Where the Hell Have You Been?

by Tom Carver

  *

  Monty did not allow anyone from the family, not even David, to attend her funeral. A single photo is all that remains of that day; it shows Monty walking back to his staff car from the graveside. He carries the air of a ghost, gaunt and withdrawn as if his soul had been ripped out. He returned to the empty house in Portsmouth and shut the door. “The funeral is over,” he wrote to Richard on 21st October 1937. “I sat in the room at the hospital until they came to screw the lid on the coffin. I kissed her dear face for the last time just before the lid was put on. I tried hard to bear up at the service and at the graveside. But I could not bear it and I am afraid I broke down utterly. I feel desperately lonely and sad. I suppose in time I shall get over it, but at present it seems that I never shall.”

  For four days Monty refused to see anyone. Betty’s death had caught him completely off guard. The man who prepared for every eventuality so meticulously had not foreseen the biggest tragedy of his life, though he’d had plenty of warning. Betty was the only person who ever loved him unreservedly, giving him love that had been denied by the cruel Maud. She didn’t find his eccentricities exasperating, she charmed his superiors and tempered his overbearing manner by teasing, she brought laughter into his khaki world and stopped his obsessive tendencies from veering into something more extreme. And now she was gone.

  Then at one o’clock one morning he called his brigade major and told him to have all his papers on his desk at nine. From that moment on, he sunk himself into his work. Without Betty there were to be no more distractions in his life.

  Extracts from Monty’s letter to Richard, October 1937

  By the time he received Monty’s letter, Richard already knew that his mother was dead. A telegram had found Richard two weeks earlier, in the officers’ mess in Bangalore where he was living, stating simply, “Mummy died peacefully today. Pneumonia. Monty.”

  3.

  THE WEEKS THAT followed Gott’s plane crash in the desert were a time of extreme pressure for Monty. As the fifth general in charge of the Eighth Army, everyone was looking to him to somehow staunch the haemorrhaging of defeat. Churchill badgered him to go on the offensive as fast as possible against Rommel. The chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, and the entire British military establishment appeared to be holding their breath, waiting for something to happen. But Monty was capable of extraordinary stubbornness. He would not be rushed, even by the Prime Minister.

  He found himself in command of a strange stew of British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian forces. At the first meeting with his senior staff on 13th August 1942, he declared:

  “I have ordered that all plans and instructions dealing with further withdrawal are to be burnt, and at once. We will stand and fight here. If we can’t stay here alive, then let us stay here dead… I have little more to say just at present. And some of you may think it is quite enough and may wonder if I am mad.”

  He paused and studied the 60 officers standing in front of him in the desert evening light.

  “…I assure you I am quite sane. I understand there are people who often think I am slightly mad; so often that I now regard it as rather a compliment. All I have to say is that if I am slightly mad, there are a large number of people I could name who are raving lunatics!”

  He scorned the rigid dress codes of the Army Handbook; he rarely wore a tie or badge of rank. Sometimes he would turn up in an Australian bushwhacker’s broad-rimmed hat, at other times he wore a beret with two cap badges on it instead of the regulation one. He was both disliked and admired by his peers in the army. He had no interest in belonging to any of their clubs or in playing polo, the game of British army officers; he neither drank nor smoked and made no attempt to endear himself in the officers’ mess.

  He was most at home with soldiers, easily overcoming the class barrier that separated most British generals from other ranks. He was a natural showman and was always happy to jump on the bonnet of a jeep and explain to a group of soldiers how he was going to knock Rommel “out of Africa”.

  When Churchill visited Monty a few days after he had taken up his command, he found his habits quite baffling. They toured the Eighth Army’s positions and stopped to have lunch with one of Monty’s junior commanders. While Churchill and the commander dug into a three-course lunch with wine, Monty insisted on staying in his car where he ate some sandwiches that had been prepared for him by his batman and drank lemonade from a flask. When Churchill asked him afterwards why he’d refused to join them, Monty explained that he never accepted hospitality from a subordinate commaxnder on principle.

  Churchill wondered if his eccentricities might be verging on the insane, but in time he came to see the value of having a general who cared little for how the world viewed him. If he is disagreeable to those about him, he commented, imagine how much more disagreeable he is to the enemy.

  North Africa was a unique theatre of war. There was none of the ferment of ideology that existed in northern Europe. In North Africa the desert was flat, even and empty like a giant playing field so that each battle felt not unlike a sports match; a trial of military strength unconfused by the warp of politics. The German commander, Erwin Rommel, was a professional soldier who was interested in winning battles but not in propagating Nazism. Even on the coast where the fighting occurred there were barely any towns or civilians. The only non-combatants that most soldiers ever saw were the occasional bands of Tuareg tribesmen who continued to criss-cross the Sahara on their camel trains, unaware of the existence of Adolf Hitler or a world war.

  Each night soldiers from opposing armies would lie on their backs, separated by only a few miles, and stare up at the same field of stars that stretched uninterrupted from horizon to horizon, listening to the silence. “Lily Marlene”, the German song, became popular with the British soldiers after they heard it being played by their German counterparts. Everyone felt the presence of the vast emptiness of sand.

  In this world where all there was to do was to prepare and fight battles, Monty could not have been happier. Like Rommel, Monty was uninterested in politics; soldiering was a vocation to him. In his caravan on the beach at Burg-el-Arab he pinned the picture of Rommel by Willrich above his desk and studied his enemy. The painting – the same one that I stared at 25 years later – shows Rommel dressed in a greatcoat of grey. Tank goggles are pushed back on his head and the Iron Cross hangs around his neck. His expression betrays no hostility – it is the direct stare of the desert fox, determined to survive.

  *

  Rommel had no intention of allowing his new opponent time to settle in. On 31st August, eighteen days after Monty had arrived in the desert, Rommel unleashed his panzer divisions on a long sweep around the thinly protected British southern flank. His plan was to lure the British out of their positions and force them to fight the kind of fast, mobile battle which the Deutsches Afrika Korps excelled at. Once they’d won, he would drive north towards the sea, cutting off the Eighth Army from its supplies, and the road to Cairo would be his.

  Auchinleck, Monty’s predecessor, had anticipated this possibility and had ordered deep minefields to be laid in the south. Just before the attack, the Ultra code-breakers picked up Rommel’s intentions and Monty hurriedly reinforced the high ridge on his southern flank known as Alam El Halfa with anti-tank guns, artillery and any spare Grant tanks that he could find. To lure Rommel’s forces within range of his guns, he intentionally left a gap in the minefields below the ridgeline.

  Rommel launched the attack under a full moon. The minefields slowed the advance and soon the German and Italian troops became bogged down. Eventually he gave up trying to break through and wheeled his panzer divisions around to attack the positions on the ridge. He had to get the British off the ridge and into the open. But Monty was waiting for them. The code-breakers in England had given Monty the time he needed to prepare. The German armoured vehicles were picked off by the British anti-tank guns and the RAF desert air force.

  On 3rd Septe
mber, after four days of being forced to fight on ground of British choosing, Rommel realised his plan had failed and pulled back. Monty had had his first encounter with the enemy and survived. Immediately morale improved. In his diary, he described his success at holding back Rommel’s assault in terms of a tennis match. “I feel I have won the first game – when it was his service. Next time it will be my service, the score being one-love.”

  His confidence boosted, Monty ignored Churchill’s impatient hectoring and settled down to prepare his forces for the offensive. He built up large reserves of fuel and ammunition; 300 of the latest US Sherman tanks arrived by sea; training exercises were held night and day to familiarise the troops with their new vehicles. He reinforced the artillery batteries on the heights of Alam El Halfa, and forced the air and army headquarters to integrate into a single command, copying the Germans who had used combined air and armour attacks to devastating effect. Meanwhile, Monty travelled from unit to unit, standing in the turret of his armoured car, handing out cigarettes and giving impromptu pep talks.

  “Radiate confidence,” he would tell his headquarters staff. “That’s the first duty of a top commander.”

  *

  In October 1942 my father left the Staff College at Haifa in Palestine to join Monty’s headquarters, reporting for duty at the large encampment on the beach at Burg-el-Arab. It had been just over two months since Gott’s plane crash. In his diaries, my father offers no explanation as to why Monty had summoned him, but the bond that had grown up between him and his stepfather, particularly since Betty’s death, must have exerted some pull. Monty was comforted by Richard’s presence, and probably wanted him nearby for the main confrontation with Rommel that he and everyone knew was coming and which would determine Monty’s reputation as a general.

  “I have my stepson, Dick Carver, joining me this week from the Staff College. I am devoted to him and it will be delightful to have him with me,” Monty wrote in a letter home on 12th October 1942.

  Monty allowed it to be known that he was planning a southerly hook around the German positions, just as Rommel had tried to do at Alam El Halfa. Only this time it was a feint – instead Monty intended to direct the weight of his attack at the centre of Rommel’s lines in the north in the hope of punching two holes through the German defences. Dozens of fake tanks were constructed out of plywood and placed in the desert at the southern end of his front line, while tanks in the north were covered with canvas to disguise their outline. Ammunition dumps were disguised as piles of trash and a fake pipeline was shown under construction, with the hope that the Germans would be fooled into thinking the Allies were less advanced in their preparations than they were.

  In six weeks, Monty built up an army of a quarter of a million troops – easily outnumbering the German forces – and by 23rd October he was ready to go. At 9.30 in the evening, 900 guns opened fire along the length of the entire German front – it was the largest artillery bombardment that had ever been mounted by the British army; the Battle of El Alamein had begun.

  Thanks to the intelligence picked up from Ultra, Monty had been able to time the attack for a moment when Rommel was away in Germany receiving medical treatment. But Monty still faced considerable obstacles – not least the half a million mines the Germans had buried in the sand in what was known as the “Devil’s Gardens”.

  The sappers had been sent in as soon as the bombardment ended to clear channels for the tanks to come through. They went on foot to avoid detonating the heavier anti-tank mines; it was a slow process and soon the British tanks were backed up in traffic jams trying to enter the channels.

  Monty threw everything at the German lines in the hope of quickly blowing a hole in the enemy’s defences, but after three days the positions of each side had hardly changed. A stand-in general from the Russian Front had a heart attack on the field of battle and died. Hitler ordered Rommel out of his sanatorium and back into the front line. As soon as he returned, Rommel immediately understood that the main attack was in the north and ordered reinforcements into the area. For a moment, it looked as if the British might fail.

  Haunted by the failures of Monty’s predecessors, Churchill fell into despair. “Is it really impossible to find a general who can win a battle?” he is said to have yelled at his staff in disgust on 26th October.

  When it seemed that the frontal assault was not going to cut the German army in half as he’d hoped, Monty began to consider changing tactics. He was loath to switch his approach in the middle of the battle but he could see that Rommel, with his back to the sea in the north, was going to fight ferociously and he knew that failure was not an option.

  On 29th October, Operation Supercharge was launched by Monty. The idea was to keep the Germans engaged in the north but to redeploy Allied reserves to the south and use them to come in behind the main part of the Deutsches Afrika Korps rather than to attempt to cut them in half. The RAF had succeeded in sinking three German tankers in the Mediterranean and the German tanks were running short of petrol, reducing their room for manoeuvre.

  For his part, stuck at headquarters, Richard saw little of the actual fighting, but he could follow what was happening by listening to the radio traffic. After five days, the mood began to lighten slightly. The Allies had new tanks and plenty of fuel and ammunition while the Germans were tired and their equipment, having travelled so far, was beginning to fray.

  Monty gave the task of encircling the German forces to the 10th Corps, commanded by General Herbert Lumsden. 10th Corps was Monty’s mobile reserve – his Corps de Chasse as he called it – and had been designed to move fast. As other Korps kept the German forces back and protected his flanks, General Lumsden was told to take his tanks as quickly as possible across the desert and attack the enemy positions from the rear.

  Monty had concerns about Lumsden. The night before he launched Supercharge, he had confessed in his diary, “Lumsden has been very disappointing; he may be better when we get out into the open. But my own view is that he is not suited for high command, but is a good fighting Div commander. He is excitable, highly strung and is easily depressed. He is considerably at sea in charge of a Corps and I have to watch over him very carefully.”

  Photograph © Getty Images

  Monty watching his troops advance towards German lines, North Africa, 1942

  Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London

  Monty with his three corps commanders – from left: Lt Generals Leese, Lumsden and Horrocks

  He would have preferred someone else to lead the charge but it was too late to change commanders now. He posted one of his own liaison officers to Lumsden’s staff to keep an eye on him and to ensure that he remained in constant contact. Once they had set off, the officer discovered that each time he stopped to set up his desert aerial, Lumsden would order his troops to move before he had been able to make contact with Monty’s HQ. Monty had little idea where his commander was.

  Operation Supercharge did not go to plan. But it nonetheless succeeded in finally breaking the will of the German forces. Lumsden’s tanks, helped by the air force, picked off the German tanks that had been forced out into the open to fight, some of which were immobilised, having run out of fuel.

  By the evening of 2nd November, the situation was looking dire for Rommel. His armoured commanders reported that they had less than 100 tanks left, compared to 600 or so British tanks. He realised that his famous Deutsches Afrika Korps was in danger of being annihilated.

  At 8 o’clock that evening, the Ultra code-breakers at Bletchley Park outside London intercepted a situation report from Rommel to the German High Command in Berlin. It contained an unmistakable air of defeat and gloom – and was the first suggestion that Rommel was considering a retreat: “After ten days of extremely hard fighting against overwhelming British superiority on the ground and in the air the strength of the army is exhausted in spite of today’s successful defence… there is only one road available, and the army, as it passes along it, wi
ll almost certainly be attacked day and night by the enemy air force.”

  That night after reading the message, Churchill celebrated with a cigar, while out in the cold undulating desert, Rommel lay on his bunk-bed with his forces scattered for hundreds of miles around him. “I lie with my eyes open and rack my brain for a way out of this disaster for our troops. Difficult days lie ahead of us; perhaps the most difficult for any man to live through,” he wrote in his diary. At the German High Command in Berlin, Rommel’s message was greeted by silence. Hearing nothing back, the next day Rommel told his liaison officer Berendt to formally ask Hitler for permission to withdraw.

  Hitler sent his response back to his commander: “In your present situation, nothing else can be thought of but to hold on, not to yield a step. Throw every man and every gun into battle… as to your troops, you can show them no other road than that to victory or death.”

  This was madness. Rommel pleaded with Hitler to be allowed to pull back: “We cannot stand and fight. Thousands of the troops do not even have rifles.”