Alamein

by Iain Gale

  ‘Yes, sir. What are our orders?’

  ‘We’re moving on Mersa Matruh to cut off the enemy.’

  ‘Cut them off, sir?’

  ‘Of course bloody cut them off, Nuts Five. They’re retreating. We’ve got them beat. We’ve been selected to administer the coup de grace.’

  ‘And what then, sir?’

  ‘What then?’ The major seemed a little nonplussed for a moment, but then he spoke again: ‘Why then we go back to Cairo of course and er…have a bath. And leave some other buggers to do the chasing for us.’

  The line went dead and Douglas looked out into the endless desert and thought of Cairo and of clean clothes and clean sheets and of a soft bed and of life and love. And then, for the first time since the battle had begun, it started to rain.

  FORTY-ONE

  2.00 p.m. HQ Eighth Army Montgomery

  The end had come as the battle had begun, in the night. He had sent in two hard punches at the hinges of the breakout area around Kidney Ridge where the enemy was desperately trying to prevent them from widening the breach.

  At dawn the armoured-car regiments had poured through the gap, and then the heavier armour had broken into the open desert, First and Seventh Divisions in the lead. There were no minefields here. Nothing to hamper his superiority.

  Shortly afterward a report had come through from the Argylls that they had reached their objective of Point Forty-four and found it abandoned. The Germans had pulled out without a fight.

  In the south all that the abandoned Italians could do was surrender and now the pursuit could begin. Now he would chase the Desert Fox out of Egypt and out of Africa. And what pleased him most of all was that it had taken exactly twelve days to do it. Just as he had predicted.

  There was a knock at the door and de Guingand entered. ‘Sir, you have a visitor. We’ve captured General von Thoma, at least Tenth Hussars have. In Rommel’s absence he commands the Afrika Korps.’

  Montgomery smiled. ‘Show him in please, Freddie,and extend him every hospitality. We wouldn’t want him to think that the British were at all ungenerous in victory.’

  De Guingand opened the door and two men entered, one in the uniform of a British tank commander, the other in that of the Afrika Korps with senior officer’s insignia, although the jacket and trousers were badly torn and covered in white dust. The latter saluted.

  Montgomery stared hard into von Thoma’s piercing blue eyes and for a moment was thrown. Here clearly was no fanatical Nazi, but a fellow soldier. A man of war rather than of politics. His reputation as a tank commander was well known. He was a leader of men, a warrior.

  At length Montgomery spoke: ‘Herr General, I would be honoured if you would dine with me this evening as my personal guest. I’m sure that we have much to discuss.’

  The general smiled and nodded: ‘With pleasure, General. Thank you.’

  Montgomery noticed that von Thoma had sustained some burns about the legs: ‘We must have that seen to. Freddie, could you arrange it? We can’t have the general in any pain. Besides, I want him at his ease at dinner this evening so that he can advise me what he thinks Rommel might intend next.’

  He laughed and von Thoma joined in: ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, General Montgomery. But I can give nothing away. No matter how many glasses of port you might offer me. Although I shall be happy to talk about the battle you have just won and to tell you how you might have won it more quickly.’

  Montgomery shook his head: ‘You might tell me that, General, but I’m afraid you would be wrong. You see, I planned this battle down to the smallest detail and I knew precisely how long it would take us to win. We simply could not have done it any sooner or with any fewer casualties.’ He paused and smiled: ‘The fact is though, General, we did it.’

  10 November, 1942 Mansion House, London Churchill

  I have never promised anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat. Now, however, we have a new experience. We have victory – a remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all our hearts…Rommel’s army has been defeated. It has been routed. It has been very largely destroyed as a fighting force…

  Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth Hitler’s Nazis will meet equally well armed, and perhaps better armed troops…Here we are, and here we stand, a veritable rock of salvation in this drifting world. There was a time not long ago when for a whole year we stood all alone. Those days, thank God, have gone…

  I recall to you some lines of Byron, which seem to me to fit the event, the hour, and the theme:

  ‘Millions of tongues record thee, and anew Their children’s lips shall echo them, and say – “Here, where the sword united nations drew, Our countrymen were warring on that day!” And this is much, and all which will not pass away.’

  Biographical Notes

  The Allies

  General Harold Alexander, after the Anglo-American forces from Operation Torch and the Eighth Army converge in Tunisia in February 1943, commands 18th Army Group, reporting to Eisenhower. Thus in July under Alexander, Montgomery’s Eighth Army and Patton’s Seventh Army invade Sicily. During the subsequent advance up Italy Alexander authorizes the bombing of Monte Cassino. In December 1944 he becomes Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces Headquarters. He is promoted field marshal and receives the German surrender in Italy. He is elevated to the peerage in 1946 created Viscount Alexander of Tunis and Errigal. He then becomes governor general of Canada and in 1952 returns to Britain and becomes Earl Alexander of Tunis, Baron Rideau of Ottawa and Castle Derg. He is Minister of Defence until 1954, when he retires from politics. Alexander dies at home on 16 June 1969.

  Sergeant Herb Ashby returns to Palestine in December with his unit and refuses the offer of officer training. In January 1943 the battalion moves out to Suez. While there Ashby hears that Bill Kibby has been awarded a posthumous VC. Ashby fights with the Australian army in the Pacific and is invalided out with sickness in May 1945. Recuperating at Mount Gambier he meets a nurse Heather Hancock and they are married in 1946. He starts to farm cattle, expands into sheep and in the 1970s sells up a successful livestock business and settles in Mount Gambier. He also works in veterans’ pensions. In 1999 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia. He has five children, eight grandchildren and six great grandchildren.

  Major Tom Bird, already the holder of an MC and bar, receives a DSO for his part in the action at Snipe. He becomes one of Wavell’s ADCs in Delhi and later while serving in Belgium is badly wounded and invalided out of the army. After the war he sets up an architectural practice in London with Richard Tyler who had been wounded on the same day, losing a leg, while serving with the Royal Engineers and had met Bird in hospital in Cairo. Their practice specialises in country house restoration and housing for disabled ex-servicemen. It is still in business today. In 2004 Bird is awarded the Légion d’Honneur for his part in the Tobruk evacuation. In 2009, a grandfather of seven, aged ninety he pledges to bequeath his medals to the Greenjackets museum in Winchester.

  Sergeant Charlie Callistan 2nd KRRB wins the DCM.

  Corporal Cope 2nd KRRB is promoted sergeant and wins the Military Medal.

  Brigadier Francis ‘Freddie’ de Guingand collapses from fatigue during the preparations for the battle of El Agheila on 23 November. Monty sends him back to Cairo. He is married to his financée Mrs Arlie Stewart and returns to the front. He is promoted major-general after the surrender of the Axis forces in North Africa in May 1943 and serves as Montgomery’s chief of staff, from Egypt to the Rhine. Throughout early 1944 he is away on sick leave on several occasions with stress. After the end of hostilities in Europe he is appointed as Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office. But fails to make Vice Chief of the General Staff. In 1946 de Guingand retires from the army to Southern Rhodesia to pursue a successful career in business. He also writes books about his experiences but h
e is blunt about his relationship with Montgomery and falls out with him. He dies in 1979 at the age of seventy-nine.

  Lieutenant Keith Castellain Douglas is wounded on 15 January 1943, in action at Wadi Zem Zem, and sent to Palestine to recover. During the six weeks he spends there, he writes an account of the fighting – From Alamein to Zem Zem. Released from hospital, Douglas rejoins his regiment in Egypt and, later, in Tunisia, where he is promoted to captain. In mid-December, he arrives back in England for three weeks’ leave. In his absence, he has become a published poet with Selected Poems. At the end of his leave, he retrains for D-Day. In February 1944, he receives a contract from Poetry London for a collection of his poetry. He takes part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. The regiment helps liberate Bayeux and on D-Day + 3, 9 June, arrives at the village of St Pierre. Douglas and a comrade leave their tank and head towards the village on foot. A mortar shell explodes directly above his head, killing him instantly without leaving a mark on his body. He is twenty-four. His remains now lie in the Tilly-sur-Seulles War Cemetery.

  General Bernard Freyberg is created Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. He is injured in an aircraft accident in September 1944. After six weeks in hospital he returns to command the New Zealand Division in its final operations in Italy and liberates Venice. He becomes Governor-General of New Zealand in 1946 and holds the post until 1952. Freyberg returns to England and in 1953 becomes Deputy Constable and becomes Lieutenant-Governor of Windsor Castle. He dies at Windsor on 4 July 1963 following the rupture of one of his war wounds. He is seventy-four.

  General Alexander Gatehouse is from 1942 to 1944 Chief Administration Officer to the British Military Mission in Washington. After the war he becomes Military Attaché to the Soviet Union and from 1946 to 1948 is Aide-de-Camp to the King. He dies in 1964 aged sixty-nine.

  Sergeant Hines 2nd KRRB wins the MM.

  General Brian Horrocks takes over command of X Corps, after Lumsden’s dismissal. He is then transferred to First Army to take over IX Corps with which he captures Tunis and accepts the surrender of the remnants of Rommel’s Army Group Africa. In June 1943, Horrocks is wounded during an air raid at Bizerte. He has five operations and spends fourteen months recovering. In August 1944 he is sent to France to assume command of XXX Corps and drives through Belgium, taking Brussels. In September in Operation Market Garden, XXX Corps under Horrocks leads the ground assault along a corridor held by British and American airborne forces to link up with the British 1st Airborne Division. He becomes a television presenter lecturing on great battles and becomes director of the house-building company Bovis. He is a military consultant for the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far, in which he is played by Edward Fox.

  He dies in 1985, at the age of eighty-nine.

  General Sir Oliver Leese commands XXX Corps for the rest of the campaign and in the invasion of Sicily and is mentioned in dispatches. He is promoted temporary lieutenant-general in September 1943 and in December succeeds Montgomery as Eighth Army commander. He commands Eighth Army at the final Battle of Monte Cassino in May 1944. His rank of lieutenant-general was made permanent in July 1944. In September 1944 he is appointed Commander-in-Chief of Allied Land Forces, South-East Asia. After falling out with General Slim he is himself replaced by him and returns to Britain as GOC-in-C Eastern Command. He retires from the army in January 1947 and became a renowned horticulturist, particularly on cacti. He dies in 1978 aged ninety-four.

  General Herbert Lumsden is sacked by Montgomery on 13 December 1942 and replaced by General Brian Horrocks. Liked by Churchill, however, he is given command of VIII Corps in Britain, prior to being sent to the Pacific as Churchill’s military representative to MacArthur. He is killed at the age of forty-eight by a kamikaze plane on the bridge of USS New Mexico observing the bombardment of Lingayen Gulf on 6 January 1945. He is buried at sea.

  Lieutenant General Bernard Law Montgomery is knighted and promoted full general. He pursues Rommel into Tunisia. Eighth Army invades Sicily and then in the autumn of 1943 Italy. In December he returns to Britain and takes command of 21st army group and prepares for the invastion of France. He masterminds the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944. However after the successful invasion the British become bogged down and Montgomery falls out with Patton. Eisenhower takes command of Allied ground forces and on 1 September 1944, after the end of the Battle of Normandy, Montgomery is created Field Marshall. Montgomery oversees the British advance to the Rhine and on 4 May 1945, on Lüneburg Heath, accepts the surrender of German forces. He is created 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein in 1946 and is Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1946 until 1948, before becoming Eisenhower’s deputy, helping with the creation of NATO’s European forces. He retires from the army aged seventy-one, in 1958.

  Montgomery’s post war views are increasingly controversial and in his memoirs he criticises many of his wartime comrades resulting in a falling out with Eisenhower. He is threatened with legal action by Auchinleck for suggesting that he had meant to retreat from the Alamein position, and has to include a corrective note in future editions and to make a radio broadcast in 1958 explaining that Auchinleck had in fact been instrumental in establishing the front line at Alamein. He dies in 1976 at home in Alton, Hampshire, aged eighty-eight. He is buried at Holy Cross Churchyard, Binsted.

  General Leslie Morshead is created a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB). He and the Australian 9th Division are recalled to the South West Pacific. In March 1943, he is made commander of II Corps, and in September 1943, moves to the Australian beachhead at New Guinea. A Japanese counter-attack is crushed. In November 1943, he becomes acting commander of New Guinea Force and Second Army and commands forces in New Guinea in the battles of Sattelberg, Jivevaneng, Sio and Shaggy Ridge. Returning to Australia, he commands Second Army and in February 1945, lands on Borneo.

  After the war Morshead becomes the Orient Steam Navigation Company’s Australian general manager. He dies of cancer in 1959 in Sydney aged seventy.

  Captain John William Poston 11th Hussars is killed in action on 21 April 1945, at the age of twenty-five, while carrying out a task for Montgomery who acknowledges the fact in his memoirs.

  Major Hugh Peter de Lancey Samwell 7th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders recuperates in Cairo and, having rejoined his unit, is wounded again in March 1943 having stood on a mine at the end of a patrol. He is awarded the MC for gallantry in action on Mareth Line, North Africa. After hospital in Tripoli he advances through Algeria and takes part in the invasion of Sicily and records his experiences of war in North Africa and Sicily in An Infantry Officer with the Eighth Army later published in 1945. In Italy he plays a leading role in defending soldiers of the 50th and 51st divisions, including many Alamein veterans, accused of mutiny in September 1943, as documented in the book Mutiny at Salerno: An Injustice Exposed by Saul David (2005). He is killed in action in Belgium in the final phase of the German Ardennes offensive on 12 January 1945, age thirty-three.

  Sergeant Joe Swann of S Company 2nd KRRB is awarded the DCM.

  Colonel Victor ‘Vic’ Turner is awarded the VC. His brother had already been awarded a posthumous VC in WWI. Turner is also made a member of the Royal Victorian Order. After the war he settles with his sister Jane and two brothers on the family estate in Ditchingham Norfolk. He never marries and dies at home in 1972 aged seventy-two.

  The Axis

  General Albert Gause is made chief of special staff Libya and Tunisia in December 1942. In June 1944 he is moved to France as acting Chief of Staff Panzer Group West. In September he is moved to Germany with SS panzerarmee but in November is relieved of his duties a suspect in the Hitler bomb plot on account of his loyalty to Rommel. But in April 1945 he is made Commander of II Corps. Isolated in Latvia, the corps is captured by the Russians on May 10 1945. It seems probable that Gause was abandoned by General Burgdorf, one of the officers who had given cyanide to Rommel. He is finally released from Soviet prison in 1955 and retires to Karlsruhe. He dies at h
ome in Bonn in September 1967.

  Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlien assumes effective command of the Afrika Korps after the capture of von Thoma. When Rommel leaves Tunisia in March 1943, Bayerlein is appointed German liaison officer under the new commander, Giovanni Messe. He develops rheumatism and hepatitis and is sent to Italy on sick leave before the German troops in Tunisia surrender in May 1943.

  He is sent to the Eastern Front in October 1943 to lead the Berlin-Brandenburg 3rd Panzer Division and later command the Panzer Lehr Division in Budapest. After the Normandy Invasion they are sent to France and fight in Caen suffering heavy losses. He then serves under General von Manteuffel in the Ardennes Offensive and commands 53rd corps. In April 1945 he and his men surrender to the U.S. 7th Armored Division in the Ruhr.