by Trevor Royle
However, the speed and aggression of the Allied assault had broken the enemy’s will to resist, and on 3 November came the joyous conformation from the BBC that there had been ‘a great victory in North Africa’. That same day Operation Supercharge was put into effect as British, Indian and New Zealand forces fought their way out of the German lines of barbed wire and minefields to allow the armoured forces to begin the chase after the now retreating German and Italian forces. Amongst them, supporting the New Zealand infantry, was The Royal Scots Greys which reverted to cavalry tactics by charging an Italian artillery battery head-on instead of attacking from the flanks. Hidden minefields were the main problem, and the Eighth Army lost heavy casualties during the pursuit phase, but the fighting in North Africa was nearing its triumphant conclusion. Soon Montgomery’s advancing men were passing names which had become familiar to the Allies during the years of attack and retreat – Benghazi, Sidi Barrani, El Agheila, El Adem, Mersa Brega – as they raced towards the strategically important goal of the port of Tripoli, which fell at the end of January 1943. It was a key moment, but the war diarist of 5/7th Gordons was not overly impressed by what the battalion found when it arrived: ‘Tripoli is not much: a few fly-blown shops selling razor blades and soap, and a moderately filthy Arab quarter.’17
Throughout his career Montgomery revealed a talent for showmanship, and in no other incident was that better displayed that in the advance on the iconic port of Tripoli. Its capture was the crowning glory of the triumph at Alamein, and Montgomery used it to reinforce the scale of Rommel’s defeat and also to underline the growing strength of the Allied cause. At dawn on 23 January 1943, the first British tanks entered the port carrying infantrymen of 1st Gordon Highlanders with their pipers playing the regimental quick march ‘Cock of the North’, and the moment was captured by accompanying war correspondents. Two weeks later Montgomery capitalised on the feat when Churchill visited Tripoli with Alexander and Brooke and was treated to the first British victory parade of the war. It was a full-blown ceremonial affair: following a triumphal drive into the main square of Tripoli, the prime minister’s party was treated to a march-past led by the pipes and drums of 51st (Highland) Division. It was a scene which greatly moved those watching, including Brooke, who recorded it in his diary.
As I stood alongside of Winston watching the [Highland] Division march past, with the wild music of the pipes in my ears. I felt a large lump rise in my throat and a tear run down my face. I looked at Winston and saw several tears on his face, from which I knew he was being stirred inwardly by the same feelings that were causing such upheaval in me. It was partly due to the fact that the transformation of these men from their raw pink and white appearance in Ismailia to their bronzed war-hewn countenances provided a tangible and visible sign of the turn of the tide of war. The meaning of this momentous change was brought home to me more forcibly than it had been up to the present. For the first time I was beginning to live through the thrill of those first successes that were now rendering ultimate victory possible.18
The next stage was the advance to Tunis to link up with the First Army which was approaching to rendezvous with the Eighth Army. (A joint British and US army had landed in Morocco and Algiers at the beginning of November 1942, as part of Operation Torch. One of its more successful commanders was Lieutenant-General George S. Patton, whose name would be heard of again.) Amongst those serving in the 1st British Division was 6th Gordons, which had landed in Algiers on 9 March 1943 as part of the reinforcements after sailing from the Clyde. During the journey the ship carrying the battalion’s vehicles and stores had been attacked and sunk, which meant that essential weapons such as mortars were missing during the opening rounds of the operation. (These turned up in April when the battalion also received its first supplies of the new PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank) weapons to replace the obsolescent Boys heavy rifle.) Minefields were also a problem, as was enemy artillery fire – in one attack eight men of D Company were killed as 6th Gordons was preparing for the first combined attack with Eighth Army.
During the night of 22 March 1943, the final assault on Tunis began in the face of sustained German artillery fire. In the opening phases 6th Gordons held the division’s right flank before being relieved a week later by 6th East Surrey Regiment; the Gordons’ losses were twenty killed and fifty-one wounded. In the next phase of the fighting 6th Gordons came under the command of 24th Guards Brigade, which needed to be reinforced for the attack on Djebel Bou Aoukaz on 29 April. A and D companies, under the command of Major A. G. I. Fleming, fought alongside 1st Irish Guards and succeeded in taking their objectives, despite coming under sustained counter-attack – at one point a force of twenty German tanks attacked from the rear of the battalion’s position in the Gab Gab Gap. During the action thirty casualties were sustained; amongst them was Major Fleming, who was the senior of the battalion’s pre-war officers.
But by then the end was in sight. On 6 April Montgomery’s forces had broken through at Wadi Akarit, having breached the Mareth Line a month earlier, and the coastal route to Tunis was open. Not that it was easy going for any of the other Highland regiments. In his war memoirs Lieutenant Neil McCallum, 5/7th Gordons, left a vivid account of the sweltering conditions as the British Eighth Army continued its pursuit of the retreating Germans, adding that whereas they had the benefit of transport, the British soldiers travelled on foot: ‘There was more marching, on feet soft with weeks of trench life. A hard rocky country. We marched past a large isolated house, glaringly white in the sun and from within its rough walls you could feel the invisible eyes watching. A robed Arab stood at a metal gate. The files of men marched past, boots grating on the rock, or lifting up white dust in chalky parts.’19 With the two armies converging on Tunis, Axis resistance began to crumble – Rommel had already left the battle front, leaving General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim in command – and amidst chaotic conditions the Germans capitulated on 12 May. The fighting in North Africa had finally come to an end.
One other factor illuminates the campaign in North Africa. It produced some of the most coherent and vibrant literature of the war, so much so that comparisons were made between Cairo and Fitzrovia, an imagined literary area in London based on the Fitzroy Tavern on the corner of Charlotte Street in London, and the centre of literary gatherings in the 1930s.20 Literary magazines such as Orientations, Parade and Oasis flourished, and the poet G. S. Fraser claimed that the Middle East theatre of operations ‘produced far more – and at times even finer – poetry than all the years of attrition on the Western Front’.21 Originally from Glasgow, George Sutherland Fraser had graduated in 1937 and served as a sergeant-major in the Ministry of Information, gaining from the eccentric English poet John Gawsworth (the pen name of T. I. F. Anderson) the poetic description: ‘Behind his Scottish rims: | It is frightfully effectual | To look intellectual.’22 He sat in the centre of much of what was happening in the literary publishing scene in Cairo, and he used journalistic skills learned while working on the Press and Journal in Aberdeen before the war. Together with the poet Keith Douglas and Lawrence Durrell, author of the Alexandria Quartet, Fraser epitomised everything that was lively and life-enhancing about the literary exiles living in wartime Cairo.
Douglas became one of the best poets of the Second World War, as did Hamish Henderson, who eventually served as an intelligence officer with the 51st (Highland) Division. Indeed, there is a strong case for arguing that Henderson was a soldier’s poet in much the same way that Wilfred Owen was regarded in the previous conflict. By any standards, though, Henderson was an extraordinary individual, a renaissance man who felt at home in several European cultures and languages, not least those of the German and Italian soldiers facing the Eighth Army. Yet he found the truest articulation of his cultural and political beliefs in his native Scotland. Born in Blairgowrie in Perthshire in 1919, he was educated at Dulwich College and Downing College, Cambridge, and had been a regular visitor to Hitler’s Germany where he worked with the So
ciety of Friends in helping refugees to escape. On the outbreak of war he attempted to join the Cameron Highlanders but was turned down due to poor eyesight, and had to wait to be conscripted in 1940 when he joined the Pioneer Corps to work on beach defences in southern England. The following year he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, and by March 1943, after much cajoling, was attached to the 51st (Highland) Division, having spent time with the 1st South African Division at the time of El Alamein.
For a man who was a pacifist by instinct and inclination, Henderson’s time in uniform could have caused problems, but he relished the experience because he believed that the war was a crusade against fascism, and one that had to be won. Like others who served under Wimberley, he was also passionate about the Highland regiments, becoming, as one obituarist put it, ‘a Jock amongst Jocks’ in a division whose ‘officers flaunted proud Highland genealogies while its squaddies sang traditional lyrics in Scots and Gaelic, and its pipers represented a summation of an instrumental tradition peculiar to Scotland.’23
Later in life Henderson would become a renowned folklorist, but during his war service in North Africa he emerged as a powerful and sensitive poet whose wartime work was published in 1948 by John Lehmann under the title Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica. The eight elegies and the final ‘Heroic Song for the Runners of Cyrene’ form a body of poetry which is written from the point of a view of soldiers on both sides of the divide and underscored by Henderson’s warning that ‘we should not disfigure ourselves with villainy of hatred’. This led him to consider the lot of the enemy as well as his own side, and during his interrogation of a captured officer he was much taken with his observation that ‘Africa changes everything. In reality we are allies, and the desert is our common enemy.’ That conceit runs through all the elegies, and finds a moving expression in the ‘Seventh Elegy’ which mourns ‘seven good Germans’ killed at El Eleba:
Seven poor bastards
Dead in African deadland
(tawny tousled hair under the issue blanket)
Wie einst Lili
dead in African deadland
einst Lile Marlene24
In his introductory note to the second section of the Elegies, Henderson quoted from another desert war poet Sorley MacLean, whose poem ‘Glac a’ Bhais’ (‘Death Valley’) is prefaced by the observation: ‘Some Nazi or other has said that the Fuehrer had restored to German manhood the “right and joy of dying in battle”.’ Coming across one corpse with ‘face slate-grey’ below the Ruweisat Ridge, MacLean saw only the pity of death, with flies swarming over grey bodies killed during the ‘delirium of war’:
Whatever his desire or mishap,
His innocence or malignity,
He showed no pleasure in his death
Below the Ruweisat Ridge.25
MacLean was another poet whose natural pacifism was balanced by the need to defeat fascism. Born in Raasay in 1911, he had been educated at the University of Edinburgh and had worked as a teacher before being conscripted into the Royal Signals. A native Gaelic speaker, he had begun writing poetry before the war, and was in correspondence with other poets such as Robert Garioch, Hugh MacDiarmid and Douglas Young. During this period, between his conscription in September 1940 and his service in North Africa, his own poetry had been fired by four relationships of varying intensity during the 1930s which resulted in the love lyrics of ‘Dain do Eimhir’ (‘Poems to Eimhir’) in 1943. To those expressions of love and regret he grafted equally passionate political sentiments as he explored his sense of anger at the triumph of fascism after the Spanish Civil War. In ‘Gaoir na h-Eorpa’ (‘The Cry of Europe’) the poet’s sense of loss is allied to his despair for the ‘poverty, anguish and grief’ of the people of Spain, and typifies MacLean’s attempts to forge a link between the opposing claims of love and commitment. ‘Dain do Eimhir’ is widely regarded as his major achievement, and was published after he was badly wounded during the Battle of El Alamein.26
While living in Edinburgh and teaching at Boroughmuir High School, MacLean had collaborated with another poet and teacher Robert Garioch (Robert Garioch Sutherland, 1909–81), who produced on his own hand press Seventeen Poems for 6d. In common with fellow poets J. K. Annand and Norman MacCaig, Garioch (or ‘Geerie’ as he was always known) was Edinburgh-born, and after leaving university became a teacher. Called up into the Royal Signals, he saw action in North Africa with 201 Guards Motor Brigade during Operation Torch when a joint British-American army invaded Morocco and Tunisia prior to joining up with the Eighth Army. However, Garioch did not get the chance to finish the campaign. On 20 June, while operating a battery charger on a Ford V8 truck, he ‘walked the regulation distance into the Blue, taking a shovel, after the manner prescribed for the Children of Israel in Deuteronomy, XXIII, 12–13’ and quickly discovered that the Germans were in the process of over-running the Allied positions.27 For him the war was over, and he spent the rest of his time in Italian and German prisoner-of-war camps. Later, he wrote movingly about his experiences in Two Men and a Blanket (1974); through a pleasing coincidence it was published by Robin Lorimer, a man in the great Scottish tradition of scholar-publishers, who had fought at the first battle of El Alamein with 11 Field Regiment Royal Artillery, serving in an anti-tank battery which knocked out eleven German tanks.28
The other notable Scottish poet of the Desert War was George Campbell Hay, who had tried to avoid conscription but ended up serving in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Tunisia as part of Operation Torch at the end of 1942. Given menial jobs – several applications to transfer to the Intelligence Corps were rejected – Hay used his time to learn Arabic and to speak to Italian prisoners of war (he was a superb linguist). At the same time he was wrestling with the problem of getting his first collection of poems through the press under the title Wind on Loch Fyne. Containing work in English, Scots and Gaelic, it was eventually published in 1948, and was well received. As to Hay’s own position, it is perhaps best summarised in a verse from ‘Teistead Mhic Iain Deorsa’ (‘Mac Iain Deorsa Testifies’):
Am I to crouch in the mud
As if I were their slave?
My father begat me free
And I have not learnt to be a coward.29
One other thing bound together the war poets in North Africa. They were fighting over a landscape which had little in common with the other theatres of the Second World War, and the war poets seem to have been affected by its wild beauty. At first acquaintance the North African terrain was harsh, barren and inhospitable, but it was also strangely compelling, a landscape which imprinted itself on the minds of the men who fought there. Henderson described it in his first elegy ‘End of a Campaign’ as the ‘brutish desert . . . this landscape for halfwit stunted ill-will’, while the English soldier poet Jocelyn Brooke declared in his poem ‘Landscape near Tobruk’ that ‘this land was made for war’.30 In fact, few of the men who served there, writers or not, failed to be affected by the sheer size of the desert arena over which the two opposing armies fought, its absence of definition and the seemingly limitless horizons with few roads or tracks to break up the bare expanse of sand and scrub. Responding to its similarities to a classical sporting arena, war correspondents on both sides tended to report the conflict in an imagery which spoke of a courtly tournament involving valiant rivals. In this respect it is noteworthy that three of the Highland battalions in the 51st (Highland) Division had their Desert War histories written by young officers who went on to enjoy successful careers in broadcasting and journalism – Felix Barker, Alastair Borthwick and Andrew Todd.
The British victory in North Africa was a turning point in the war. Not only were the church bells rung throughout Britain to celebrate the Eighth Army’s victory at El Alamein, but Montgomery had proved that the British soldier had nothing to fear in action against his German counterpart. Even so, it was only an interlude, if a welcome one. Giving a bloody nose to Rommel’s Afrika Korps had provided a marvellous fillip for morale, but it was not th
e end of the war. Ahead lay two and a half years of hard fighting, and there was still much to do – in addition to dealing with the Japanese, the Allies faced a determined and ruthless enemy in Europe, where the brunt of the fighting was being borne by the Red Army in the heartlands of the Soviet Union. For the British and US forces the next stage of the war involved the capture of Sicily as a precursor to the invasion of Italy, a move which would lead to the final securing of the Mediterranean, with its vital maritime routes to India and the Far East.
The Sicilian operation called for a British seaborne assault by Montgomery’s Eighth Army between Syracuse and the Pachino peninsula on the island’s south-eastern coast on 10 July, while the US I and II Armored Corps under Patton’s command would land on a forty-mile front along the southern coast between Gela and Scoglitti, and Licata on the left flank. There would also be an airborne assault carried out by the US 82nd Airborne Division and the British 1st Airborne Division to attack targets in the inland area, and to secure the landing grounds. Once ashore, Montgomery planned to create a bridgehead, and to secure the ports of Syracuse and Licata before moving rapidly north to take Messina, while Patton’s forces covered the left flank.
In addition to the 51st (Highland) Division, a number of other Scottish regiments were involved in the Sicilian campaign, including The Royal Scots Greys, 2nd Royal Scots Fusiliers, 2nd Cameronians and 2nd Highland Light Infantry. All the Allied forces went into the operation with the high morale that had been instilled by the successful outcome of the fighting in North Africa, but the capture of the island was not the foregone conclusion that the Allies hoped it would be. As part of XXX Corps, 51st (Highland) Division landed on the south-east corner of the island, with the 1st Canadian Division on the left, and then pushed north towards Pachino. To 1st Gordons fell the task of maintaining the bridgehead, and within a week the division had pushed 75 miles inland in what the battalion’s War Diary described as ‘a long and tiresome hike’.31 The first choke point was at the town of Sferro, which covered the road and railway to Catania, and was guarded by the German Hermann Goering Division who proved to be formidable opponents.