Second World War, The
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Churchill suggested a splitting of Middle East Command, giving the Auk Persia – where an Indian Army expedition had occupied the oil fields to forestall any German attempt to seize them should their Caucasus attack succeed – and Iraq. Auchinleck declined – he knew very well that this was but a face-saving sop, and he considered it beneath the status of an ex-Commander-in-Chief India – and returned to India, for the moment unemployed. Fortunately for British arms, he would not be idle for long. While it cannot be disputed that the public face of a military command, the commander-in-chief of a major theatre of war, must be acceptable to the government of the day, politicians have no business in interfering with the workings of the military machine below the top level. That Churchill was allowed to order the sacking of Lieutenant-General Thomas Corbett, Auchinleck’s Chief of the General Staff, acting Major-General Eric ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith, the Deputy Chief of Staff, and Lieutenant-General William Ramsden, the commander of XXX Corps, was nothing short of a disgraceful abrogation of responsibility by Brooke. Corbett was an officer of the Indian Army whom Brooke had met once and to whom he had taken an instant dislike, and, although Dorman-Smith was not an Indian, he had served there and was a friend and confidant of Auchinleck. What cooked Dorman-Smith’s goose was that, while a student at the Staff College in Camberley, he had fallen out in a big way with Montgomery, then an instructor, and had ostentatiously burned the notes from Montgomery’s lectures immediately on completing the course. Brooke was well aware of that and now it was payback time. There was little sympathy for Dorman-Smith: he was largely responsible for Auchinleck’s successful plan for First Alamein which had saved Egypt but if you are cleverer than your contemporaries and superiors it is as well not to let them know that, and Dorman-Smith could not resist poking fun at those with less intelligence than himself. Ramsden would eventually go for no greater sin than being disliked by Brigadier ‘Freddie’ de Guingand, former Director of Military Intelligence and now about to become Montgomery’s chief of staff, who told Montgomery that Ramsden was useless, which he wasn’t.
Alexander arrived in Cairo on 8 August and the formalities of the handover of the commander-in-chief’s post were quickly concluded, with as much tact as the situation required. Churchill and his entourage departed for Moscow, and four days later Lieutenant-General Montgomery arrived and good manners went out the window. Montgomery was rude and dismissive to Auchinleck, who, as the changes in appointments were not due to take effect until 15 August, was still his superior in the chain of command as well as, of course, in rank and seniority. Montgomery then went off to the front, announced that he was not waiting until 15 August to take over but would do so immediately – a piece of staggering discourtesy – sent an ostentatious signal to Cairo ordering the immediate destruction of all withdrawal plans and went to sleep ‘with an insubordinate smile… I was issuing orders to an army that someone else reckoned he commanded.’58
Along with de Guingand,whom he had known and liked in previous postings, Montgomery now began to recast the plans for the defence of the Alamein position and informed Alexander and London that he hoped to be able to go over to the offensive at the end of October, a month after the date that Auchinleck had been sacked for insisting upon. While the troop movements and thickening of the minefields to create a solid front in place of the series of defended boxes was going on, Montgomery embarked on a tour of his command to impress his personality on the army. He initially wore an Australian bush hat, on to which he affixed a variety of unit cap badges, and, when someone plucked up the courage to tell him that he cut a ridiculous figure so attired, he took to wearing a tank corps black beret with two badges, one of the general staff and one of the Royal Tank Regiment. To the former he was entitled, to the latter he was not. His tours of units became the stuff of the Montgomery legend. He would stand on the bonnet of a jeep, tell the men to gather round, take their hats off and relax and then harangue them with assurances that the days of retreat were over and that they were going to knock Rommel ‘for six, right out of Egypt’. To the listeners the idea that the army commander should take them into his confidence was a novel concept and his visits generally went down well, but one soldier who was at the receiving end of several of Montgomery’s pep talks said: ‘it might have impressed the wartime-only boys, but we regulars could see right through him.’59 To officers and in his written despatches to London, Montgomery unfailingly criticized all that had gone before him, and here was evident the beginnings of the egotism, vanity and ungenerous treatment of anybody not a Monty sycophant that was to become more marked as his life went on. He began to surround himself with a coterie of uncritical and admiring subordinates whose loyalty was unquestioned, many of them young and good-looking. It is inconceivable that Montgomery could have been a practising homosexual (then a serious offence in both civil and military law) but he may well have been a suppressed one, and it is noticeable that his liking for the handsome de Guingand declined markedly once the latter got married.
In strengthening the front all along its line rather than having a series of defended localities from which mobile forces would operate, Montgomery was probably right: Panzer Army Africa was far better at manoeuvre than the British and Montgomery hoped to make use of the perceived traditional ability of the British soldier to stick it out, even if those supposed qualities had not been displayed in any great measure in Hong Kong or Singapore. On 30 August, Rommel made one last attempt to reach the Nile Delta by hooking round to the south of the British line to cut the coast road – as Dorman-Smith had predicted. The thrust was beaten off by infantry and armour dug in on Alam Halfa Ridge, as Dorman-Smith had said it should be. Now Rommel had run out of options: his command was not being reinforced; he had lost air superiority to the RAF; rations had been cut; dysentery, scabies and lice infestation were rife and the sick rate was rocketing, even amongst the Germans. He was short of everything from bullets to socks to petrol; rations of food and water had been reduced and Berlin had effectively written him off while forbidding him to withdraw. Worse, nineteenth months of desert soldiering had caught up with the Generalfeldmarschall and he was evacuated to recuperate in Germany via Rome, where he was assured of immediate improvements to his logistic problems, and Berlin, where Göring assured him that, contrary to what he may have thought that he had seen, the Luftwaffe and not the RAF ruled the skies. The only person who listened to what he had to say was Hitler, who promised him some ferries that had proved relatively immune to torpedo attack, some of the new Panzer Mk VI (Tiger) tanks and more artillery. Rommel was then unwise enough to announce at a public meeting that his army stood but fifty miles from Alexandria and that they had not come all that way only to go back again. In temporary command of Panzer Army Africa was General of Panzer Troops Georg Stumme, fresh from commanding a motorized corps in Russia and being court-martialled over the loss of the Case Kremlin plans.*.
For Montgomery, on the other hand, things could only get better. With the double layer of Alexander and Brooke to protect him from Churchillian interference; with men, supplies, aircraft and vehicles including the new Sherman tank arriving almost daily, he was able to build up Eighth Army and prepare it to take the offensive. By the middle of October the British had reorganized Eighth Army into three corps: X Corps consisting of two armoured divisions, XIII Corps of one armoured and three infantry divisions and a Free French infantry brigade, and XXX Corps of five infantry divisions and an armoured brigade. This amounted to 220,476 men in three armoured divisions and an armoured brigade group, seven infantry divisions (three British, one including a Greek brigade, one Indian, one Australian, one New Zealand and one South African) and a Free French brigade, 1,348 tanks, 856 artillery field guns and 1,403 anti-tank guns.60 Opposed to them were 112,000 men (50,000 Germans and 62,000 Italians) in three armoured and eight infantry divisions with 560 tanks, 500 field guns and 850 anti-tank guns. Of the Axis tanks, only 220 were German and of those only thirty-eight were Mk IVs with a 75mm gun, whereas the British had
246 American Grants and 285 Shermans, all with 75mm guns.
The plan for Second Alamein – or the Battle of El Alamein as it became known, First Alamein being conveniently forgotten as not being Montgomery’s – was for XIII Corps in the south to mount diversionary attacks to prevent the Axis from moving troops to the north, where the main British effort would be. There XXX Corps would attack on a four-division frontage and clear two corridors through the mines to allow the armour of X Corps to come through and to deploy to protect XXX Corps’s infantry as they cleared the German and Italian infantry positions. Once that had been done, the British armour would move against the Axis tanks and Eighth Army would then move over to pursuit. The battle would start with a night attack during the full moon, and would be preceded by a massive artillery bombardment.
Montgomery was not an original thinker and his tinkerings with Auchinleck’s plan were more cosmetic – to indicate his disapproval and contempt for all that had gone before – than substantive, but he had the ability to explain the most complicated plan in simple terms. By 24 October, D-Day for the battle, all his subordinates knew exactly what they had to do – even if some did not approve. Major-General ‘Cal’ Renton, commanding 7 Armoured Division, thought the proposed employment of his tanks in the southern battle was wrong and told the newly arrived XIII Corps commander, Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, just that. Horrocks was another of Montgomery’s favourites, brought out to North Africa at the army commander’s behest, and Renton was given an almighty rocket and told to get on with it. No doubt his subsequent sacking after the battle was nothing at all to do with his being proved right.
At 2145 hours on the night of 23/24 October 1942, Operation Lightfoot began with eighty-two field and medium guns opening a bombardment that must have reminded the older soldiers on both sides of the Western Front in the last war. Augmented by RAF bombers dropping high explosive on German and Italian positions, the bombardment became a creeping barrage behind which the infantry moved out to cross the minefields and take up position for the engineers to clear the armoured corridors before first light. At first the advance went well, particularly in the northern sector, the responsibility of the Australians, but soon difficulties became apparent. Navigating officers – subalterns with compasses – were killed, map-reading in the featureless plain became difficult; visibility despite the full moon was reduced to a few yards by the dust kicked up by exploding shells; there were arguments as to what was the British artillery barrage and what was Italian or German defensive fire; and traffic congestion ensued as follow-through battalions and heavy weapons tried to come up. The Australians got to pretty well where they should have been except for the extreme northern flank; the Highland division took most of their objectives but at very heavy cost; the New Zealanders got well beyond their stop line and then had to come back through their own artillery; the South Africans were held up by particularly accurate artillery fire but did reach their objectives on the extreme south of the line. The infantry had done reasonably well but had fallen behind schedule, and there were delays in getting corridors open for the tanks. The Axis troops held a forward outpost line but had their main defensive positions well back, out of range of the immediate fire support available to the attackers. Well-organized counter-attacks pressed home with determination and minefields that had not been detected all militated against the British, and, while infantry could survive at the bottom of a forward slope if they could dig in before daylight, tanks would be sitting ducks. When Major-General Gatehouse, commanding 10 Armoured Division, objected to being told to advance unsupported through a minefield against a German anti-tank screen that had not yet been cleared, he was told to get on with it and his leading regiment was virtually wiped out. After the battle he was sacked, as eventually was his corps commander, Lieutenant-General Herbert Lumsden. Arguing with Monty did not pay. A cavalryman who had played a major part in the mechanization of that arm between the wars, Lumsden had ridden in several Grand Nationals and had won the Grand Military Gold Cup in 1926.An Old Etonian of independent means, he saw no need to kow-tow to Montgomery and frequently argued with him. He had particularly offended the army commander by voicing his objections to Montgomery’s entirely unauthorized and unearned wearing of the black beret of the Royal Tank Regiment, and this alone would have got him his cards eventually.
Despite the British plan not going exactly as intended, the artillery bombardment had destroyed large numbers of German and Italian guns and much of their communications, although the death of General Stumme early on in the battle when he ventured too far forward to see what was happening and ran into Australian machine-gun fire did not have the traumatic effect that it might have done in a British formation – German staff officers were trained to cope with dead or missing commanders. Perhaps if Rommel had been there the British would have had a lot more difficulty than they did, but by the time he arrived, on the night of 25 October, Eighth Army had established itself inside the Axis defended area and was not going to be dislodged. Ultra transcripts of Axis radio traffic told Montgomery exactly what Rommel intended to do next and it was soon obvious that, pedestrian and unimaginative though the British might be, they ruled the skies, had no fuel shortage and hugely outnumbered their sick and logistically impaired opponents.
The British attacked again on the night of 29 October, this time on a one-division front, and then again on the night of 1/2 November in Operation Supercharge, a major offensive led by the New Zealand Division with 1 Armoured Division in support. To deal with those mines not yet cleared, the advance was preceded by thirty-two Scorpions, old Matilda II infantry tanks with flail drums attached in front. The drums revolved and the flails – lengths of chain – struck the ground in front, exploding the mines. The idea was a good one, and applied to Churchill tanks in Normandy later in the war worked well, but here the tanks were just too old and too unreliable and many were blown up when they broke down or the flails failed. There were communication difficulties between the infantry and the tanks, navigational failures and traffic gridlock, but by 2 November Rommel had come to the conclusion that the overwhelming British superiority in materiel gave him no choice but to withdraw. By this stage the DAK was down to twenty-five tanks and the army had lost 50 per cent of its German infantry and 40 per cent of it artillery. OKW in Berlin at first tried to get him to stand fast but eventually relented and Rommel began to disengage. The British began a cautious pursuit and on 4 November the commander of the DAK, General of Panzer Troops Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, was captured with the rearguard.
Once the Alamein battle was over, Eighth Army lost one of its better divisions when the Australian prime minister, John Curtin, concerned as to the approaching Japanese, requested its return to Australia. In addition, the South African division was pulled out to be converted to armour, and by the end of the year two British divisions, 8 Armoured and 44 Infantry, would be disbanded when the logistics tail, getting longer and longer as the British moved westwards, was unable to supply them. The men would be used as reinforcements for formations still in being.
Alamein was duly trumpeted as a great British victory and Montgomery was promoted to full general and received a knighthood. Church bells were rung in Britain and Churchill talked about the end of the beginning. As it was, the British had consistently been beaten by the Germans, in Norway, in France, in Greece, in Crete. The Dieppe Raid on 19 August 1942 had been a disaster: 6,000 Canadian and British troops had been deployed and less than 2,000 returned, leaving all their tanks and most of their heavy equipment behind, and, despite much rubbish being talked then and since about it being a necessary rehearsal for the invasion of Europe in 1944, the raid achieved nothing except to prove that any such invasion could not happen in 1942;in Hong Kong and Singapore the performance of British troops compared unfavourably with that of the Americans in Wake Island and in the Philippines. Alamein was a British victory, but it almost stalled in the first twenty-four hours, had to be rethought and only just succeeded. Eighth Arm
y could only produce results in a tightly controlled and well-rehearsed set-piece operation. For all that, it was the only British victory for many a long day, even if the success of ten British divisions against eleven Axis was not the turning point of the war, as many have claimed. Alamein and Stalingrad were happening at the same time, and the turning point of the war was surely determined by the twenty German divisions fighting seventy-five Russian at Stalingrad.
Now, however, was the time to cut Rommel’s forces off, trap them in Egypt and destroy them. Unfortunately for the British, it was not to be. They were far too slow; their attempts to hook behind the retreating Panzer Army Africa were too hesitant; a break in the weather brought driving rain and low cloud and restricted flying, prevented vehicles from moving off roads and disrupted radio communication. Above all, Rommel might have been beaten but he still had an army in being, bruised and battered though it was, and its withdrawal was conducted with skill and determination. On the morning of 8 November, Rommel’s troops were closing up to the Halfaya Pass at the Egyptian border and, although the weather had improved sufficiently for him to be subjected to regular air attacks, there was still no sign of the pursuing Eighth Army. Then, that same day, 2,000 miles to the west, British and American troops began landing at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers in Morocco and Algeria, both colonies loyal to the Vichy regime.