There was a perceived romance about combat in the vast spaces of Libya, with headlong advances and retreats. Much anecdotage, sometimes reported in the British press, noted the Afrika Korps’ humane treatment of prisoners, and occasional truces between combatants for the recovery of wounded. ‘One enemy post was approached,’ wrote Australian Private Butler during the siege of Tobruk, ‘just in the act of drawing the pin [on a grenade] when a voice was heard from a sangar, “Stay Aussie – we have two wounded Diggers here” … The Aussies said the Germans had shot them and then went out at great personal risk, brought them in and dressed their wounds, gave them hot coffee and then sent for their medical assistance. Thank God there is chivalry.’ Likewise, a participant recorded a halt in fighting while both sides recovered their wounded: ‘Men of both armies stood up under an astonished sun. The absolute stillness almost tinkled with tension … It was the more incredible in contrast with the fury of the night … The truce was as if two armoured combatants had paused and raised their visors, and for a moment one had glimpsed the human faces behind the steel.’ After one failed German attack an Australian wrote: ‘We were sitting up on the parapet, waving and singing to them. There were shouts of “Heil Hitler.” “How would a pint of beer go, mate?” “Have another go tonight,” and many other remarks not so complimentary.’
As Sergeant Sam Bradshaw searched for the rest of his tank squadron during the shambles of Crusader, he glimpsed an enemy soldier limping beside the sandy track.
I drew alongside and called out, ‘Are you Italian?’ He replied, in very good English, ‘No, I’m not a bloody Italian, I’m a German,’ obviously annoyed at the suggestion. He was wounded, so I gave him a lift on the tank [and] a drink of water. He gave me a Capstan cigarette. ‘We got one of your supply columns,’ he said. We saw some German armoured cars about 1,000 yards away and he rolled off the tank and hobbled towards them. My gunner traversed on to him and I shouted on the intercom ‘Don’t fire – let him go.’ He turned around and saluted and called out cheekily, ‘I’ll see you in London.’ I called back, ‘Make it Berlin.’
There were disadvantages, however, to this ‘civilised’ approach to making war. Allied troops who regarded their tactical position as hopeless saw little risk and no shame in surrendering, rather than fight to the death or submit themselves to a waterless desert. British commanders, and their superiors in London, became increasingly dismayed by local capitulations and the allegedly excessive sporting spirit of the campaign.
Eighth Army comprised a remarkable range of national contingents. Its New Zealand division – later a corps – was recognised as outstanding, reflecting all its nation’s virtues of resolution and self-reliance. Two Australian divisions were also highly rated, especially after the legend was established of ‘the Diggers” stand at Tobruk. A German officer shouted indignantly at a prisoner: ‘You are an Australian and you come all the way over here to fight for the filthy, bloody English!’ War correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote of ‘men from the dockside of Sydney and the sheep-stations of the Riverina [who] presented such a picture of downright toughness with their gaunt dirty faces, huge boots, revolvers stuffed in their pockets, gripping their rifles with huge, shapeless hands, shouting and grinning – always grinning’. Notoriously ill-disciplined out of the line, and sometimes poorly officered, they deserved their formidable reputation, especially for night operations. ‘The Australians regarded themselves as the best fighters in the world,’ wrote a British officer. ‘They were.’ He added that their units were held together by ‘mateship’, almost always a stronger motivation for successful soldiers than any abstract cause.
Opinions about the South African component of Auchinleck’s army were more equivocal. On good days it was good, but on bad ones the division did not impress. The same might be said of Indian units: the Indian Army sometimes displayed remarkable courage and fighting skill, but its performance was uneven. The British justly esteemed the prowess of their beloved Gurkhas, but not every man or battalion excelled. For all white officers’ complacency about their men’s loyalty to the King Emperor, the Indian Army was a force of mercenaries. Among Eighth Army’s British formations, 7th Armoured Division – ‘the Desert Rats’ – was deemed an elite. The Germans regarded British artillery with unfailing respect. But the old cavalry regiments, now uneasily translated from horses to tanks, were prone to displays of mindless courage which evoked their worst traditions.
An important difficulty persisted until the late summer of 1942: Eighth Army’s fighting men had little confidence in their higher commanders. The colonial contingents, especially, believed that their lives were being risked, and sometimes sacrificed, in pursuit of ill-conceived plans and purposes. There was bitter resentment about the huge ‘tail’ of the army, indulging a privileged lifestyle in Egypt while fighting soldiers endured constant privation ‘up the desert’. A British gunner wrote sourly: ‘I came to realise that, for every man sweating it out in the muck and dust of the Western Desert, there were twenty bludging and skiving in the wine bars and restaurants, night-clubs and brothels and sporting clubs and racetracks of Cairo.’ Another cynical soldier wrote the song of this tribe:
We never went west of Gezira,
We never went north of the Nile,
We never went past the Pyramids
Out of sight of the Sphinx’s smile.
We fought the war in Shepheard’s and the Continental Bar,
We reserved our punch for the Turf Club lunch
And they gave us the Africa Star.
Britain’s prime minister shared that soldier’s disgust. An elaborate support system was essential to sustain Eighth Army in a country lacking its own industrial infrastructure. But Churchill fumed about the extravagant manpower committed to logistical and administrative rather than combat functions.
The men who fought the desert war suffered fewer hardships than those serving in Russia, Burma or the Pacific, but water shortage imposed chronic discomfort. ‘The flies plague us in millions from the first hour in the morning,’ wrote an Italian officer. ‘The sand always seems to be in our mouths, in our hair and in our clothes, and it is impossible to get cool.’ Armoured officer Pietro Ostellino wrote in August: ‘Even the climate has begun to make us lose hope. All day we suffer an infernal heat while the shade is rendered useless by a constant suffocating wind. It seems as though the valley has become a furnace. After eight in the evening the wind drops, but … we suffocate.’ In their tanks, the temperature often rose above 40 or 50 degrees Celsius. Opening hatches merely allowed sand and dust to swirl in.
British soldiers received a water ration of two pints a day, together with copious issues of tea brewed in old fuel tins on fires of mingled petrol and sand. They ate chiefly bully beef, biscuits and canned fruit. The Germans rejoiced in captures of Eighth Army rations, which they preferred to their own, especially the generous issues of cigarettes. ‘We … slowly make ourselves become Tommies,’ wrote Wolfgang Everth wryly during one of Rommel’s advances. ‘Our vehicles, petrol, rations and clothing were all English. I … breakfasted off two tins of milk, a tin of pineapple, biscuits and Ceylon tea.’
Men learned that the desert was perilously nuanced terrain on which to move and fight. ‘Smooth yellow sand, attractive to the uninitiated, was deadly,’ wrote a British officer. ‘Unless it was of short duration and taken at speed the truck would bog to the axles. Pebbly going was usually good, but sometimes it was a deceptive crust with soft sand underneath which only the experienced eye could detect at a distance. In some places the desert was smooth and firm as a race-track for miles on end and in every direction; in others it was treacherous as treacle.’ Both sides were sometimes confused by their enemies’ use of captured transport. Again and again, British troops received unwelcome surprises from approaching British vehicles and even tanks which proved to be driven by Rommel’s men. The Italian Bologna Division was panicked one day by the sight of a column of British trucks in their midst, until they discovered that i
t carried Germans.
Between offensives, there were long intervals of boredom, training and preparation. ‘The chief occupation of soldiers in wartime is hanging around doing nothing, though preferably purposefully,’ wrote a British soldier. Men dug incessantly, laid minefields, patrolled and conducted sniping duels. They suffered from desert sores, jaundice, dysentery. Both sides learned to curse khamsins, sandstorms that reduced vision to a few yards and drove yellow grit into every crevice of vehicles, equipment and human bodies. Italians called them ghibli. Pietro Ostellino wrote home: ‘You would think it impossible to take two and a half hours to cover the two hundred metres which separated the mess from my tent but that is the truth. I have never seen a night so dark: you stopped for a moment to clear your eyes and immediately lost your bearings. When finally I got to my tent I found everything under five centimetres of sand. At any moment, the canvas seemed likely to blow away.’
Even during long lulls between battles there were few diversions save the arrival of mail, every soldier’s obsession. Many men wrote home almost daily, because there was nothing else to do. The act of writing maintained a link with their other lives which became ever more precious as the passage of months extended into years. Eighth Army’s soldiers were granted occasional brief leaves in Cairo, a city they learned to hate. Olivia Manning, who later became famous as author of The Balkan Trilogy, arrived there as a refugee from Greece in April 1941: ‘The unreality had something to do with the light … It was too white. It flattened everything. It drained the colour out of everything. It lay on things like dust … we were shocked by the colourless summer delta. The squalor of the delta shocked us horribly – not only the squalor, the people’s contentment with squalor. For weeks we lived in a state of recoil.’
Having been abroad since 1939, Manning gazed curiously at the throng of British soldiers in the streets: ‘Sweat shining, hair bleached to sameness, the pink burn of English skin disguising differences; much of a size, not tall … Their worn, thin, washed-out khaki was wrinkled with heat. Dark patches of sweat showed between their shoulder blades and under their arms.’ Officers found consolations in the smart rendezvous of Egypt: ‘Groppi’s at Cairo and Pastroudi’s at Alexandria stay in the mind,’ wrote one. ‘There is a splendid decadence in having morning coffees and éclairs amid gilt mirrors and all the kitsch of affluence.’ Other ranks, however, knew only Cairo’s sordid bars and brothels, which inflicted alarming disease rates on Eighth Army.
For Mussolini’s soldiers, from the outset the North African campaign was a nightmare. The usual hazards of war were rendered almost unendurable by Italian shortages of food, ammunition, vehicles, medical supplies and belief in their cause. A transport driver, Vittorio Vallicella, kept a diary which is an unflagging tale of woe. The campaign was hopeless, he said, ‘not because of our incompetence or the enemy’s courage, but because the other side was so much better organised’. He added bitterly: ‘This is “the war of the poor” wished upon us by the Fascist hierarchy, comfortably ensconced in Rome’s Palazzo Venezia.’
Vallicella claimed to have seen only one Italian ambulance in all his time in Africa; he complained bitterly of lack of leadership at every level, from supreme headquarters in Rome down to his own unit’s officers: ‘How many times have we veterans saved their bacon. Our ally’s divisions are much more aggressive, with vastly superior fire power and manoeuvrability, led by officers who really lead. Many of our own officers have been sent home wounded or sick.’ Italian soldiers resented the disparity between their meagre rations – soup, bread, a little jam, the occasional lemon – and those of officers, who enjoyed wine and mineral water flown in from Italy. They cherished rare glimpses of home comforts, such as a visit from Red Cross girls bringing parcels sent by well-wishers at home: ‘After nearly twenty months it is wonderful to see these lovely women bringing useful gifts.’
Their best source of decent food, however, was the enemy: ‘For those lucky enough to return alive from a night patrol there was booty: jars of jam and fruit, packets of biscuits and tea, tins of corned beef, bottles of liqueurs, cigarettes, sugar, coffee, shirts, trousers, casual shoes, towels, lavatory paper, medicines like aspirin and quinine, condensed milk, jerseys made from real wool, compasses and every other kind of equipment under the sun. Such things never featured in our own supplies.’ When Vallicella caught malaria, he prayed that it might be something worse, to justify his repatriation to Italy – and was disappointed. Where most men thrilled to receive mail from home, he was dismayed to learn from his family letters that those at home knew little about ‘the hell we were in’. He was rash enough to voice aloud the view that without armour and rations it was impossible to fight, which caused him to be threatened with a firing squad. Only the intervention of his colonel saved his life.
Wavell began the Middle East war with 80,000 troops under his command. By the time Auchinleck, his successor, launched Operation Crusader in November 1941, he fielded 750,000, albeit most committed to garrison, logistical and support tasks across the theatre. After pushing Rommel back to El Agheila, the British anticipated a lull, and set about refitting their armoured units. But the Axis forces, having escaped destruction, regrouped with remarkable speed. When Pietro Ostellino emerged from the long and bloody Crusader mêlée, ‘I had the pleasant surprise of finding my kit, which I thought had fallen into English hands. It was aboard a truck which managed to escape the enemy encirclement. I finally got to sleep on my camp bed. I was in tatters after ten days without even washing my hands. I got rid of all the dirt as well as lice – some of these are still with me, but a little petrol should get rid of them. Clean, I feel a new man.’
Most of the Axis army shared Ostellino’s reinvigoration. On 21 January 1942, the British were rudely surprised when Rommel launched a new offensive, with devastating effect. Within three weeks he advanced almost three hundred miles eastwards before familiar logistical problems obliged him to halt. Neil Ritchie, now Eighth Army’s commander, set about creating strong defensive positions – the so-called Gazala Line, based upon brigade ‘boxes’ protected by mines and wire. He intended Rommel to dissipate his strength assaulting these, then to commit British armour, as usual superior in numbers, to press his advantage.
This gambit failed miserably: Ritchie had neglected to study his enemy’s commitment to deep penetration and flanking operations. When Rommel attacked on 26 May, Ritchie’s ‘boxes’ proved too widely separated to provide mutual support. For some days a Free French brigade staunchly defended the southernmost, at Bir Hacheim, but was then forced to withdraw. German armour manoeuvred with its usual skill: ‘We could never fire more than a couple of shots at any one tank before it was hidden by dust and the Germans were keeping just outside our range,’ wrote a frustrated British tank officer. Then his squadron was ordered to charge. ‘Ten to one we don’t make it,’ muttered a tank commander. He noted the look of disgust on his loader’s face as the man thrust another round into the smoking breech – he had been married a few weeks before leaving England. ‘I felt sorry for him.’ Then they began to fire: ‘Driver left-halt. Two-pounder traverse right – steady, on. Three hundred, fire!’ Within seconds of their own shot, in the words of the tank commander,
there was a tremendous crash. I felt a sharp pain in my right leg, heard the operator groaning, and said, ‘Driver, advance.’ Nothing happened. The shell, an 88mm, had exploded in his stomach … At the time I realised only that the engine had stopped, the Tannoy internal communication set had broken down, air was escaping from the high pressure pipes and clouds of acrid smoke were coming up from inside. It all happened in a moment. Then we were out of the tank and running towards another one. It was our squadron leader, who had stopped to rescue us; my gunner was already on the tank, the operator had disappeared on another, but I could only hobble because my leg wobbled uncontrollably beneath my weight. I was terrified they would go without me. The Germans shelled me as I ran. The ground opened up at my feet and I staggered as the blast struck me
, but I was not hurt. I hurled myself onto the tank, dizzy and exhausted as we moved off to safety. The gunner was beside me smiling cheerfully though his right arm was smashed to bits below the elbow. Bones gleamed white through the blood and his fingers dangled on shreds of skin. He was bleeding badly so we fixed up a tourniquet and I gave him my syringe of morphia. We talked about going home.
At a field hospital, he recovered consciousness after an operation to hear falling bombs and the terrific din of Tobruk’s anti-aircraft guns. ‘There were so many wounded that the floor was covered with patients on stretchers, the reek of anaesthetic filled the air and people were groaning or shouting in delirium as they died. The heat and stuffiness were quite appalling. My right leg was in plaster to the hip, the other was smothered in dried blood. There were no sheets and the blankets scratched.’
Both sides suffered heavy tank losses in confused fighting around ‘the Cauldron’ in the centre of the British line, but by 30 May the Germans had gained a decisive advantage. The British were forced into headlong retreat. A South African and Indian force was left to defend Tobruk, while the remainder of Eighth Army fell back into Egypt. Rommel bypassed Tobruk, then on 20 June turned and assaulted its defences from the rear, where the line was weakest, and soon broke through. The South African commander, Maj. Gen. Hendrik Klopper, surrendered next morning. By nightfall on the 21st, all resistance had ended. More than 30,000 prisoners fell into Axis hands. Only a few units made good their escape to Eighth Army.
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