The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  General Sir Claude Auchinleck did not really deserve to be removed from his command in North Africa in August 1942. ‘The Auk’ had stopped Rommel’s Panzer Army from breaking through his defensive lines based on the Ruweisat Ridge at the first battle of El Alamein in early July, taking 7,000 prisoners, and had laid sound plans for a full-scale counter-attack in the autumn, but had warned the High Command in London that this could not be launched until September at the earliest. Churchill and Brooke visited Cairo, and Auchinleck was rewarded for his caution by being offered the command of forces in the Middle East instead, a definite demotion, which he refused. Although after a year he was appointed to the post of commander-in-chief in India, he was never to see battlefield service again. Taking over the Near East command was General Sir Harold Alexander, with the brilliant Lieutenant-General William ‘Strafer’ Gott at the helm of by far its largest component, the Eighth Army, which had already suffered no fewer than 80,000 casualties during its short existence.2 As a brigadier Gott had led the armoured strike force for Operation Brevity in May 1941, the first attempt to relieve Tobruk. Yet just as Gott flew back from the desert to meet Churchill in Cairo before taking up his command, travelling in a slow and unescorted Bristol Bombay passenger plane, it was attacked by six Messerschmitt Me-109s from Jagdgeschwader 27, and crash-landed in flames. Four of the twenty-one people on board survived, but not Gott. The second choice for the post had been Brooke’s protégé, the fifty-five-year-old Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery, who was flown out post-haste, and took up the Eighth Army command at Ruweisat Ridge at 11 a.m. on Thursday, 13 August 1942.

  There are a number of pitfalls in attempting to delve into the minds of generals at a distance of seven decades, and the results of doing so are often meaningless psychobabble. But if anyone makes a fascinating candidate for the psychiatrist’s sofa, it is Montgomery. The fourth child of a vicar who became Anglican bishop of Tasmania, he cut off all contact with his unloving mother to the extent of boycotting her funeral.3 After an academically undistinguished time at the London day school St Paul’s, Montgomery went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, where he bullied a fellow cadet so badly by setting fire to his coat-tails that the young man required hospitalization.4 He then served on the North-West Frontier of India with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Montgomery had a good First World War, leading an attack at Ypres in which he took one German prisoner by kicking him in the testicles. On another occasion a grave was dug for him at a dressing-station, so unlikely did it seem that he would survive his wounds, but instead of an early interment he won the Distinguished Service Order, and ended the war as a brevet lieutenant-colonel. After marrying in 1927 and having a son, his wife Betty died tragically in 1938 from septicaemia, from an insect bite on her foot which even the amputation of her leg had failed to halt. The emotional side of his life closed down after her death, and total concentration on soldiering took over; he even became teetotal (not in any sense a British Army tradition). The professor of military history at Oxford, Hew Strachan, has written that:

  Montgomery’s great strengths lay in training, careful preparation and method; above all, he integrated artillery into an all-arms battle. He accepted that battles swung on fire-power and the exploitation of ground, as much as on movement, and he emphasized that they were about killing and being prepared to be killed. He expressed all this in a language that was direct and even attritional.5

  Disciplined, focused, adaptable, a meticulous planner, quick to dismiss the incompetent, respectful of the Germans’ capacity for counter-attack, for all that Montgomery was irascible, opinionated and egotistical he was also the greatest British field commander since the Duke of Wellington. As one historian has noted, ‘Generals should not be judged by their party manners.’ If Montgomery was vain, he had plenty to be vain about.

  Montgomery had performed well on the retreat to Dunkirk, and although he had been in part responsible for the initial planning of the disastrous Dieppe Raid of August 1942, he had at least suggested that it be abandoned before it was undertaken. By the time he got to the Western Desert he had worked out in what way he wanted to fight his duel with Rommel differently from the way his three predecessors – Alan Cunningham, Neil Ritchie and Claude Auchinleck – had fought theirs. Unlike them, he would not seek to chase the Desert Fox back and forth along the North African littoral between Egypt and Tunisia. Instead he would try to bring the Afrika Korps to a single great, Clausewitzian decisive battle, and break its power for ever. As he told his Eighth Army officer corps in a short speech on the evening of his first day in command:

  I understand that Rommel is about to attack at any moment. Excellent. Let him attack. I would sooner it didn’t come for a week, just to give me time to sort things out. If we have two weeks to prepare we will be sitting pretty; Rommel can attack as soon as he likes after that and I hope he does… Meanwhile, we ourselves will start to plan a great offensive; it will be the beginning of a campaign which will hit Rommel for six right out of Africa… He is definitely a nuisance. Therefore we will hit him a crack and finish with him.6

  Such a pep-talk might today sound like absurd hyperbole from a hitherto minor commander speaking of a strategic giant who had not lost an important battle, and moreover was well inside Egypt. But, nine months later to the day, the Afrika Korps – which was to lose a total of 5,250 vehicles during 1942 – surrendered in Tunisia.7

  The depredations of desert warfare were well described in the British propaganda film Desert Victory, and included boiling days but freezing nights; bathing in one’s shaving mug for want of water; sandstorms that lasted many days (in some traditional Arab lore, murder was acceptable after the fifth); mosquitoes, flies and scorpions; and a landscape so desolate that a compass was as important a tool as to a sailor. Of the local inhabitants, one divisional history recorded: ‘If they could have carried it away, they’d have stolen the air out of the tyres.’8

  Rommel attacked the Alam el Halfa Ridge seventeen days after Monty’s first speech, on 30 August, and destroyed sixty-seven British tanks for the loss of forty-nine of his own. But within twenty-four hours British minefields, warplanes and artillery had slowed his Panzers’ advance to a crawl, and that day the Germans got as far eastwards in Africa as they were ever going to; their 3,000 casualties were almost twice the Eighth Army’s 1,750. Rommel himself only narrowly avoided death when the Desert Air Force (DAF) bombed and strafed his Kampfstaffel (tactical headquarters).

  For the rest of the summer and into the autumn of 1942 the two armies faced one another at the obscure desert railway stop of El Alamein, each being resupplied as best they could organize. Here lay the key to Montgomery’s victory. Because both Benghazi and Tobruk could not be properly protected by the Luftwaffe, and were thus heavily bombed by the Allies, most of the Axis supplies came to Tripoli via Naples and Sicily. Yet whereas in 1941 the average monthly delivery of motor fuel to Axis forces in Africa had been 4,884 tons, because the Tripoli-to-El Alamein return journey was over 2,000 miles long, and German trucks consumed a litre of fuel for every 2 miles covered, the Afrika Korps required 5,776 tons of fuel per month by 1942 as a result of its extended supply lines.9 With the DAF destroying lorries carrying fuel to Rommel along the only road that was worthy of the name, as Frederick von Mellenthin recorded, ‘Petrol stocks were almost exhausted, and an armoured division without petrol is little better than a heap of scrap iron.’10 One Afrika Korps divisional commander, General Hans Cramer, believed El Alamein to have been ‘lost before it was fought. We had not the petrol.’11

  Aircraft and submarines stationed at Malta ceaselessly harried the Axis lines of communication. An unsinkable Allied aircraft carrier, Malta now became the most heavily bombed place on earth. The island was awarded the George Cross in April 1942 for its stalwart courage under near-permanent attack, one of only 106 recipients between 1940 and 1947. (The only other collective recipient would be the Royal Ulster Constabulary, in 1999.) A problem developed when the devoutly religio
us Governor of Malta, Lieutenant-General Sir William Dobbie, would not allow the garrison to work on Sundays. In the view of the military historian John Keegan, this Sabbatarianism effectively allowed two of the few ships which succeeded in running the Axis blockade to be sunk with their cargoes at their moorings, a fact not mentioned in Dobbie’s autobiography, entitled On Active Service with Christ.12

  Yet if Rommel’s supply routes were long at more than 1,000 miles, Montgomery’s were twelve times longer. Most Allied troops and equipment had to come around the Cape of Good Hope, menaced all the way by U-boats, and the rest along the shorter but also dangerous air route across central Africa and up the Nile Valley. This was described in Desert Victory as the longest line of communication in the history of warfare. However, the proximity of the Middle Eastern oil meant that in the twelve months after August 1941 Commonwealth ground and air forces in Egypt received no less than 342,000 tons of oil products.13 The logistics could be complicated: for example, the Allies’ four types of tank – Shermans, Crusaders, Grants and Stuarts – ran on three different types of fuel. Yet, whereas in August 1942 Churchill had privately described the Eighth Army as ‘a broken, baffled army, a miserable army’, by October its huge reinforcement and strange but charismatic new commander had changed all that.

  It has been argued that Rommel should never have offered battle at El Alamein, only 60 miles west of Alexandria, but ought instead to have withdrawn back along his extended lines of communication into Libya once it had become obvious that the interdictions of the Royal Navy and DAF meant that he was being resupplied at only a fraction of the rate of his antagonist. But Jodl’s deputy General Warlimont had explained to Rommel’s Staff in July the importance of remaining at El Alamein. He spoke of Kleist’s plans to invade Persia and Iraq from the Caucasus and pointed out that it was essential to have the Allies tied up defending Egypt rather than sending troops to other parts of the Middle East.14 Furthermore, the prizes of victory in Egypt were dazzling for Rommel. Alexandria was the headquarters of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet; Suez was the gateway to Britain’s Indian Empire; Cairo was the largest city in Africa and the centre of British power in the region, just as the Nile Delta was the route to Iran, Iraq and the oilfields of the Middle East. The Wehrmacht had pulled off astonishing coups regularly over the previous three years despite a growing paucity of men, equipment and fuel, so it was felt to be far too early to give up such hard-won ground.

  The lull in fighting after the battle of Alam el Halfa allowed Montgomery – who with his taste for multi-badged service berets and eccentric dress was very consciously transforming himself into the much loved public figure known as Monty – to train his army. Detailed orders went out from his headquarters – a caravan in the desert which featured a postcard photograph of Rommel – concerning every aspect of the army’s logistics, fitness, equipment, morale, organization and discipline. Many of the reinforcements he was being sent had never fought in the desert, and his belief in intensive training was put into full operation in the weeks of relative calm. This led Montgomery to take a firm stance with Churchill, who was pressing for an early attack. The best that Alexander would offer Downing Street was the promise of being sent a codeword – Zip – when the great assault finally began.15 Alexander’s determination to leave Montgomery alone might have frustrated the Prime Minister but it was the right thing to do. Alexander – who tap-danced in regimental talent shows – was a cool commander, who ran his Staff mess in a way that Harold Macmillan, the Minister Resident in North-West Africa, equated to an Oxford high table, where the war was ‘politely ignored’ as they instead discussed ‘the campaigns of Belisarius, the advantages of classical over Gothic architecture, or the best ways to drive pheasants in flat country’.16

  In hoping to drive Rommel back over the very flat country, special-forces attacks were made in mid-September against Tobruk (Operation Agreement) and Benghazi (Operation Bigamy). Operation Agreement was badly compromised from the start after a clash at a roadblock, and cost the lives of 750 men, the cruiser HMS Coventry and two destroyers with little to show for it. Bigamy was an attractive idea in theory, but ultimately turned out to be expensive and not worth the effort. Although the Long Range Desert Group did destroy twenty-five enemy aircraft at Barce, that was its only real success, and afterwards the Germans used second-line units to garrison their staging areas, freeing up first-class troops for the coming battle.17 Meanwhile, Rommel fell ill with stomach and liver complaints, high blood pressure, sinusitis and a sore throat, and so on 23 September he flew back to Germany for a long period of leave, passing on his command to an Eastern Front veteran, the obese and unfit General Georg Stumme. He was therefore not even in Africa on 23 October 1942, when Montgomery launched Operation Lightfoot, the first phase of the second battle of El Alamein.

  As we have already seen, after his fighting retreat of 400 miles earlier in the year Auchinleck had originally chosen El Alamein for his defensive lines because there was only a 40-mile gap between the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the impassable salt-marshes of the Qattara Depression, an area the size of Ulster, to the south. Yet this same narrowness now worked in Rommel’s favour, when he was forced on to the defensive by sheer weight of numbers. Whoever attacked at El Alamein, it was always going to be a battle of attrition rather than movement, far more reminiscent of the Western Front of the First World War than the sweeping Blitzkrieg manoeuvres of the Second.

  Montgomery hoped that the Germans would be distracted by a diversionary attack in the south of the battlefield by Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks’ XIII Corps, while full frontal infantry attacks by Lieutenant-General Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps towards the Miteiriya and Kidney Ridges in the north were exploited by the 1st and 10th Armoured Divisions of Lieutenant-General Herbert Lumsden’s X Corps driving through and rolling up the Axis defences from behind.

  The Axis front line was defended by vast minefields of between 5,000 and 9,000 feet in depth, comprising half a million mines and nicknamed the Devil’s Gardens by the Germans.18 Teller anti-tank mines, packing 11 pounds of TNT, destroyed vehicles but were not set off by infantrymen (though they were by camels), while the Springen mines sprang to midriff-height after being stepped on, before exploding with 360 ball bearings. Hidden beneath the sand, they were hard to detect even in daylight. Clearing a path through the minefields for the infantry would be sappers using detection equipment that was in its infancy and involved poking the sand with bayonets, often while under artillery, mortar, machine-gun or small-arms fire. The cool nerve of the Allied sappers at El Alamein was equal to anything seen in any theatre of the war.

  On 23 October, Stumme commanded some 50,000 German and 54,000 Italian troops, compared to Montgomery’s 195,000 mainly Commonwealth soldiers. The Eighth Army had eighty-five infantry battalions compared to the Africa Korps’ seventy-one (of which thirty-one were German), as well as 1,451 anti-tank guns to Rommel’s 800, and 908 first-class field and medium artillery pieces to about 500 Axis, of which 370 Italian guns were temperamental Great War pieces, and not up to the coming task.19 If one strips out the British light tanks, German Panzer Mark IIs and the Italian tanks, which Rommel called ‘decrepit and barely fit for action’, the figures for effective medium tanks at El Alamein were 910 Allied to 234 Axis, a ratio of four to one.20 The disparity is striking, and a testament to Allied interdiction of Axis reinforcement attempts, as well as to the massive reinforcement of the Allied forces via the Gulf of Aden.

  Although the morale of the Italians’ air force, armour, artillery and, especially, paratroopers was generally high, this was not true of their regular infantry, who made up the great majority of the 1.2 million Italians stationed on foreign soil in 1942. As had been seen earlier in the war, the Italians could fight bravely if properly officered, equipped, trained and fed, but this was rarely the case in the latter stages of the Desert War. Some Italians units, such as the small but all-volunteer Folgore (Lightning) paratrooper and Ariete armoured divisions,
were as solid as any on the battlefield. Rommel said of the Ariete that ‘We always asked them to do more than they practically could, and they always did.’ Nonetheless, some Italian infantry formations could not stand prolonged bombardment before they began to consider surrendering. Lack of food was also a major problem for the Italians, and as a history of El Alamein records: ‘The only fresh meat was provided by the occasional camel that strayed into one of the Devil’s Gardens and either set off a mine or came close enough to be shot.’21 Moreover, Italian tanks were generally too light and mechanically unreliable, much of their artillery was wildly inaccurate at over 5 miles’ range and their tanks’ wireless sets barely functioned when in motion.22

  ‘We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us,’ Churchill controversially told the House of Commons of Rommel on 27 January 1942, ‘and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.’23 (Churchill had used his maiden speech in 1900 to praise the Boers as fighting men too.) The way that Rommel attempted to stiffen the morale of the Italian infantry was to ‘corset’ them close to crack German units, so for example the Italian Bologna Division would be stationed near to the elite German Ramcke paratroops, while the Italian Trento Division would be interspersed with the 164th (Saxon) Light Division. Much the same thing had been done by the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo, when he had placed British regiments among Belgian and Dutch units of more doubtful quality.

  A vital aspect of the coming struggle was to be the air superiority that the Allies had by the time of Alam el Halfa established over the Luftwaffe, but which by the second battle of Alamein had almost turned into air supremacy. Montgomery attached Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham’s DAF headquarters to his own, and, although he gave him little credit in his writings later on, the two commands worked effectively together. The DAF could deploy 530 aircraft to the Luftwaffe’s 350, but it had an edge that the difference in numbers would not seem to justify, for during the battle the DAF flew 11,600 sorties against 3,100 by the Luftwaffe.24 By then the DAF consisted of nineteen British, nine South African, seven American and two Australian squadrons, including some supplied with Spitfires, which had begun to appear in Africa that March. By September 1942, the United States had also landed 1,500 aircraft in a theatre in which her ground forces were not yet engaged, and before Alamein the ratio of air reinforcement had been five to one in the Allies’ favour.25