'd

you, there were snags; nobody could pave the road to

Ahmed. We were a workshop bunk on nights would be woken up at dinner-time by the Ahmed who had queued up and collected his grub. And knowing - who better? - the value of good food, Ahmed would hang round and see that the bloke ate his food Hell with better intentions than

mob and

the bloke in the

before dropping off again; for which

we were

all

grateful.

Then a wave of sandfly fever caught us, and the hospital filled up. So we were left to sweat it out in our bunks. I don't think I'll ever forget that day. Four of us in a hot barrack room, all with

temperatures up in the hundreds, fighting off soHcitous Ahmeds waking us up every ten minutes with plates of congealing stew. At one moment, one of them was holding me up in bed trying to shove the stuff down my throat with the wrong end of a spoon, and at six in the evening when the rest of the mob came off duty, they found four Ahmeds sitting in the middle of a bunk, all devotedly guarding four plates of congealed muck.

immune to the ills which laid us low - but Most of them went down every so often with bilharzia or hookworm and you'd come across a small heap crouched in a corner of the desert, rocking away and moaning, or flat out with hashish which is all they ever got for it. Our medical orderlies would whip stuff from the m.i. rooms for them, but I doubt whether it ever did much good except that when one of us went down with Gippo Tummy, the nearest Ahmed would offer him a home-made reefer. Once Ahmed got an idea into his head, nothing but high explosive would budge it. A chap I knew was driving a 3-tonner down from Sarafan with a mixed load, and as a lot of the stuff They seemed

to be

they had their own.

was signal gear and fragile he'd spread a couple of dozen blankets on the floor to cushion it. Coming through one village, he got held up by a couple of camels, and he must have been more than usually thick at»that moment, for two or three minutes elapsed before he twigged what was happening. He jammed on his anchors and shot round the back of the truck, but it was much too late. The canvas canopy had been slit and all the portable stuff heaved out to waiting hands; by this time it had been well hidden in the mud ruins around him. Twenty blank faces stared politely at him as he swore a blue streak at them and then he suddenly spotted amongst them an Ahmed who had left us four months before. He hauled him out

Ahmed knew nothing. He swore at Ahmed he was blue in the face, bumped him up and down, cursed him, reviled him, even appealed to his better nature, but all Ahmed did was to gaze back with a look of polite interest which never varied. Then in a spasm of eloquence this chap pulled down the tailboard and revealed the vast emptiness of the lorry - absolutely nothing except 20 army blankets spread out on the floor. The effect was miraculous. A look of instant comprehension lit up Ahmed's eyes as though he'd been switched on, and with a leap of delight and a broad smile he vanished into a nearby hovel. He was back in 20 seconds flat. With his sister. front, but of course

till

196

The

desert poets

by Philip Oakes As

there were songs and paintings and slang and newspapers which

was poetry. Some of it was written at the front by combatants, some by civilians in Cairo bars. Philip Oakes - who writes about the poets here, and has chosen some of their work to go with this sm'vey - missed the war, but served in Cairo during 1946 and 1947, a corporal attached to the magazine Parade as a feature writer. He is a poet himself, who has published a collection called Unlucky Jonah, a novelist {Exactly what we Want), a TV documentary writer, film critic. In 1967 he took over the Atticus column of The Sunday Times of London. reflected the war, so too there

Some The

Lili

years ago a wholly fictitious organisation calling itself

Marleen Club of Glasgow published a slim volume of World War II. It contained the ribald, un-

entitled Ballads

bowdlerised lyrics of songs familiar to every serving soldier, including The Ballad of King Faruk and Queen Farida - to be sung, said a footnote, to the tune of the Egyptian National Anthem and dwelling on the sexual antics of Egypt's royal family. Its collector - who composed several of the verses himself -

was Hamish Henderson, a served as an

tall,

loping, bespectacled Scot

Intelligence Officer at

Alamein, went to

who Italy

later, the 8th Indian, and Field-Marshal Graziani as the Italian broad-

attached to the 51st Division and, finally sat beside

cast his surrender.

As war poets go 1949,

won

Dead

in

-

and he

the Somerset

is

a very considerable one

Maugham Award

who,

m

for his Elegies for the

Cyrenaica - Henderson hardly accords with the official image. He was not one of the Rupert Brooke breed who accepted the war 'like swimmers into clean-ness leaping', but he belongs heart and sand-blasted soul to the company of writers who, in the desert campaigns, forged something lasting from death and exile, and whose voice is uniquely and poignantly of its time. They were an odd bunch. Keith Douglas - killed subsequently in Normandy - and Sidney Keyes - who died on a mysterious patrol behind the enemy lines - are the best-remembered. But in 1942, as the Desert War gathered momentum, all of Egypt and especially Cairo and Alexandria was a nest, not of singing birds, but of transients who perched on the black delta soil, and wondered fretfully what they were doing there. Poetry became 197

5

them a badge of identity. They wrote it to prove not only where they were, but who they were. Poems - carefully copied on to airgraphs - winged their way to London. Every little magazine nurtured its batch of service writers. Comparisons were drawn - justly, or not - between Douglas in the desert, and W. H. Auden, safe in New York. The paper tigers roared. The spectators were primarily the poets themselves. The war did not create them. Keith Douglas was a poet at 1 when he was a pupil at Christ's Hospital, a prodigy in his blue cloak and yellow stockings. He contributed to Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse at 16, and between times practiced tap-dancing to jazz records, played for the school First XV, and joined the otc for

where, according to a friend, he 'religiously polished the soles of his boots as well as the uppers'. At Oxford he studied literature under Edmund Blunden, joined the army in 1940, and a year later sailed for the Middle East where he became a captain in a

tank regiment of the Notts Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry. He wrote prolifically poems, and prose which - when it was published as Alamein to ZemZem - provided a bruising account of tank warfare, painful in its detail, searing in its authenticity. Douglas, say his contemporaries, was a natural soldier. He was also a remarkably objective one. To a friend he wrote "I see no ;

:

reason to be either musical or sonorous about things at present.

When I do I shall be so again, and glad to. I suppose I reflect the absence of expectation - it is not quite the same thing as apathy with which I view the world. To trust anyone or to admit any hope of a better world is criminally foolish, as foolish as it is to stop working for it. It sounds silly to say work without hope, but it can be done it's only a form of insurance it doesn't mean work .

.

;

;

hopelessly".

Douglas spent his leaves in Cairo, but rarely met his fellow Apart from their poetry they had little in common. "It was," says Robin Fedden - a pacifist who later joined a Quaker Ambulance Unit in Syria - "an extraordinarily international society, rather like that described by Lawrence Durrell in the poets.

members was one for a while), and even a King's Messenger named Dorian Bell. The poet George Eraser, then a notoriously scruffy lancecorporal in the rasc, recalls their meeting. "You must be Eraser," said Bell, "You're very untidy." "You must be Bell," said Eraser, Alexandria Quartet."'

It

included university lecturers,

of the British Council, propagandists (Durrell

"you're very peculiar". 198

Two desert poets

Hamish Henderson (above, in centre oj group) and Keith Douglas (below) The pipers with Henderson played the music, and perhaps sang the words, which he composed or collected while serving in the Middle East and Italy. Douglas, a captain in a tank regiment, was killed later serving in Normandy. -

.

Also present were Terence Tiller - a lecturer at Fuad University when war broke out; Bernard Spencer, driven from Greece by the German advance John Waller, now a baronet, then an army ;

captain responsible for water tanks; Ruth Speirs, a brilliant translator of Rilke; and Ellie Papadimitriou, a Greek poet who

disappeared

in

post-war political troubles.

"Rank or status didn't matter much," recalls George Fraser, "but money made a considerable difference. I frequented a small grocer's shop where the wine was cheap and we could help ourfrom a barrel of olives. They sold little roasted birds too. Whole birds that you crunched down, beak, claws, and all. On Sunday mornings we used to meet at the house of Keith Bullen, who ran a boys' prep school at Gezira. He was a kind, old man quite poor, but a great provider of coffee and brandy. He edited a literary magazine called Salamander. Many of us wrote for it." Robin Fedden, Bernard Spencer, Terence Tiller, and Durrell were - in a very real sense - the fathers of the literary scene in Cairo. Meeting in the garden of the Anglo-Egyptian Union - a selves

low, white building with green shutters - the ice tinkling in their glasses, the bulbuls gargling in the trees, they

a magazine, devoted mainly to verse.

hatched the idea of Personal Land-

Its title -

came from a poem by Fedden, and embodied the philosophy of the group. 'Tt expressed our wish to emphasise the importance of personal life and values when the current of all thought and feeling around us set strongly in the channels of war, scape -

and when it was growing ever more difficult to exist outside the 'war effort'," wrote Fedden subsequently.

The poets who were actually fighting the desert war rarely wrote for the Cairo magazines. Keith Douglas and George Fraser contributed to Personal Landscape, but the togetherness of the largely civilian group of exiles was exclusive. Their poems, too,

now seem

curiously boneless. "Only

when Rommel,

ad-

vancing on Alamein, was almost in sight of the green belt (or alternatively when an occasional air raid seemed to justify arp lectures), did the war suddenly become a tonic," wrote Robin War in a neutral country like Egypt is war at its Fedden. ". most sterile; expatriates of all nations have felt here the length and inconvenience rather than the inspiration of the struggle." .

.

In the desert

it

was

different. Inspiration

was

in short supply,

but for a poet the war bred its own imperatives. Hamish Henderson - now a folk-lorist with the Scottish School of Studies at Edinburgh University - was goaded into poetry by the deaths of

200

Keith Douglas was a painter as well as a poet.

friend photomural (Death) which Douglas constructed using a

graphed

this

nail-file,

fingernails

occupied

A

and camoufiage paint in one hut which he was 'a natural soldier'.

the desert. Friends said he

in

and enemies, "'l think it was that saying The only good German is a dead one' that got me going," he says. The

his friends

poems were

written at night in his tent, revised

when he returned

and published three years after the war ended. Henderson is proud of them - and justly - but prouder still of his ballad The Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily which was sparked off by a Gordon Pipe March, and sung by Scottish troops throughout Italy and the Middle East within a year of having been written. His bawdy ballads - which he refuses to tone down - had an even wider circulation. Henderson did not meet either Keith Douglas or Sidney Keyes, although they served in the same theatre of operations. In the case of Keyes it's not surprising. The last few months of his life have an aura of cloaks and daggers and even his biographer John Guenther - whose study of Keyes has been published by Alan Ross Ltd. - can only speculate on the manner of his death. He was a middle-class boy whose grand-father patented Daren flour, and whose father was a professional soldier. Keyes, though, was an aesthete; fond of music; an ardent movie-goer; and attractive to women. He was neat, and well-built, but hardly

to Scotland,

201

robust. His early poetry

was

,

in the recollections

military

of

Edmund Blunden

man, whose natural

seemed became -

well received, his career

assured. But after joining the Royal Fusiliers in 1941 he reserve

somehow

tougher; a

was transmuted

into some-

-

thing close to secrecy.

Posted to Tunisia, his note:

letters frequently

sounded a desolate

"Arab ploughmen wear hooded cloaks made of sacking or

some coarse material and as they push the plough behind two white oxen, they look blind and sinister, like figures of death or pestilence." To his mother, however, he wrote perkily: "Your :

letter arrived at a rather tense moment. I was just opening it while going along the road in a truck, when a Messerschmitt suddenly roared down at us, and passed over at about 200 feet (no more) machine-gunning the road. We dived for the ditch, and I picked your letter out of the grass about ten minutes later." On Thursday, April 29 1943, Keyes and his orderly. Private Harold Smith failed to return from a patrol and were posted as missing. After a gruelling interlude in which a body - thought to be that of Keyes - was found and transferred to Massicault Military Cemetery, a unit of the Army War Graves Service came upon four isolated graves in the Tunisian hills, a mile north of Hill 133, where Keyes was last seen. The graves were marked by wooden crosses. One bore the name of Harold Smith, another that of Sidney Keyes. The date of death was given as April 29. What happened no-one can say with certainty. John HeathStubbs, the poet and friend of Keyes, believes that he was captured by a German patrol and shot while trying to escape. It is a distinct possibility that the Germans buried him. The desert poets are part of history now, the good ones and the bad. In a well-documented war they provided much of the understanding, most of the compassion. But whether or not they will be remembered on their own merits is another matter. Maybe so. In 1944 bdmund Blunden wrote to a friend of Sidney Keyes: "1 feel you would be happy to know that many boys at Wellington who had never met Sidney, but knew his writing, experienced a sort of unhappiness that I would not have expected from young people towards someone they had never seen. Do you remember a poem he wrote while still at Tonbridge called Remember Your Lovers'] ... I was surprised to hear a boy of 17 up for a scholarship quoting it from memorv the other evening."

There have been more glowing a better epitaph.

202

tributes.

There has never been

A Soldier - His Prayer

Gerald Kersh

Stay with me, God. The night is dark, night is cold: my Httle spark Of courage dies. The night is long; Be with me, God, and make me strong.

The

I I I I

love a game. I love a fight. hate the dark I love the light. love my child; I love my wife. am no coward. I love Life. ;

its change of mood and shade. want to live. I'm not afraid, But me and mine are hard to part; Oh, unknown God, lift up my heart.

Life with

I

You And

waters at Dunkirk saved Your Servants. All your work Is wonderful, dear God. You strode Before us down that dreadful road. stilled the

We were alone, and hope had fled We loved our country and our dead. And The

could not shame them so we stayed and were not much afraid. ;

course,

Dear God, that nightmare road And then That sea! We got there - we were men. My eyes were blind, my feet were torn. My soul sang like a bird at dawn !

I

I

knew that death is but a door. knew what we were fighting for:

Peace for the kids, our brothers freed,

A

kinder world, a cleaner breed.

my mother bore, and nothing more. of strength and gentleness.

I'm but the son

A simple man, But

-

God

Be pleased Help me,

to

make me nothing

O God,

when Death

less.

is

near

To mock the haggard face of fear. That when I fall - if fall I must My soul may triumph in the Dust.

203

Simplify

me when

I'm Dead Keith Douglas

Remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I'm dead. As

the processes of earth

and the skin and blue eye

strip off the colour

take the

brown

and leave

me

hair

simpler than at birth,

when

hairless

as the

moon

I

came howling

in

entered the cold sky.

Of my skeleton perhaps, so stripped, a learned man will say 'He was of such a type and intelligence', no more. Thus when

in a year collapse particular memories, you may deduce, from the long pain I bore

the opinions

I

held,

who was my

foe

even my appearance but incidents will be no guide.

and what

I left,

Time's wrong-way telescope will show a minute man ten years hence and by distance simplified.

Through

that lens see

if I

seem

substance or nothing: of the world deserving mention or charitable oblivion,

not by momentary spleen or love into decision hurled, leisurely arrived at

an opinion.

Remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I'm dead.

Landscape Near Tobruk Jocelyn Brooke made for War. As glass Resists the bite of vitriol, so this hard And calcined earth rejects The battle's hot, corrosive hand, no green And virginal countryside for War To violate. This land is hard, Inviolable; the battle's aftermath Presents no ravaged and emotive scene. No landscape a la Goya. Here are no trees This land was

204

Uprooted, gutted farms; the unsalvaged scrap scattered petrol-cans, the upturned

-

The

And abandoned

truck, the fallen Heinkel; all rusted and angular detritus Of war, seem scarcely to impinge Upon the hard, resistant surface of This lunar land ephemeral As trippers' leavings, paper-bags and orange-peel Upon Ben Nevis. Sun and sand Inhibit here the mind's habitual And easy gestures hand and eye Perform their functions with a robot^cunning The sly and casual movements of

The

:

;

The shadowed

thief.

The

soldiers

camped

In the rock-strewn wadi merge Like lizard or jerboa in the brown And neutral ambient: stripped at gunsite. Or splashing like glad beasts at sundown in The brackish pool, their smooth And lion-coloured bodies seem The indigenous fauna of an unexplored, Unspoiled country harmless, easy to trap. And tender-fleshed - a hunter's prize. :

Egypt Keith Douglas Aniseed has a sinful taste your elbow a woman's voice like, I imagine, the voice of ghosts, demanding food. She has no grace at

but, diseased and blind of an eye and heavy with habitual dolour, listlessly finds you and I and the table are the same colour.

The music, the harsh talk, the fine clash of the drinkseller's tray, are the same to her, as her own whine; she knows no variety.

And

in fifteen years

of living

found nothing different from death but the difference of moving and the nuisance of breath.

A disguise of ordure can't hide her beauty, succumbing in a cloud of disease, disease, apathy. My God, the king of this country must be proud. 205

Seven Good Germans Hamish Henderson track running between Mekili and Tmimmi was at one time a kind of no-man's-land. British patrolHng was energetic and there were numerous brushes with German and ItaHan elements. El Eleba lies about half-way along this track.

The

Of the swaddles who came to the desert with Rommel There were few who had heard (or would hear) of El Eleba. They

recce'd,

or acted as medical orderlies or patched up their tanks in the camouflaged workshops and never gave a thought to a place like El Eleba.

To

get there, you drive into the blue, take a bearing and head for damn-all. Then you're there. And where are you? - Still,

of some few

there are seven

The

first

who

who

did cross our path at El Eleba bide under their standing crosses.

a Lieutenant.

When for service overseas, he to the

day and the hour keep

the decision

and

the medicos passed him in a note-book

had jotted

me steadfast

there

is

only

the will the rest has no importance

The second

a Corporal.

He had been in the Legion and had got one more chance to redeem his lost honour. What he said was Listen here, Fmfed up with your griping If you want extra rations, go get 'em from Tommy! You're green, that's your trouble. Dodge the column, pass the buck and scrounge all you can - that's our law in the Legion. You know Tommy's got 'em He's got mineral waters, and beer, and fresh fruit in that white crinkly paper and God knows what all! Well, what's holding you back ? Are you windy or what? .

.

.

Christ, you 'old Afrikaners' If you're wanting the eats, go and get 'em from Tommy!

third had been a farm-hand in the March of Silesia and had come to the desert as fresh fodder for machine-guns. His dates are inscribed on the files, and on the cross-piece.

The

The fourth was

a lance-jack.

He had

trusted in

Adolf

while working as a chemist in the suburb of Spandau. His loves were his 'cello, and the woman who had borne him

206

two daughters and a son. He had

THAT THE NEW REICH MAY The

fifth

faith in the Endsieg.

LIVE prayed

the flyleaf of his Bible.

a mechanic.

All the honour and glory, The siege of Tobruk and the conquest of Cairo meant as much to that Boche as the Synod of Whitby. Being wise to all this, he had one single headache,

which was, how to get back to He had said

his sweetheart (called Use).

-

Can't the Tommy wake up and get weaving? If he tried, he could put our whole Corps in the bag.

May God damn The

sixth

this

Libya and both of its palm-trees!

was a Pole - or to you, a

Volksdeutscher -

who had put off" his nation to serve in the Wehrmacht. He siegheiled, and talked of 'the dirty Polacken', and said what he'd do if let loose among Russkis, His mates thought that, though he was not a bad bloke.

On

the

'just

a polnischer Schweinhund'

morning concerned

he was driving a truck with mail, petrol and rations. on duty shouted five words of warning. The

MP

He nodded laughed revved

and drove

straight for El Eleba

not having quite got the chap's Styrian lingo.

The seventh

a

young swaddy.

Riding cramped in a lorry to death along the road which winds eastwards to Halfaya he had written three verses in appeal against his sentence which soften for an hour the anger of Lenin. Seven poor bastards dead in African deadland (tawny tousled hair under the issue blanket) wie einst Lili

dead

in

African deadland einst Lili

Marleen

The poems in this selection speak for themselves but A Soldier - His Prayer merits a footnote. It was originally published in 1944 by George Harrap and Co. in a volume called Poems from the Western Desert. Verses hy Members of the Eighth Army. Every poem in that book except this one had been chosen from verse submitted to a competition ("Piastres for Poets") organised by Eighth Army's Education Officer. Field-Marshal (then General) Montgomery explained in a foreword that .4 Soldier His Prayer was anonymous. "Written on a scrap of paper, it fluttered into the hands of a soldier sheltering in a slit trench, during the battle of El Agheila." A year after publication, however, Harrap's accepted the attribution of the poem to Gerald Kersh. later a well-known novelist, who served in the Coldstream Guards during the war. It is a favourite poem of Montgomery's. He quoted from it when he laid a wreath at Alamein in May 1967.

207

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Front page o/Crusader, February of Tripoli. General Montgomery

1 is

1943, celebrating the capture

shown facing Axis

ojficers.

Acknowledgments Apart from the people named in the title and contents pages, the editor is particularly grateful for the help of Nicholas Mason. June Stanier, Doris Bryen. Gilda Archer, Janey Burland, Antony Terry and Elizabeth Jewell in preparing this book. George Perry and Rose Barnicoat did valuable research into German picture sources, and Eric Caswell assisted greatly by providing volumes of Cnisailer. Hamish Henderson not only gave permission for his fine

poem Seven Dead Germans reading for catching the

to be reprinted his collection. Ballads of World War II, is essential of the Desert War. Edward Wiltshire was another invaluable ;

spirit

adviser.

The main source of war photographs in this book is the magnificent collection of the Imperial War Museum. No one producing a war book could move without their knowledgeable assistance. The I.W.M. also gave permission for the reproductions of paintings by desert artists to be used. The front cover and title page photographs are specifically theirs too. The present-day work of three notable individual photographers is represented. These pictures are by Horst Baumann (pages 101, 121. 125, 126-129), Donald McCullin (pages 10, 174 - Arab with jerrican) and Ian Yeomans (pages 102-103, 108, 173, 174-175 - except Arab with jerrican). Other picture sources include Associated Press, Keystone, P.A.-Reuter and Thomson Newspapers. Barrie McBride and Mrs Ina Naylor kindly gave access to pictures I, 2 and 7 in the Farouk sequence (pages 1 86- 87). Peter Chamberlain provided some photographs from his collection. Other specific pictures were provided by Miss Ethelwyn Broadbent (page 158), Mrs Marie J. Douglas (pages 199 and 201), Hamish Henderson (page 199), Hans Leip (page 155) and Norbert Schultze (page 151). 1

Thanks are also due to the following for permission to reprint some elements of this book — The estate of the late Jocelyn Brooke for Landscape Near Tobruk Faber and Faber Ltd. and Chilmark Press Inc. (U.S.) for Simplify Me When I'm Deadend Egypt, from Collected Poems by Keith Douglas; George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. for A Soldier - His Prayer by Gerald Kersh, and the extract by J. Broome quoted in Mr McBride's article - both from Poems From The Desert, Peter Maurice Music Co. Ltd. and Edward B. Marks Music Corporation for the extract :

;

from Tommy Connor's lyrics to Lilli Marlene. Peter Maurice also provided the sheet music of the song from which the cover reproduction on page 155 comes; Jon (Capt. W. J. P. Jones) for the Two Types cartoon on page 142; The Royal Engineers Corps Committee for the reproduction of the painting by Terence Cuneo on pages 116-117; Messrs. Collins for the three maps from the Memoirs of Field-Marshal Montgomery, and the Field-Marshal himself for his pre-Alamein briefing notes (pages 80-81).

208

This

is

Cover printed

an original publication-not a reprint.

in U.S.A.

The

great tank battle of Alamein marked the decisive defeat of Ronnnel's famed Afrika Korps and the turning point of

World War

II.

ALAHE[N AND THE DESERT WAR the full story of the battle by Field Marshal Ben lard Montgomery and others, "with is

oven 100 photographs and maps.

WITH

PAGES

16

IN

FULL COLOR

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