Alamein (Major Battles of World War Two)

by C. E. Lucas Phillips

  A new fighter Group HQ (No.212) and a new fighter Wing (No.244) were established. An additional day-bomber Wing HQ (No.232) was brought forward from Palestine. The twenty-five British and American fighter squadrons were divided into two fighter groups, one being assembled in No. 211 Group (Group Captain G. L. Carter) and known as Force A, for follow-up after the battle, while Force B came under No. 212 Group.

  The growth of the United States Air Force in the Middle East under General Brereton (later the Ninth Air Force), much of which was employed on long-range strategic bombing, made it necessary to revise plans for its control. Operational control of the American heavy bombers was placed under IX Bomber Command USAF and that of the medium day-bombers and fighter squadrons under the Desert Air Force. The day before the battle was to begin a small American Task Force HQ was set up alongside Coningham’s own advanced desert HQ on the sea-shore.

  Training for the coming battle was highly systematized, the emphasis being on improving radio-telephone operation and discipline, and on the difficult task of laying down smoke screens from the air, which was practised by the Bostons of 12th and 24th USAF Squadrons. The American squadrons were well trained technically, but they had not had war or desert experience. The problems of their absorption into a highly-trained mobile force were not easy, but were overcome on a human level by the co-operation of unit commanders.

  We still suffered some drawbacks in our aircraft, our fighters being inferior in performance to the German Messerschmitt 109 F or G. There was a shortage of Spitfires and Kittyhawks and there were no replacements for Hurricane losses. Two Hurricane Squadrons (No. 6 and No. 7 SAAF) were equipped as ‘tank busters’, armed with 40-mm ‘cannon’ and were ready for battle after long and arduous training and high casualties.

  Coningham had designed the general shape of DAF operations so that he could change their emphasis to suit conditions as they developed. In the pre-battle phases he aimed at reducing the risks of heavy enemy air attacks on our assembling troops by attacking enemy airfields by day and by night, by providing fighter cover over the Army’s forward areas and constantly reconnoitring the enemy defences. As soon as Montgomery’s attack began, the emphasis would change to attacking the enemy troops in the battle area as intensively as possible.

  STOCKPILING FOR BATTLE

  The great effort needed for the provisioning and maintenance of the troops in battle, and for the subsequent operations, testified to the soundness and strength of the administrative services of the Army and the Allied Air Forces. They were in contrast to those of the enemy, whose administrative services were unstable, badly coordinated and often at odds with the combatant troops. The ‘Quartermaster’s Battle’ was won by the British before the fighting soldier rose from his trench for the assault.

  For movement into the battle area from the railheads of Amiriya and Burg el Arab and other depots, the equivalent of thirty-six General Transport Companies RASC was available, with a carrying capacity of over 10,000 tons, together with six Tank Transporter Companies, which did service of the highest order in the delivery of tanks right up to the battle area. There were nine Water Tank Companies. Three new water points were opened near Alamein and many miles of new water pipeline built.

  Ten days before the battle five days’ stocks of rations, ammunition and stores of every kind had been built up in the Field Maintenance Centres, the highly efficient administrative system that Eighth Army had devised for supply in the Desert. Great stocks of ammunition were accumulated, 286,000 rounds of 25-pdr shells and 20,000 of medium artillery being dumped right forward and concealed from the enemy’s aerial eye; quantities were buried in the sand at pre-determined gun positions not occupied until the very eve of battle. Large reserves were at hand. In the event, the supplies available enabled the Royal Artillery regiments to fire more than a million rounds in the twelve days of fighting at Alamein — an average of 102 rounds per gun per day, while the rate for the medium artillery was higher still, reaching 157 r. p. g. per day for the 5.5’s.

  The establishment of the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers shortly before the battle greatly improved the means of quick and efficient repairs to tanks, vehicles, guns, optical and all other equipment. Drawn from the engineering elements of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and the RASC, with some RE, it provided workshop facilities and technicians at all command levels and co-ordination of their work from the base right up to the fighting units. The new Tank Reorganization Group created a machinery to maintain a swift and regular flow of new and repaired tanks from dockyard and base workshop right up to the front, where, complete with crews, they were fed into the armoured regiments in action by the Tank Delivery Squadrons and Troops. For the Desert Air Force a like service was carried out by the repair and replacement mechanism under Air Commodore T. W. Elmhirst, Coningham’s administrative officer.

  Chapter Eight: Meet The Divisions

  We have seen in the last chapter how Montgomery reviewed the Order of Battle, reshaped the divisions and set them to intensive training for the particular kind of battle that he had designed.

  For the convenience of readers, and in order not to impede the narrative, the Order of Battle as he determined it is set out in Appendix A. Its structure is, however, an integral part of our story and a brief study of it at the present stage will repay the reader who is anxious to follow the events to come without frequent reference.

  An unadorned list of units, however, will not suffice and, therefore, before considering the parts for which these divisions were ordained in the battle, we shall pay them a brief visit in their trenches, their training areas and their gun-pits and see what manner of men they were.

  THE DOMINION DIVISIONS

  Prominent among the infantry divisions were the three from the Dominions — as they then were — Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Each had its own characteristics, but a factor they shared in common, as Leese testifies, was the excellence of their artillery and their medical services. Leese considered ‘Steve’ Weir, the New Zealand CRA, to be the best gunner in Eighth Army. He was certainly one of the most popular — dark-haired, deeply tanned, ruggedly handsome, full of laughter and spirit, fit and alert.

  There were very few Regular soldiers in these divisions, since the Dominions maintained only very small armies in times of peace. They all, however, took their military teaching from Britain and ‘spoke the same language’. Their organization, drill and equipment were identical with those of Home Country units. Their staff officers went to Camberley or Quetta and many of their gunner officers to Larkhill. Many men from the Dominions and other overseas lands — particularly Rhodesians and South Africans — went to British home country units as officers. The same close identity of structure and method occurred in the various Air Forces.

  The 9th Australian Division, whose emblem was a platypus surmounting a boomerang, were the people who, perhaps, had the most distinctive corporate personality. Outwardly, they had a free-and-easy form of discipline all their own. The ‘democratic’ image was strongly emphasized. The military character was to a large extent submerged in the civilian. The officer enjoyed small natural respect from his men by reason of his rank alone. He had to prove himself by personal example, particularly example in battle, before he was ‘accepted’.

  In this civilian-style army, the Regular officer was a rarity and he was generally a staff officer. The staff man held a very special place, for he was the only one who had a thorough professional training. He was regarded merely as a technical specialist. So strong was the anti-military complex in the Australian mind that the Australian Government expressly debarred any officer of the Staff Corps from being appointed to a command.[19] All commanders were citizen-soldiers, chosen for their personal qualities.

  This applied even to the divisional commander, Leslie Morshead, who by profession was a shipping executive but a very fine commander indeed. He was small, swarthy, quiet-mannered, spoke with a pronounced Australian accent and had an equally pr
onounced will. ‘He gave me,’ said the newly arrived Wimberley, ‘a higher feeling of morale than anyone else I had met so far.’ Under him the division had achieved fame in the previous year as the defenders of Tobruk (together with many British troops).

  An obvious disadvantage of this system was that the senior men, though they might be fine commanders and leaders, had a limited knowledge of the mechanism and practice of military operations. This was done by the professional staff officer. The others had to learn the hard way. But the material was fine. Victor Windeyer, commanding 20th Brigade, had a good tactical brain and was cool and resolute in action; he was a Sydney lawyer and is now a judge. David Whitehead, commanding 26th Brigade, known as ‘Torpy’, was an angular and almost ascetic figure, who had served in the First World War. Arthur Godfrey, of 24th Brigade, was a diamond if something of a rough one, who was to be killed at Thompson’s Post. He was followed by Bernard Evans, an architect, now Lord Mayor of Melbourne.

  Morshead and his division of citizen-soldiers were extremely fortunate in the trained Regular Officer who was their GSO 1. This was Lieutenant-Colonel G. P. Wells, known to all as ‘Bomba’. He had been to Camberley staff college and, by a fortunate circumstance, had been there with Rickie Richards, whose armoured regiments of 23rd Armoured Brigade were to give the Australians such fine tank support.

  The Australians, therefore, had their own type of discipline and their own way of getting things done. To Douglas Wimberley they were ‘natural born soldiers’, thrustful in the attack, tenacious in defence. This excellence derived from what may be called battlefield discipline, which, in its simplest terms, means the will and desire to fight. Morshead’s men were not alone in this — the Highlanders, the New Zealanders and others displayed it — nor were all Australians of the same quality, but it was certainly the distinguishing mark of 9th Division. When to battlefield discipline you add battle drill, which the Division acquired by hard and painful experience, you have a formation that knows how to win its battles.

  The New Zealanders — the celebrated ‘Kiwis’ with the fern-lea emblem — were a rather different parcel of men. Greatly admired and regarded with affection by the whole Army, they had already proved their exceptionally fine fighting qualities on several occasions, though likewise after some hard lessons learnt. They had suffered heavy casualties in the ‘Gazala Stakes’ and in the July fighting, had a serious reinforcement problem, and were one brigade short at Alamein, but their spirit was as buoyant as ever and their battle technique now very high. Conspicuous among them was the Maori battalion, under their half-Maori CO, Fred Baker; they fought like tigers but needed a firm hand to control them.

  Towering above them all, physically as well as figuratively, was their famous commander, Major-General Bernard Freyberg, VC. ‘Tiny’ Freyberg was a figure of legend throughout the Army. A man of powerful stature and bull-dog features, he had been wounded so many times, in both wars, that no one knew exactly what the count was. He was scored and creased with scars. He would frequently scratch the back of his neck, from which, after twenty-two years, small fragments of shell splinters from the wound sustained when he won his Victoria Cross kept working out through his skin. He had only just now recovered from another wound sustained at the beginning of the July fighting. He was a great friend of Mr Churchill’s, who loved a warrior and who, at the victory parade in Tripoli, fell upon his neck with tears and publicly proclaimed him as ‘the salamander of the British Empire’.

  Freyberg was a born and natural warrior. Normally a rather deliberate thinker, not making a decision until he had weighed all the factors, on the battlefield, with the smell of powder in his nostrils, his intellect became instantly illuminated. His whole being was quickened. He had, as few other people had, the rare ‘battlefield instinct’, partly inborn, partly acquired from long battle experience, beginning in the Mexican Civil War of 1911. He had invisible antennae which could feel which way things were going all around him. He could sense the enemy’s pulse and looked ahead to what had to be done next. His changes of plan and his forgetfulness of ‘dates’ could be maddening, but he was regarded with veneration and tremendous affection by everyone, for, besides being a very brave man, he was also a very kind-hearted one and always retained something of a boyish spirit. He never lost the feelings of a young platoon commander in the front line and looked at all problems from the point of view of the man with the rifle. A Grenadier Guardsman and not wholly a New Zealander, he had more than once very nearly swum the Channel, in the days when that was a very rare and considerable feat indeed.

  If, as George Walsh said, Freyberg was the division and the division Freyberg, he was by no means the only remarkable figure in it. Howard Kippenberger, commander of 5th Brigade, courageous, determined, forthright, a solicitor by trade, and one of the most celebrated desert fighters; Steve Weir, the gunner already mentioned; Bill Gentry, the sturdy and equable commander of 6th Brigade; Ray Queree, the nimble-minded GSO 1, who could have done with some of his general’s inches; Fred Hanson, the CRE, strong, solid, very independent-minded, who had been an infantry sergeant in the First War; Charles Upham, the phenomenal double VC — these were a few of the men who helped to win the Kiwis their renown; and when the lion-hearted John Currie, with crisp hair stolen from the sun, and his 9th Armoured Brigade were added to them, they made up a balanced fighting force that any commander from Alexander the Great onwards would have been glad to have had at hand.

  This brigade was an English formation and was one of the most shining successes of Alamein. Composed of two yeomanry regiments (formerly of 1st Cavalry Division) that had not long been mechanized and a regular cavalry regiment, it had experienced very little action and Alamein was to be its first serious battle. Many of the officers were foxhunting men and two of the COs — Sir Peter Farquhar, of 3rd Hussars, and Guy Jackson, of the Warwickshire Yeomanry — were masters of hounds. Farquhar, who took over his regiment only a few weeks before the battle, was one of the few officers who had had much battle experience, but from the fine raw material that the regiments provided Currie had forged a splendid fighting machine, which, when called upon, did not hesitate to ride out upon a mission of almost total self-destruction, fore-ordained and calculated.

  John Currie was himself a product of the Royal Horse Artillery. He was a vibrant personality, hard as nails, burned with offensive spirit and was charged with tremendous personal energy and drive. He had a strong sense of humour and a dash of horse-gunners panache. He wore a pair of old, tan-coloured canvas slacks, a khaki flannel shirt and an old, faded gunner mess cap of red, blue and gold. He suffered severely from desert sores on his hands, which he kept bound up with faded red bandana handkerchiefs.

  His most astonishing characteristic, however, was his complete freedom from fear, indeed, his positive enjoyment of danger. Major Nicholas Pease, his brigade signals officer, said of him: ‘He could be abominable in training or at rest, but in action he was magnificent. He became a changed man. He laughed and joked like a boy on holiday and the hotter the fire the more he enjoyed himself. He stood right up on top of his tank and took not the slightest notice of shells and bullets. If he saw anyone getting down to earth under fire, he would say, with a laugh: ‘What on earth are you lying down for? Why don’t you stand up?’

  Like others who have been mentioned who were born leaders in action, Currie was very severe and exacting in training. When his new brigade major, young Pat Hobart, nephew of the celebrated tank general, joined the brigade in September, he recorded in his diary:

  Found that 9 Armd Bde was not a very happy party. Everybody seemed to be terrified of J.C. and there was an atmosphere of veiled distrust. J.C., experienced in battle, knew that he had to get this completely un-battle-tried brigade ready for the biggest battle yet in about six weeks’ time. He was determined to do this and drove them relentlessly, which they resented.

  Most of these cavalrymen had had a fairly easy, if boring, war so far and were not used to this rigorous handling, but C
urrie had seen what happened in battle to half-trained troops. Within a month the whole atmosphere in the brigade had changed and Hobart wrote: ‘People are all starting to talk and laugh together as people should and seem to be less frightened of the Brig.’ When at last they went into action together, as another officer said, ‘all the hard words were forgotten and forgiven’ as they followed his inspiring leadership.[20]

  Currie’s brigade was placed under command of the New Zealand Division and a warm comradeship ripened between them. Exclusive of headquarters’ tanks, they were equipped with forty-six Crusaders, thirty-seven Grants and thirty-five of the new Shermans. They became so much a part of that division that they mounted the Kiwis’ fern-leaf emblem on their tanks and came to regard it as a battle honour.

  Of the South Africans, commanded by Major-General Dan Pienaar, we shall not see a great deal on this stage, as their part in the play, though important, was of short duration. Whatever they were called upon to do they did well and their armoured cars did particularly good work. With their orange flash on their shoulder-straps, the Springboks were familiar and popular figures in the desert, a constant reminder of the greatness of their leader, Jan Smuts. The division’s simple badge was symbolic of the sun rising on the veldt.

  THE HIGHLAND DIVISION

  From the Dominion troops we pass to those who came from Great Britain and may look first at 51st (Highland) Division, on whom, of the British infantry, was to fall the largest part of the Alamein fighting. It was the only one at full strength. Freshly out from home in August, the ‘Jocks’ had learned their desert fighting technique by sending contingents into the line with the Australians, for whom they had a great admiration — a sentiment which the Aussies warmly returned.