War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3

by Grice, Frederick

  After so many months at sea or time wasted waiting for troopships and minor relocations, Fred, and no doubt other radio and radar operatives, required additional training under desert conditions. This 606 got at or near Alam El Osmaili, while General Montgomery was preparing his breakout from El Alamein. On 6 October Fred was reclassified as a Leading Aircraftsman (LAC) with a 90 per cent pass in the examination that he took in the field; on 1 November, while waiting at El Alamein, he was promoted Leading Aircraftsman (LAC), and on 31 December, while on active service, became a LAC Radar Operator.

  An aircraftsman en route from Britain to Egypt

  Despite Fred’s degree in English and his career as a grammar school master, he seems not to have been a candidate for a commission when he was called up to the RAF – perhaps because he didn’t volunteer. He therefore entered military service as an Aircraftsman Second Class, and moved up to First Class only on the eve of his posting to the Middle East. This had financial and status implications for him and his family, none of them good.

  Fred found himself below the vital social-class barrier that, in the military, divided the British middle and upper classes from the lower class – a distinction that roughly followed the line between the Commissioned Officers, on the one hand, and Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) and other ranks, on the other. While his RAF rank fitted his home background, since his father was a coalminer, whose whole life had been led in the mining community, Fred’s education and employment had turned him into a member of the middle class.

  This lack of a commission had an immediate and deleterious impact on Fred’s wife, Gwen. There was a substantial gap between the wages of an AC2 and the salary of a grammar school master, and Durham was one of the few Local Education Authorities in England not to make up the difference between their former teachers’ wages and the payments they received from the armed forces. Gwen, with no job (she, too, was a teacher but had had to give up her post as soon as she married in 1939) and a young child, suddenly found her finances spinning out of control, and it was only by selling the family home and moving to cheaper rented property that she was able to stabilize them. It is for this reason that Fred expressed his delight in the ‘Black Book’ on 26 August 1942 to know that their house had been sold.

  Fred embarked on His Majesty’s Transport J10, which involved a long and tortuous trip from Avonmouth, Bristol via South Wales and the Irish Sea to western Scotland, where on 10 May 1942, at Oversay in the Inner Hebrides (Fig. 1), it joined the convoy (WS 19) to Cape Town, South Africa, travelling via Freetown, Sierra Leone in West Africa (Fig. 2). Especially galling for Fred was that he and his fellow aircraftsmen were treated with scant consideration. His annoyance at their perfunctory-to-humiliating departure from England, with scarcely a word of goodwill from the officers or NCOs, was matched by what he saw as the degrading, indeed squalid, conditions under which the other ranks lived both prior to embarkation and on board the troopship, the Highland Monarch.

  The Highland Monarch (62A in the convoy), had seen service before World War II as a meat transporter from Argentina to Britain, and Fred draws the obvious parallel between the hanging of animal carcasses and the pendant sleeping conditions of the aircraftsmen in their hammocks below decks (Winston Special Convoys in WW2 – 1942 Sailings). Fred was scandalized by the officer class’s life high-on-the-hog, while the ratings received indifferent food and often suffered a shortage of water; and the casual greed of the officers in purloining the cramped space of the other ranks for their own luxury and entertainment. He was equally alienated by the swearing and general boorishness of many of his companions below decks (and in the barracks before embarkation), though he shows considerable skill in mimicking their expressions and turns of phrase.

  It was only towards the end of the voyage to Cape Town via Freetown (Fig. 2), when he met the padre and medical officer, was invited onto public discussion groups and brains trusts, and asked to lecture on ‘The Future of Education’ that Fred’s self-confidence re-asserted itself. Apart from his clarity of thought expressed in the text, this is the first glimpse we get of his positive personal qualities – accomplishments that are going to enable him to cope with the privations of a military campaign in the Western Desert, and to enjoy the camaraderie of his fellow men in Unit 606. The men of 606 seem to have shown a more positive interest in education than the erks on the Highland Monarch.

  Fred’s associates in South Africa were a liberal white family (the Eakins), who hosted him and other servicemen at Fish Hoek outside Cape Town (Fig. 3), and military men from Commonwealth countries, whose units made up the allied cause in North Africa. Contact with Africans was non-existent in Cape Town (which emerges as a white city), as had been the case in Freetown, where the Highland Monarch’s passengers were not even allowed on shore. The only comment relayed by Fred about South African blacks was the ‘white man’s failure to educate the native’ – a view expressed by his host and almost certainly endorsed by Fred too. In Cairo, however, the ‘Black Book’ reveals that Fred and his companions were allowed to wander at will, and his account contains many sympathetic vignettes of Arab artisans, traders and businessmen, as well as descriptions of European suburbs, notably Heliopolis – and the Pyramids (Fig. 4).

  The leitmotif of ‘On Draft’ is the boredom of waiting – for everything, according to Fred’s account. With boredom went ignorance – of their precise destination, route and timetable for arrival. Much of this can be put down to the need for secrecy about the deployment of troops to the battlefields, and, in Fred’s case, the absolute secrecy associated with the use of radar. The journey to Egypt was, of course, made much longer than was geographically necessary by the unacceptable risk of using the Strait of Gibraltar for convoys that the British could not afford to lose, and by the need to select routes that were free from German naval attention. Key to the journey to Africa was the port of Cape Town, from which convoys were despatched to the Middle East (including the Suez Canal) or beyond. But even as they waited to leave Britain, the malaise they were experiencing was already dispiriting, as Fred reveals in his poem:

  Education

  After years studying the beauties of Old English,

  Melting over the plaintive Dream of the Rood,

  And stirred at those heroic saints who made the dawn of our race glorious,

  I complete my education in His Majesty’s Forces,

  Learning, after a thousand years of progress away from St

  Cuthbert and St Werburgh,

  How to deceive an equipment clerk for a new pair of boots,

  To steal a meat pie from two half-vigilant cooks,

  And to lie my way out of any embarrassment

  My criminality may land me in.

  Fred’s intense irritation over waiting, and his sense of outrage over mistreatment were to continue to Cape Town, after which, transferring temporarily to the comparatively luxurious New Amsterdam, camping in South Africa at Pollsmoor (Fig. 3), and socializing with other Commonwealth soldiers, many of whom Fred found very congenial, the quality of life improved – if not the waiting. Fred celebrated his 32nd birthday on 21 June near Muizenberg, Cape Town (Fig. 3), but had to endure more than another month, much of it at sea in the Indian Ocean, before the Highland Monarch reached the Suez Canal. Then he had yet another month to wait before he was on active service as an erk in the Egyptian desert.

  Background to ‘Erk in the Desert’

  Fred’s Western Desert campaign

  When Aircraftsman Fred Grice was arriving in the Egyptian desert immediately to the west of Alexandria in early September 1942, the battle between the newly-appointed British commander, General Montgomery, and his German adversary, Field Marshal Rommel, was taking place at Alam Halfa, a ridge immediately to the south of El Alamein (Fig. 2). It was the final eastward thrust of the Afrikakorps in its attempt to outflank the British forces and take Alexandria and the Suez Canal – and the turning point in the British Eighth Army’s fortunes in North Africa (Hastings 2012) (F
ig. 5).

  Informed of German battle plans by Ultra decrypts at Bletchley Park, UK, Montgomery was able to deduce that Rommel’s attack would come from the south, and his innovative use of army-air co-operation, his digging-in of his tanks, and the dominance of the Desert Air Force over the Luftwaffe ensured that the El Alamein box, sandwiched between the desert and the Mediterranean Sea, remained intact and accessible from Alexandria (Smith 2011). The British victory at Alam Halfa enabled Fred to get to his radar unit, 606, at Alam El Osmaili, a rocky outcrop looking towards El Alamein from the south-east. From there, while under additional radar and rifle training, probably in the company of other AMES personnel, he witnessed the second and final battle of El Alamein from 23 October to 4 November (Fig. 6).

  Reinforcements had given the British a decisive advantage: the British Eighth Army (including its Commonwealth troops) deployed 195,000 men against 104,000 Germans and Italians; 1,029 tanks against 489; 750 aircraft against 675; and it had vastly superior artillery. Informed again by decrypts of Rommel’s strategy, Montgomery proceeded to engage in a set-piece tactical battle, using camouflage deception, concentrated artillery barrages and constant air attack. Rommel, faced with a chronic shortage of fuel and armaments, exacerbated by the destruction of supply ships leaving Italy, and suffering from personal ill-health, withdrew after almost two weeks of bombardment (Hastings 2012).

  There then began Rommel’s long retreat along the desert coastal strip following the Mediterranean to Tunisia, crossing first western Egypt and then the whole of Libya. The British forces pursued Rommel all the way, and Unit 606 was just behind the Eighth Army front line for much of the chase, both before and after the occupation of Tripoli. An attempt by the Eighth Army to encircle the Axis forces at Mersah Matruh was frustrated by rain, and they escaped by 7 November; Tobruk was re-taken on 13 November, but again Rommel’s forces escaped the trap; an opportunity to outflank Rommel at Agedabia in December was cautiously declined for fear of counter-attack (Fig. 5).

  Montgomery has been criticized for his failure to finish off the Afrikakorps while it was in full flight, but he was afraid that Rommel, with his greater mobility, might turn the tables on Britain’s ‘citizen army’ (Hastings 2012, 379); and so he erred on the side of caution, content to chase the enemy into Libya and Tunisia towards the British and American forces of Operation Torch, who had landed in Vichy French Algeria and Morocco on 8 November 1942. Although the US military unsympathetically dismissed the Mediterranean as tainted by British imperial ambitions, Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt agreed there could be no Continental D-Day in 1942; and it was soon acknowledged that North Africa might form the base from which to attack Italy and southern France – hence the allied approval given for Torch (Hastings 2012) (Fig. 5).

  As Fred’s account shows from the Eighth Army side, amid winter rain and mud, the Germans were able to frustrate efforts to rush Tunisia, as Operation Torch tangled with the end of the Western Desert Campaign. However, the tide of war was with the Allies, and by the end of February 1943 Ultra revealed Rommel’s intention to use all three of his weakened panzer divisions to attack Montgomery’s troops as they approached the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia (Smith 2011). Fred witnessed the British victory at Medenine on 6 March, after which Rommel, a sick man, left Africa. But surprisingly, Fred too was not present at the failure of Montgomery’s first assault on Mareth on 19 March, though he did witness the military build-up involving the New Zealanders beforehand, which he describes in some detail (Fig. 5).

  At this juncture Fred was plucked from the military activities in southern Tunisia and flown from Medenine to Tripoli and then on to Cairo, seeing from the air, within one day, the entire route of Unit 606’s journey in pursuit of Rommel. This erk, Fred, was now en route to a commission as Pilot Officer and a new career as an Education Officer in East Africa. Perhaps his promotion was part of the general re-appraisal of manpower and military strategy after the fall of Tunis in January 1943; perhaps his age (he was 32), his degree and his teaching qualification warranted a non-battlefield posting.

  In addition to reflecting on the effacement of the traces of war by the incursions of the desert during his flight back to Egypt, it is likely, too, that Fred would have pondered the earlier phases of the Western Desert War in North Africa, and, in particular, the existence of the airstrips which were so frequently the destinations of the various legs of his own military journey from Egypt through Libya to Tunisia. It is to these landing grounds, and their construction during the battles of 1940–1942, that I now turn.

  The see-saw war and the landing grounds

  The British victory at the second Battle of El Alamein and the pursuit of Rommel into Libya and Tunisia was the last and decisive phase of a back-and-forth struggle that began in August 1940 with the invasion of neutral Egypt by Italian forces based in the Italian colony of Libya. The Italian offensive was halted by British and Commonwealth troops stationed in Egypt, and in December 1940 a counter-attack was launched, resulting in massive Italian losses and their retreat to El Agheila on the Gulf of Sirte. A total collapse of the Italian army was prevented by the arrival the German Afrikakorps and units of the Luftwaffe, and Germany – represented by General Rommel – became the dominant element in the Axis partnership in North Africa (Hastings 2012) (Fig. 5).

  Axis forces launched two more large-scale assaults against the British, each time forcing them back to Egypt, but both times the British retaliated and recovered the lost ground. During the first Axis push in 1941, the front line stabilized at the Egyptian border, but Tobruk, with its Australian garrison, was isolated and besieged for 240 days. Later in 1941 Tobruk was relieved, the territory gained by Rommel was re-captured, and the front line again set at El Agheila. At this juncture the Eighth Army was formed out of British, Australian (soon to be re-deployed), Indian, South African and New Zealand units.

  As a result of Rommel’s second offensive from January to July 1942 the British and their allies were driven back into Egypt, defeated at the Battle of Gazala (Fig. 7), and Tobruk fell for the first time. The Eighth Army under Auchinleck halted the Axis powers at the Alamein Line on 1 July 1942, only 70 miles short of Alexandria, at the first battle of El Alamein (Hastings 2012) (Fig. 5).

  During July, gloom suffused the British in Cairo, matched by visible exultation among Egyptians. On the notorious ‘Ash Wednesday’, Middle East headquarters conducted bonfires of secret documents and many families fled to Palestine. (Hastings 2012, 365)

  Fred’s narrative in ‘Erk in the Desert’ opens at the beginning of September 1942, soon after Churchill replaced Auchinleck by Montgomery as the commander of the Eighth Army. Max Hastings’s evaluation of the British position at that moment makes chilling reading:

  Britain’s fortunes in the Middle East, and the global prestige of its army, had reached their lowest ebb. Churchill’s attempt to exploit Africa as a battlefield against the Axis had thus far served only to make Rommel a hero, and grievously to injure the morale and self-respect of the British people at home (2012, 138).

  In reality, however, Rommel’s situation was less than favourable: the outnumbered Axis army facing El Alamein stood at the end of a tenuous 1500-mile supply chain; fuel and weapons from Germany were always inadequate; informed by Ultra decrypts, the Royal Navy and the RAF began to destroy fuel, tank and ammunition shipments to Rommel across the Mediterranean (Smith 2011). Furthermore, once the Eighth Army had broken out of El Alamein, there were few strong points that could be defended by the retreating Axis troops (though there were previously prepared defences running inland at El Agheila, Buerat and Homs – all in Libya), while a string of landing grounds (that could be used by the advancing RAF) ran along the Mediterranean coast road across Egypt and Libya into Tunisia, or followed the course of the Egyptian railway from Alexandria to Sollum (Jefford 2001).

  These landing grounds had been constructed by the RAF from late 1940 onwards, and once checked out and cleared of debris, would be used by
the pursuing Desert Air Force, made up of RAF, South African Air Force and Greek Air Force units, plus US reinforcements. There were 240 landing grounds in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia potentially at the disposal of the Advance Army and RAF Headquarters at Burg el Arab (Fig. 6), but only about 70 lay in the path followed by the Eighth Army (Table 1). Each had been constructed on flat land cleared of bush, and had a landing strip of about 1000 yards in length (Judge 2009). Dating from the earlier phases of the Western Desert Campaign, they were organized into a landing-ground (LG) numerical series in the Western Desert in Egypt, and given place names in Libya and Tunisia (Jefford 2001).

  Almost all the destinations of Unit 606 were landing grounds (with 20 likely visits), and this applied both during its progress westwards in November and December 1942 along the Mediterranean coast and in 1943 when it turned inland as road conditions, fortifications and military strategy required, particularly in the approach to Tripoli and in Tunisia (Table 2). The conditions of the formerly-abandoned landing grounds needed to be verified, and repairs carried out; a rendezvous with a squadron might be made; in case of danger, protection might be found with the Bofors and Lewis gunners of the RAF Regiment, if they had already taken up defence of the air strip. Most important of all, Unit 606 might be expected to go operational and give early warning to the squadron on the ground of air attack by Axis fighters. In one of his few references to the flying and land operations of the RAF during this phase of the war, Fred noted:

  While the aircraft were leapfrogging forward their support came over the desert in a fleet of gharries, hour after hour churning through soft sand that blew up into the nostrils and eyes or bumping shockingly over rock and stone (Were Your Knees Brown? 1943, 4).