Neither Churchill nor his people doubted the dominant importance of the struggle in Russia, but North African operations mattered much to British self-respect. In the winter of 1942–43, these also offered an important, probably indispensable opportunity for some US formations to gain combat experience, and for curbing the hubris of their generals. During much of the preceding year, however, it seemed doubtful that the British could even hold Egypt. MP Harold Nicolson wrote: ‘A whisper is going round that our troops do not fight well … Our men cannot stand up to punishment. And yet they are the same men as man the merchant ships and who won the Battle of Britain. There is something deeply wrong with the whole morale of our Army.’ Churchill told a secret session of the Commons debating the desert campaign: ‘The conduct of our large army … does not seem to have been in harmony with the past or present spirit of our forces.’ Following the ignominious surrender of Tobruk on 21 June, Auchinleck dismissed Ritchie, his field commander, and took personal charge of Eighth Army. But at the end of the month, beaten at Mersa Matruh, his battered formations retreated yet again, to the El Alamein line inside Egypt.
British fortunes were at their lowest ebb. It was widely agreed that desert generalship and tactics in the first six months of 1942 had been deplorable, the Gazala battles scandalously mishandled. Morale was wretched. It seemed plausible to both sides that Rommel might reach Cairo, and Egypt be lost to the Allies. The strategic impact of such a blow would have been limited, because the Axis lacked resources for exploitation. But the cost to British prestige, already badly tarnished, would have been appalling. Panic swept Egypt, and the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet quit Alexandria. Lt. Pietro Ostellino wrote exultantly to his wife on 2 July 1942, in a letter that emphasised residual fascist enthusiasm among some Italians who clung to hopes of military success: ‘Things here get better and better. As you will have heard from the radio and newspapers, the English and their allies are taking such a beating that they will find it difficult to raise their heads again. They deserve it! Our soldiers are simply marvellous. We cannot fail to be victorious now.’
Washington agreed. The leaders of the US Army believed, and continued to assume until late autumn, that the British campaign was lost; that Eighth Army had shown itself fatally inferior to the Afrika Korps, which was destined to sweep onward and seize the Nile Delta. 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. To the shame of the Mandate authorities there, several hundred Jews fleeing Egypt who applied for sanctuary, including some working for the British, were refused entry visas. Officials asserted blandly that they were unable to breach immigration quotas.
Yet the British predicament was not as bad as they themselves supposed. Some civilians, even in occupied Europe, made shrewder deductions from meagre and deceitful Nazi bulletins than did Allied soldiers on the battlefield. Victor Klemperer, the great Dresden Jewish diarist, wrote on 8 July 1942: ‘I assume that England and Russia exaggerate by 100 per cent, Goebbels and Co by 200 per cent … In Russia Hitler’s victories are killing him; in Egypt he really could win. But … Rommel appears to have been brought up short before Alexandria.’ Klemperer was right: Rommel’s condition was unenviable. The outnumbered Axis army stood at the end of a tenuous 1,500-mile supply line. Allocations of fuel and weapons from Germany were always inadequate. Empowered by Ultra decrypts, the Royal Navy and the RAF began to inflict heavy attrition on fuel, tank and ammunition shipments across the Mediterranean.
The RAF in North Africa gained strength, while the Luftwaffe weakened; the first American Grant tanks, almost a match for Rommel’s panzers, reached Eighth Army. Strategically, it would have profited the Germans to withdraw to a line inside Libya, easing their own supply difficulties and increasing those of the British. Whatever delusions Rommel’s soldiers cherished, his army lacked strength to make a final push for Alexandria with a realistic prospect of success. But vanity and ambition often caused ‘the Desert Fox’ to overreach himself, and Hitler urged ill-judged aggression upon the Afrika Korps even more insistently than Churchill pressed his own commanders.
Auchinleck was well placed to frustrate Axis purposes, merely by holding his ground. American and British forces were to land at the opposite end of North Africa in November – Operation Torch – and this made it unnecessary for Eighth Army to take risks. Once the Allies established themselves in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, Rommel’s position in Egypt would become untenable. But as autumn approached, the success of Torch seemed ill-assured, especially in Washington. For the British, there was also the imperative of national prestige. Since 1939 Churchill’s armies had suffered repeated defeats – indeed humiliations – often by smaller enemy forces. Spirits at home were low. Churchill’s people had grown morbidly sensitive about the contrast between the heroic struggle waged by the Russians and their own nation’s feeble battlefield showing. A British victory was desperately needed, and only in the desert was this attainable. The defeat of the Afrika Korps in Egypt was scarcely relevant to the war’s outcome, but had become an issue of the highest moral importance, and perceived as such by the prime minister.
On 1 July, when the Germans attacked again, they were repulsed in what became known as the First Battle of El Alamein. In the encounters which followed, neither side gained a decisive advantage. But what mattered was that Rommel was denied a breakthrough – although, given the opposing forces’ respective strengths and detailed Allied foreknowledge of German intentions, it would have been disgraceful had he achieved one. In the first days of August Churchill arrived in Cairo with Alan Brooke, to see for himself how things stood. He sacked Auchinleck, who was replaced as Eighth Army commander by Brooke’s nominee, Lt. Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery, and as Middle East C-in-C by Gen. Sir Harold Alexander. A month later, on 30 August, Rommel attacked at Alam Halfa. Montgomery, provided by Ultra with full details of German plans, drove him back. The general then addressed himself to training Britain’s troops for his own offensive. He had the critical advantages that large US tank reinforcements were arriving, and the Desert Air Force had gained dominance of the sky.
The volume of Ultra intelligence was now increasing dramatically, with critical influence in every theatre. In earlier years, decrypts were priceless, especially to the naval war, but their flow was erratic. From mid-1942 onwards, with a few important breaks, the Allies became privy to much of their enemies’ signal traffic; the penetration of German and Japanese ciphers made a massive contribution to victory. Beyond the achievements of British and American decrypters, it was a secondary miracle that the Axis powers never seriously suspected that their most secret communications were being accessed by the enemy. Not all important traffic was read all the time: Axis telephone landlines, always the link of choice where available, remained secure. The quality of Allied analysis and exploitation varied in accordance with the prejudices of field commanders and their intelligence chiefs. For instance, Ultra would later reveal the December 1944 German armoured build-up in the Ardennes, but staffs failed to draw appropriate conclusions about an impending offensive. Knowing the enemy’s hand did not of itself diminish the strength of his cards, and provided no guarantee of success in clashes between armies and fleets. But Ultra revealed to the Allies more about what the other side was doing and planning than had been vouchsafed to any previous combatants in history.
The Ultra achievement owed much to three Polish mathematicians, led by Marian Rejewski, who conducted critical early work on the German Enigma between 1932 and 1939, after acquiring a commercial example of the ciphering machine. The French assisted, providing the Poles with a list of 1931 Wehrmacht keys, acquired from a German source. Though Rejewski served with the Polish Army in Britain between 1943 and 1945, he was never told of the rich fruits of his pioneering achievements. In 1939 the Poles presented both the British and the French with reconstructed Enigm
a machines. The following year, these enabled the British Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to begin to break some German and Italian messages. At intervals thereafter, captures at sea of further Enigmas and monthly settings lists reinforced Bletchley’s armoury of knowledge.
Ultra was a collective Allied designation for a large variety of Axis keys, more than two hundred by 1945, some of which proved slow to surrender their secrets. Luftwaffe signals were broken first, towards the end of May 1940, followed by army and navy traffic. In 1941, a substantial volume of Wehrmacht messages were being read and their contents passed to Allied field commanders with an average delay of six hours. This proved too slow usefully to influence tactical decisions in ground fighting. It became progressively understood that Ultra could be used most effectively to guide strategy, as it was during the summer 1942 Alamein battles.
Allied handling of Ultra intelligence became superbly sophisticated, with information passed to commanders by locally deployed Special Liaison Units whose role was not merely to protect secrecy, but also to ensure that no initiative or pre-emption of German action revealed Allied foreknowledge. If a prospective naval target was located at sea through cryptanalysis, whenever possible reconnaissance aircraft overflew the enemy before an attack, to mask Ultra’s role. From 1942 onwards, Bletchley Park became an industrial centre, with 6,000 staff working in a hutted township, processing a flood of messages in shifts around the clock. The heart of its operation was Colossus, the electronic ‘bombe’ which dramatically speeded exploration of multiple mathematical possibilities. The codebreaking teams were dominated by some hundreds of brilliant academics, most of them mathematicians and German-speakers. The most influential personalities, both in their early thirties, were Alan Turing, sometimes described as the father of the computer, and Gordon Welchman. Some young men performing vital, and perforce absolutely secret, roles at Bletchley were chided by outsiders for their absence from the front. One received a letter from his former headmaster, asserting that his doggedly civilian status disgraced his old school.
The picture of enemy operations provided by Ultra was always incomplete, but it offered a reliability no human intelligence, or ‘humint’, provided by spies could match. For instance, the Allies could launch D-Day on 6 June 1944 confident that the enemy was still oblivious of their objective and timing. Churchill permitted some Ultra information about the Eastern Front to be passed to Moscow. Stalin was never officially informed of the Bletchley Park operation, but Moscow was well briefed by British traitors, who supplied their NKVD handlers in London with a steady flow of decrypts.
Full Anglo–American intelligence-sharing began only in 1943. The United States had broken the Japanese diplomatic cipher before the war, but their handling of Ultra never matched the inter-service integration achieved by the British, partly because of army–navy rivalry. The US Army ran its own decryption operation at Arlington Hall, Virginia, eventually employing 7,000 staff. The USN team, based in bleak subterranean quarters at Fourteenth Naval District, Pearl Harbor, was led by Commander Joseph Rochefort, the brilliant Japanese-speaker, cryptanalyst and intuitive thinker who contributed so much to victory at Midway. Rochefort’s men read some messages in the Japanese navy’s JN-25 operational cipher soon after the outbreak of war, and achieved fragmentary breaks at vital moments in 1942, which proved the most important Ultra achievements of the Pacific war. Thereafter, however, for some months JN-25 defied Rochefort’s team, leaving naval intelligence dependent upon coast-watchers and traffic analysis. In 1943 the operational code was again broken, and provided a stream of data for the rest of the war.
Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall played key roles in breaking Japanese army codes in 1943, the first being that of military attachés overseas. Captures of Japanese codebooks laid open bulk military signal traffic in 1944. Whereas in January that year Arlington Hall read fewer than 2,000 of the enemy’s army messages, in March this increased to 36,000, decisively influencing MacArthur’s New Guinea strategy. Interception of Japanese communications faltered during the 1944–45 Philippines campaign, when the army’s main codes changed, causing a further break in decryption. In general, US naval operations were more importantly influenced by Ultra than were those of the armies in the Pacific campaigns. No codebreaking achievement could eliminate the difficulties of assaulting strongly defended enemy positions. But the collective contribution of US and British cryptanalysts to the war effort was greater than that of any other such small body of men in history. Their operations provided the supreme example of the Western Allies’ imaginative integration into the war effort of their cleverest civilian intellects.
In the autumn of 1942, Churchill was passionately impatient for Eighth Army to attack. Once the Torch landings took place, the glory of every subsequent British success would be shared with the Americans. Alexander and Montgomery were relentlessly chivvied from London, though the foxy little field commander stuck to his own timetable. A cold, incisive, self-consciously professional soldier, ‘Monty’ was determined to impose on British operations an order and discipline which had hitherto been absent. He has sometimes and not unjustly been described as ‘a good World War I general’, most comfortable with limited set-piece operations. His most conspicuous attribute was ‘grip’: between August and October 1942, in a remarkable fashion he revived the confidence of the desert army. Reinforcements now gave the British a decisive advantage: Eighth Army deployed 195,000 men against 104,000 Germans and Italians, 1,029 tanks against 489, 750 aircraft against 675, and enjoyed a massive superiority of artillery.
Keith Douglas, traversing the rear areas of Eighth Army to join an armoured regiment, was fascinated by the spectacle of men and machines massing in the sands for battle: ‘Lorries appeared like ships, plunging their bows into drifts of dust and rearing up suddenly over crests like waves. Their wheels were continually hidden in dust-clouds: the ordinary sand being pulverized by so much traffic into a substance almost liquid, sticky to the touch, into which the feet of men sank almost to the knees. Every man had a white mask of dust in which, if he wore no goggles, his eyes showed like a clown’s eyes.’
On the other side of the hill, Rommel’s army inhabited the same environment, but was prey to increasing gloom about its predicament. It bears emphasis that its most numerous component was Italian, not German, and like most of his countrymen, Vittorio Vallicella was dejected: ‘We are stuck in this desolate plain of El Alamein, tired, hungry, with little water, filthy and full of lice. We know that our Great Leader [Mussolini] is 660 kms from the front, furious because we have been unable to open the gates of Alexandria for him … For 16 months we have led this life: kept going with a canteen of water (if lucky); at the mercy of fleas and lice. Maybe at this point we can only hope that a bomb takes us out and puts an end to our suffering.’ He recorded a comrade’s suicide as the seventeenth in his unit since March 1941. The RAF strafed constantly: during one attack, Vallicella’s companions were rash enough to seek cover under a vehicle which suffered a direct hit, killing them all. The ‘bomb-happy’ Vallicella gained a respite of a few hours’ sleep in a German field hospital before being sent back into the line.
The Italian army’s supply system had collapsed, leaving its men dependent on German largesse. The Afrika Korps was irked by Italian scrounging, to which Vallicella and his comrades responded by resort to ‘arrangiarsi’, loosely translatable as ‘every man for himself’. ‘What will become of us?’ mused the soldier. ‘How can we keep fighting so far from our supply bases and at the mercy of air attack? Not a week goes by when our supply columns are not machine-gunned and destroyed. Lack of water, food, arms, drives our morale to rock bottom.’ Many Italian soldiers were subsisting entirely on canned and dried food. After the first week, Vallicella wrote: ‘We are at the end of our tether; if our logistics have always been inadequate, now they scarcely exist.’ He and his comrades roamed the battlefield, scavenging food and water, draining fuel from the tanks of wrecked vehicles. The Folgore Division su
ffered shocking casualties: ‘Those young men supported only by mortars and the odd machine-gun wrote a page of history. Hundreds were wiped out for a regime that didn’t even know how to provide them with the equipment they needed to fight.’
Meanwhile, in the British camp, as Alamein began Lt. Norman Craig reflected on the challenge of junior leadership: ‘Before an attack fear is universal. The popular belief that in battle there are two kinds of person – the sensitive, who suffer torment, and the unimaginative few who know no fear and go blithely on – is a fallacy. Everyone was as scared as the next man, for no imagination was needed to foresee the possibility of death or mutilation. It was just that some managed to conceal their fear better than others. Officers could not afford to show their feelings as openly as the men; they had more need to dissemble. In a big battle a subaltern had little or no influence over the fate of his platoon – it was the plaything of the gods. His role was essentially histrionic. He had to feign a casual and cheerful optimism to create an illusion of normality and make it seem as if there was nothing in the least strange about the outrageous things one was asked to do. Only in this way could he ease the tension, quell any panic and convince his men that everything would come out right in the end. Inwardly I marvelled that they did not take to their heels. They grumbled and looked apprehensive, but nothing more … [The NCOs were thinking] “If an officer can do it, we damn well can.” The men looked to the NCOs and said, “We’ll go wherever the bloody corporals go.” Thus an army stands firm.’
All Hell Let Loose Page 50