The division came out to the desert with the memory of a tragedy to avenge, and to avenge against Rommel himself. In a last effort to stem the disasters of the Battle of France in 1940, 51st Division, led by Victor Fortune, but operating under French command, had been trapped at St-Valery during Rommel’s lightning drive through a broken country and obliged to surrender. From the ashes of the old division a new phoenix had arisen, eager to wipe out that unhappy record. The commander of the division, as already mentioned, was Douglas Wimberley, very tall and lean, tremendously energetic, a ‘serious’ soldier but eager and cheerful in spirit. Riding in a jeep, with his long legs tucked up under his chin, covered with desert sores and wearing the bonnet of the Camerons, he was always happiest when right in front with his troops, never bothering about food and leaving his able GSO 1, Roy Urquhart, to run divisional headquarters. His whole being was devoted to his division and, despite his English surname, he was an ardent Highlander. He was known affectionately as ‘Big Tam’ or ‘Tartan Tam’. He believed in the outward and visible signs of corporate pride as a stimulus to the inner springs and he made sure that, wherever 51st Division went in its long trail of battle, the world should know that it had passed that way. It was a duty of his Military Police to write large the simple divisional emblem of HD all along that honourable trail.
This was something quite new to Eighth Army, who had been bred in ‘security’ measures and who chaffingly christened Wimberley’s men ‘the Sign-writers’ or ‘the House Decorators’; but it was a practice in keeping with Montgomery’s own ideas that men should have ‘a guid conceit o’ themsels’. ‘Security’, in this matter, went overboard; as Wimberley said, Scottish troops always proclaim themselves!
Otherwise, the only outward evidence of the division’s origin was in the Scotch bonnets of the infantry. Only the pipers then wore the kilt; some pipers also wore a beard. The general wear was shorts, but James Oliver, his wisdom overcoming other inclinations, required 7th Black Watch to wear trousers as a protection against desert sores. The infantry battalions were from Highland regiments and the majority of the officers and men came from Highland homes. They combined the qualities of the highlander of the glen and hillside with those of the spirited Jock of the city streets. The other units were somewhat more mixed in their origins but the Scottish element was naturally dominant.
The division’s machine-gunners, however, were an exception, being a Territorial battalion of the Middlesex Regiment (‘The Diehards’). They were nearly all Londoners, commanded by a spirited CO, Lieutenant-Colonel J. W. A. Stephenson, well known as a county cricketer. Between the nimble-witted Cockney ‘Die-hards’ and the sturdy Jocks there was a warm affection. On the eve of the battle Stephenson sent a signal to his GOC, saying: Proud to be serving under you. Scotland for ever. And Wimberley replied: Special message for the Diehards: For ever England.
The quality of 51st Division was to be seen not only in their fighting record but also in the many men within its ranks who were to advance on the road to distinction: ‘Nap’ Murray, of 1st Gordon Highlanders, burly and prematurely bald, who was to become Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces in Northern Europe; Roy Urquhart, Wimberley’s GSO 1, who was to achieve fame as the commander of the Airborne Division at Arnhem; Thomas Rennie, the rugby footballer, of 5th Black Watch, pipesmoking, outwardly lackadaisical, who had been captured with the old division in France and had made a thrilling escape, who was himself to command the division and to be killed on the eve of victory in Germany; Douglas Graham, ‘that great little warrior’, soon to command a division, walking with a slight limp, always minimizing difficulties and given to saying ‘Now here’; Lorne Campbell, the handsome VC; and yet others.
THE INDIANS
At the southern end of 30th Corps front, guarding Ruweisat Ridge, stood the veteran 4th Indian Division under its emblem of a hawk in flight. It shared honours with 7th Armoured Division as the most renowned of the old desert formations, having faced the enemy ever since O’Connor’s day. It was commanded by Major-General F. I. S. Tuker, known as ‘Gertie’ Tuker, an intellectual soldier of the highest standing. As in other Indian divisions, nearly all the officers were British; there was a British battalion in each of the three brigades and all the artillery regiments were British. They did not have a large part at Alamein, but one brigade had a long and difficult attack to make at the very end.
THE ARMOUR
These were the five infantry divisions of 30th Corps at the start of the battle, but there was another formation in this corps of the first importance — 23rd Armoured Brigade Group. Apart from the 9th, which Montgomery had given to the New Zealanders, this hard-fighting brigade was the only armour at the disposal of Oliver Leese.
The 23rd consisted of three Territorial battalions of the Royal Tank Regiment from the Liverpool area, to which was added a Regular battalion, the 8th. They had had a bloody baptism in the grossly mishandled battle of ‘Second Ruweisat’ in July, but their spirit was unshaken. They were equipped with the Valentine tank, which mounted the little 2-pdr gun and was thus no match for the German tanks, but which had a low silhouette and was mechanically reliable. They were well suited, however, to the special task to which they had now been assigned — the close support of infantry. This was effected by placing one or more of its battalions under command each assaulting division. Appropriately, their emblem was the legendary Liver bird.
Thus 40th Battalion, who became famous as ‘Monty’s Foxhounds’ and who had been formed from 7th Battalion The King’s Regiment, supported the Australians; it was commanded by the remarkable Jim Finigan, a Liverpool business man whose diminutive figure and acute, peering short-sightedness seemed to deny the likelihood of his plucky spirit and his strong hold over his men. The 46th Battalion also supported the Australians at one stage, under the determined command of T. C. A. Clarke. The 50th Battalion served the Highland Division, led by the soldierly figure of John Cairns who later on was to die gallantly in a tight corner when going to the help of 50th Division. The 8th Battalion served initially with the South Africans. The brigade had its own artillery, engineer and other units.
It is important that the reader not familiar with these matters should bear in mind the difference in function between the armoured brigade in an armoured division, concerned most characteristically with fighting other tanks and with breaking out into enemy country, and the armoured brigade operating in close support of infantry in the assault. Given the right tank and the right training, the same brigade could do both tasks, but 23rd Armoured Brigade was used solely for infantry support.
The technique of this co-operation was by no means perfect at Alamein. That came later, but to 23rd Brigade belonged the credit for working out the problems under their gifted commander, G. P. Richards. A thinking soldier, staff trained, technically expert, ‘Rickie’ Richards made an analytical study of every action. After one of the disasters in the July fighting, he offered the Australians a battalion of his tanks to train with each of their infantry battalions in turn. Together they carried out day and night exercises until they had developed a common doctrine for all the problems of coordination, mine-lifting, keeping direction, consolidation under pre-arranged artillery support, preparedness for the enemy counterattack and so on. The techniques so evolved became basic to all operations of this nature for the rest of the war.
Leaving the infantry of 30th Corps and the armour working with them, we come to the totally different 10th Corps, which GHQ had re-formed at Montgomery’s special request, under the command of Herbert Lumsden. It was a formidable force. Composed, as the Order of Battle shows, of 1st and 10th Armoured Divisions, it counted altogether 434 tanks in the armoured regiments. It had been intended to include 8th Armoured Division also, under Charles Gairdner, but this division was never completed, and its headquarters, its divisional signals and other troops were employed before the battle on the important deception role.
First Armoured Division, identified by its white rhinoceros emble
m, was commanded by Raymond Briggs, a Royal Tank Regiment officer, who had begun his soldiering as a private in the Liverpool Scottish in the First World War, in which he had been twice wounded. He had served in the Western Desert before the Second War and had acquired an intimate understanding of it. Lean, alert and ‘black-avised’, he was an able and painstaking commander, firm but tactful. His sable hair and his very deep tan earned him the name of the ‘Black Prince’, but in the veiled language of the radio, the simple subtleties of which seldom deceived an astute enemy, he was referred to, by association with the famous firm, as the ‘Umbrella Man’. Like Monty, Horrocks, Lumsden and others, he had been an instructor at the Staff College. Briggs was not a ‘Monty selection’, but earned Monty’s approbation. His GSO 1 was Roger Peake.
Briggs had 161 tanks in the armoured brigade of his division, of which ninety-two were Shermans. This brigade, the 2nd, consisted entirely of cavalry regiments, including, paradoxically, its motor infantry battalion, the Yorkshire Dragoons. It was commanded by Brigadier Frank Fisher, deliberate in method but with a very sound tactical sense.
The 7th Motor Brigade, which had just joined the division as its infantry element, were veteran desert fighters, composed entirely of Rifle regiments, whose tenacity and resilience in many a critical situation had won them a great name in the Desert Rats. They were commanded by Jimmy Bosvile, another of the celebrated desert ‘race of dwarfs’, quick in action and quick in temper. They were specialized infantry mounted wholly in small trucks and bren-carriers, with lorried supply echelons. Their strength lay in their remarkable mobility and their considerable fire power, but their weakness in numbers made them unsuitable for the assault of defended positions. Their special qualities will be seen more closely when we witness one of their battalions and their accompanying gunners in a day of Homeric fighting below Kidney Ridge.
Briggs’s division was perhaps the most up-to-date of the armour. Its artillery, under ‘Frizz’ Fowler, included the self-propelled Priests of 11th RHA and the self-propelled Deacons of ZZ Battery in 76th Anti-Tank Regiment. It also led the way in its thinking on the Minefield Task Force, largely through the influence of its able CRE (Commander Royal Engineers), Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth MacKay. In this division, however, the Task Force was commanded not by him but by the Rifleman, Victor Turner, who will shortly be seen winning the Victoria Cross.
Tenth Armoured Division, identified by its emblem of a fox’s mask, was a powerful formation of two armoured brigades, with a total of 273 tanks, and a lorried infantry brigade.
The 8th Armoured Brigade, commanded by Neville Custance, shrewd but deliberate in method and enjoying the golden opinion of his regiments, included 3rd RTR, which, led by the able ‘Pete’ Pyman, had suffered some hard hammerings in previous fighting, and two fine yeomanry regiments. The Staffordshire Yeomanry, led by Jim Eadie, had been largely recruited from Bass’s brewery at Burton-on-Trent and they wore the Bass red triangle behind the Staffordshire Knot on their caps. The Nottinghamshire Yeomanry, more often known as the Sherwood Rangers, were commanded by an MP, the gallant E. O. Kellett, known to all, on account of his smartness of turn-out, as ‘Flash’ Kellett.
The other armoured brigade in the division, the 24th, was a new and untried formation not long out from England. The divisional artillery was commanded by ‘Baron’ Ebbels, good-looking, always well turned-out, always laughing and never, it seemed, feeling any need for sleep.
The dominant interest in this division, however, was in its commander, who was to become a figure of controversy and to have a serious row with Montgomery. We shall see for ourselves in due course the true facts behind this row, which the Field-Marshal himself represented in an unfortunate light in his Memoirs.
Major-General Alec Gatehouse had unquestionably been one of the outstanding tank officers of the desert fighting and he had probably had more experience of actually fighting in a tank than any other senior officer. He was a robust, four-square, John Bull Englishman, with a touch of rugged panache that matched his blunt independence of mind. In contrast, he had a rather high-pitched voice and a slight impediment of speech which were as familiar to the Germans as to the British. On return to the desert after an absence on one occasion the German wireless interceptor was heard to say:
‘Ahllo, Alec! Zo you are back. Vell, ve are kvite ready for you!’
Gatehouse had commanded a tank company in the memorable Battle of Cambrai in 1917, and in the second war had been in battle time and again, gaining a reputation for his personal leadership and his offensive spirit against odds. Much decorated, he was a man of outstanding personal bravery, indeed, in the words of Douglas Wimberley, ‘almost foolhardily brave’. At a critical point in the Battle of Alamein Wimberley found him sitting calmly before a little camp table outside his tank, studying the map, while the shells were detonating all about. Wimberley said:
‘Good heavens! Why don’t you get a slit trench dug?’
To which Gatehouse replied light-heartedly:
‘Oh, you can’t do that sort of thing in an armoured division.’
These qualities had made Alec Gatehouse one of the best-known figures in the desert. So also had his bluntness. He was outspoken to a degree and did not give a damn for anyone. He was on bad terms with Lumsden, whose orders he interrupted and questioned almost to insubordination. On occasions Lumsden would remark icily:
‘I am giving orders.’
Upon which Gatehouse would say loudly to his GSO 1, Bill Liardet:
‘Take down the Corps Commander’s orders in writing.’
The hostility derived, no doubt, from a simple clash of personalities as between the rugged and the polished, the RTR officer and the cavalryman. Gatehouse did not take kindly to the intellectual type of soldier that Lumsden was. He would speak somewhat scornfully of ‘the Staff’ and ‘Staff College types’, yet was on the warmest terms with his own staff, who immensely admired him. So also did the rank and file, for Gatehouse was a soldier’s soldier.
It need not surprise us in the least, therefore, that Montgomery, who did not care for independent subordinates, and Gatehouse, who was subservient to no man, should before long strike sparks from the flint of each other’s will.
13TH CORPS DIVISIONS
These two corps — 30th and 10th — are to fill the major part of our narrative, but down in the hot south, under 13th Corps, were other formations which had also some hard fighting to do and which were afterwards to take the lead in the battles of the pursuit.
South of the Ruweisat Ridge and on the left flank of the Indians, 50th (Northumbrian) Division sat astride Alam Nayil and stretched away southward to the harsh features of the Munassib Depression. They wore the distinguished TT emblem (for ‘Tyne and Tees’). The 50th, like the 51st and the 7th Armoured, was another of the great fighting divisions that Montgomery afterwards took with him wherever he went, using them in one major assault after another through Africa, Sicily, Normandy and onwards.
Their commander at Alamein was the spectacled, tough and much decorated ‘Crasher’ Nichols, who at Eton had fought a record struggle with Oliver Leese in the wall game. His infantry came mainly from Durham and Yorkshire, and his Durham Brigade and his Rhodesian anti-tank gunners were shortly to be sent north to help the New Zealanders and Australians. To replace his third brigade, decimated in the early fighting, Colonel Katsotas’s Greek Brigade, ardent patrollers and collectors of Italian ears, had been temporarily included in his command.
Southward again of 50th Division, holding a long front in rough ground and much soft sand, stood the division that had the hardest luck of any. This was the 44th, which had formerly been commanded by Brian Horrocks and was now by Ivor Hughes. Drawn mainly from Kent, Surrey and Sussex, and not long out from England, it suffered heavy casualties before and during Alamein and two of its brigades were taken away to provide lorried infantry for 7th and 10th Armoured Divisions. Thus dismembered, the division was broken up soon after Alamein.
This division
worked in close association at Alamein with the already famous 7th Armoured Division, who, wearing their ‘desert rat’ emblem, stood behind the 44th in and about the soft sand of the Ragil Depression. They were commanded now by John Harding, that little tiger whose unhidden fire kept every man on his toes and who was one day to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
The division had no infantry brigade at this time. Mechanically, it was in a run-down condition; its tanks had seen long and hard service and its wheeled vehicles were maintained only with difficulty — a factor that was to condition its employment. It had no Shermans. Its main strength lay in 22nd Armoured Brigade, which had 126 tanks of various kinds and which had done so well at Alam Halfa under the able ‘Pip’ Roberts, yet another man of small stature with a remarkable battlefield flair.
In 4th Light Brigade there were only eighty-one tanks, but the division had a phenomenal array of about 170 armoured cars, many of which were employed in patrolling the enormous No Man’s Land, five miles wide, which stretched between the opposing minefields.
Last of all, away down under the shadows of Mount Himeimat, in difficult ground, the Free French stood on guard under the distinguished command of General Koenig, the hero of Bir Hachim. They were a mixed force of French and French-Colonial troops and were under command of 7th Armoured Division.
Chapter Nine: The Plan
RELATIVE STRENGTHS
By 23 October the Allied and enemy forces stood at the following strengths (computed from British and enemy field returns on comparable bases by the Historical Branch of the War Office, except for the last two items):
Allied
Enemy
Men
Alamein (Major Battles of World War Two) Page 12