The next morning, which was a Friday, Montgomery himself moved forward to a small tactical headquarters, alongside those of Leese, Lumsden and Coningham, their vehicles all dug-in.
All that day the waiting soldiers in front remained motionless in their cramped trenches, forbidden to move for any purpose whatever, roasted and blistered by a blazing sun and preyed upon by clouds of flies. They spoke a little to one another and tried to get some sleep, but for the most part each man was occupied with his private thoughts. It was an extremely trying day, the physical discomfort aggravated by the high tension of expectancy. Peter Moore and his minefield sappers of 10th Armoured Division felt ‘all very keyed up and a bit frightened, but determined that the thing was going to work this time, for we had so often seen it go wrong before’.
The long, burning day dragged on. The waiting soldiers felt as though cut off from the world. Before them stretched a country seemingly as empty and barren as it had been for thousands of years, shadowless and motionless, except for the ‘Devil’s Waters’, the dancing mirages of the afternoon, but, as well they knew, impregnated with the buried engines of death and peopled with the unseen outposts of the distant enemy. As the day wore on, every man began that small and meaningful gesture which he was to repeat with increasing frequency in every hour to come — looking at his watch.
The sun began to sink in a crimson bed behind the enemy lines. The charged air gave up its burden of heat and the cool evening breeze mercifully flowed in, expelling the hateful flies. A meditative colonel closed his sketch-book with a sigh and put away his pencil. The twilight phantasms dissolved. Suddenly it was dark. The myriad stars began their nightly watch. The chill of evening made men shiver a little.
The soldiers got up from their cramped trenches, their accoutrements creaking as they stretched, moved about and relieved themselves. Hot meals came up from the battalion lines in the rear. Officers and NCOs went up and down, checking equipment and ammunition and ensuring the utmost quiet. Water-bottles were inspected. A tin of bully beef and a packet of ration biscuits was issued to each man.
Out in front of 51st Division, Stirling and his men of 5th Seaforth Highlanders, spectral shadows working against time, quickly ran out the white tapes of the start-line in No Man’s Land and lit the pinpoint lamps that showed each battalion its way ahead through our own minefield. At the Regimental Aid Posts, the Medical Officers, among the very bravest of all men on the battlefield, with their orderlies and their stoical stretcher-bearers, prepared to be about their business, and there, also, were likely to be found the battalion padres.
The main tracks from the rear built by 30th Corps on the northern front — Sun, Moon, Star, Bottle, Boat and Hat — were likewise lit with their distinguishing signs. The anti-tank guns, bren-carriers and other operational vehicles of the infantry moved up and parked, to await their chance to traverse the minefields. The divisional commanders and brigadiers drove forward to their tactical battle headquarters in the vicinity of the front line. The Valentines of 23rd Armoured Brigade, having, like chrysalids, cast off the canvas skins of their dummies, emerged in their fighting aspect and crawled forward to mate with the infantry whom they were to accompany — Finigan’s and Clarke’s to the Australians, Cairns’s to the Highlanders, Winberg’s to the South Africans. John Currie, bubbling with laughter at the prospect of action, brought up his more powerful tanks to the New Zealand sector, the formidable shapes of the new Shermans silhouetted against the background of the stars; it was the first time that the American tank had been summoned into battle and in the mustering squadrons all ranks braced themselves for the challenge to its baptism of fire. Pat Hobart, Currie’s brigade major, wrote in his diary: ‘My mind stopped revolving over and over, checking over every detail of plans, orders and preparations. If anything had been forgotten, it was too late now to do anything about it. Felt rather tense but somehow fatalistic.’
Montgomery’s battle message was read out to the troops, in which he declared his confidence that if every officer and man entered upon this battle with the determination to fight and kill and win, ‘we will hit the enemy for “six” right out of North Africa’. Then he went on:
Let every officer and man enter the battle with a stout heart, and with the determination to do his duty so long as he has breath in his body.
And let no man surrender so long as he is unwounded and can fight.
Let us all pray that ‘the Lord Mighty in battle’ will give us the victory.
Men looked again at their watches.
The infantry started to fall in by platoons and to move forward throughout our own minefield to the white tapes of the start-line in No Man’s Land. In the New Zealand Division Reg Romans, eager and ardent, his shirt sleeves rolled up, led his battalion forward with sections in single file, fifty yards apart. To Lieutenant John Van Grutten and Sapper Flinn, both of 3rd Cheshire Field Squadron, the scene looked for all the world like the start of some great and stern athletics contest.
In 51st Division every man was wearing a white St Andrew’s cross on his back as a recognition signal in the dark and in 1st Gordon Highlanders every officer was carrying a rifle like his men. The machine gunners of the Middlesex Regiment, one platoon to each battalion of Highland infantry, took up their heavy loads — seven men to a gun, carrying gun, tripod, water and ammunition for their 6,000 yards carry. Wimberley, the knees of his long legs drawn up to his chin, drove up in his jeep to his battle headquarters in the front line. He looked at the gaps in our own minefield and saw that they were properly lit for the move forward to the start-line.
‘As we drove about’, he records in his journal, ‘everything was deathly silent. I remembered First Cambrai, in 1917, how quiet it was before Zero. It seemed a good omen. Then I stood at one of the minefield gaps and watched my Jocks filing silently through, heavily laden with picks, shovels and sandbags, as well as their weapons and accoutrements. At the head of each battalion was its CO, his piper at his side. It was only possible now for me to pray. I went back to my battle headquarters and had a little food.’ The generals had now handed over to the regimental soldiers.
At the start-line the infantry, the minefield sappers and the machine gunners spread out in their correct order in the spacing at which they were to advance. At a quiet order the infantry fixed bayonets. The navigating officers, compass in hand, took station in the centre of each battalion and company. The taping squads fell in immediately behind them, ready to reel out the white line of the battalion axis.
Dead silence lay over the whole desert. The swelling moon rode high, large, serene, illuminating the spectral scene with blue light. By its bright light men peered again at their watches, waiting for the mighty roar which they knew would burst out behind them at twenty minutes to ten.
Every man in Eighth Army and the Desert Air Force now had his eye on his watch, counting the minutes. Behind the infantry, where the hidden armoured divisions lay, the flimsy structures of the dummy lorries were cast aside, to reveal to the inscrutable moon the naked features of guns and tanks. On the Springbok Road, just south of El Alamein Station, 1st and 10th Armoured Divisions, after a difficult and skilfully planned approach march, refreshed and took such rest as they could until their turn to go forward at 2 a.m. In the Warwickshire Yeomanry a radio set picked up the air of ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ on the BBC.
Robert Wright, commanding 76th Anti-tank Regiment in 1st Armoured Division, wrote in his journal: ‘I could not help having a feeling of pride and confidence; proud to be taking part in a battle likely to prove decisive, confident that the leadership, the men, the tanks, the guns and the aircraft were now enough to deliver a real punch. Except for one or two vehicles moving on the coast road, everything was very still. The scene reminded me of the marshalling of the performers before entry into the arena at the Aldershot Tattoo. Even now our eyes were focused on Tripoli, 1,300 miles away!’
On the airfields away in the rear the bomb racks had been charged and the air crews
briefed for the night’s tasks. They were to illuminate the enemy country by flares, bomb gun positions, attack concentrations of troops with low-flying aircraft, jam the enemy’s radio by specially-equipped Wellingtons, lay clouds of smoke to create confusion and drop dummy parachutists.
The Royal Navy also had their part to play and a small force had put out to sea. Their task, with RAF co-operation, was to make a feint landing in the enemy’s rear at Ras el Kenayis, a promontory near Fuka, with the intention of creating confusion and nervousness and of occupying the enemy’s reserves.
That evening Stumme radioed his routine evening report to Hitler’s headquarters in Germany:
Enemy situation unchanged.
THE BARRAGE
Meanwhile, a little way behind the infantry were the men who were counting first the minutes and then the seconds perhaps more precisely than anyone else — the artillery.
At the appointed second, 882 field and medium guns were to open fire, in Montgomery’s words to the author, ‘like one battery’. For this second the gunners had been preparing all day and the gunnery staffs for much longer. The fire plan prepared by Kirkman for the whole thirty-eight miles from the sea to Himeimat had been allotted and sub-allotted from Army to Corps, Corps to division, division to regiment and regiment to battery. The gunners’ maps were covered with transparent traces on which were marked with precise care the parallel lines by which a curtain of shells would move forward by leaps of 100 yards for the whole depth of the infantry’s advance.
But it was not to be a ‘barrage’ in the true sense; there were not enough guns for that. On the New Zealand front, as an example, there would be only one shell every forty-five yards. It was to be mainly a series of moving concentrations of shell fire on known or suspected points of enemy resistance. The first fifteen minutes, however, were to be devoted to concentrations on the enemy’s own gun positions, plotted from air photographs and by other means, in order to reduce the volume of fire that would break on our infantry.
At the little headquarters of each battery — usually a hole dug out of the sand and rock — the Command Post Officer and his assistants, working with artillery board, range table and slide rule, had patiently calculated the line and range for each of the eight guns of their battery for every step in the long ladder of fire. The arithmetical corrections had been applied for the barometric pressure, the temperatures of the air and the cartridge, the direction and force of the wind, the difference in height above sea level between each gun and its target. Still further corrections had to be made for each gun individually, as also for each batch of shells and cartridges if they differed from the normal.
The Command Post of each battery was quite close to the two Troops of four guns and before long the completed gun programmes, which were foolscap forms covered with a mass of figures, went out to the Gun Position Officer of each Troop, who was a subaltern. The GPO, through his Tannoy loud-speaker set, or by other means, then summoned his four Nos. I, who commanded each gun and who were nearly all sergeants, and explained his task to each. There was a start of astonishment when he told them that they would have to fire 600 rounds per gun that night.
Back in each gun pit, under its dim camouflage net, the No. 1 went through the barrage programme with his gun-layer, explained the task to his detachment and prepared his ammunition, which for days had been gradually accumulating and had lain buried in the sand. He saw that water was at hand for sponging out the gun when it became over-hot, ensured that all moving parts were working smoothly and tested his sights. An artificer came round to test the gun’s recoil apparatus.
Every man in the detachment now knew the nature of the tremendous call that was to be made on him. It was to be the most massive artillery onslaught ever seen in the continent of Africa and the biggest of the British Army anywhere since 1918. Except for ten minutes’ rest each hour to cool the gun, they would be required to maintain a high rate of fire for five and a half hours continuously, and if they came under fire themselves from the enemy must not pause or take cover. When all was prepared, the sweating detachment bedded down in the sand for what rest they could get.
The quick desert twilight fell and all down the long line Eighth Army awoke to sudden activity. The gunners saw a flood of traffic crawling forward — tanks, scout cars, carriers, lorries — and great clouds of dust were kicked up, neutralizing the moonlight. In the rear of the gun position, the pin-point lamp had been lit on the night picket, on which the layer would centre the vertical cross wires of his dial sight to put his gun on the right line.
The men had a hot evening meal and looked at their watches, as everyone throughout the Army was doing. Through the camouflage net overhead the moon glinted wanly on the polished parts of the gun. The GPO went quietly round the Troop to see that all was well. The men began to break open the green metal ammunition boxes. Though the night air was chill, they stripped to the waist, for soon they would be dripping with sweat.
At about 9.30 the GPO, from his position in the centre rear of the Troop, ordered crisply:
‘Take post!’
The faint moon-shadows were agitated into sudden life as the gun detachment sprang to their places — No. 2 on the right ready to operate the breech mechanism, the layer on the left at his dial sight, with the elevating and traversing wheels at his hand, the other numbers at the trail or by the stacked ammunition. The No. 1 ordered:
‘HE, 117, Charge 3, load.’
The layer set his driftscale plate and range reader to the Charge 3 settings, No. 4 stepped forward with the 25-lb high-explosive shell, armed with its instantaneous 117 fuse, and slipped it into the open breech of the gun. No. 1 himself, with a short, truncheon-like rammer, rammed the shell home and as the copper driving-band engaged with the rifling of the barrel there was a deep, bell-like ring. No. 4 half-turned, took the long, brass cartridge case from No. 5, showed it to No. 1 to prove that it contained the full three charges of propellant, and pushed it into the breech with his closed fist. No. 2 slammed home the breech-block with a metallic clang.
The sergeant ordered: ‘Zero One Five Degrees.’
By the light of a hand torch the layer set the scale on his dial sight to the figure which would bring his gun pointing towards its target and, by means of hand signals, directed the trail to be swung over until he found the fight on the night-aiming-point in the prisms of his sight.
‘Angle of Sight 5 minutes Elevation.’
The enemy battery was a little higher above sea level than his gun and the layer made the correct setting on his sight clinometer.
‘10,800.’
The layer, repeating ‘10,800’, quickly set the range to the enemy battery on his range-scale plate. The muzzle of the gun lifted up and up as he turned the elevating handwheel for approximate elevation first. He cross-levelled his sight till it was vertical, then, with his eye glued to the rubber eyepiece, laid accurately on the night aiming-point and finally levelled his sight clinometer bubble for exact elevation. Then he reported:
‘Ready.’
The gun was ready to be fired, the detachment alert and tensed, but there were still some minutes to go. The GPO ordered:
‘Troop, rest.’
The detachment relaxed, but stayed at their posts. Someone cracked a little joke and there was a subdued laugh. The sergeant was looking at his watch continuously and presently he said: ‘A minute to go’. The last long seconds dragged by till at last there was a crisp command, from the GPO:
‘Take post!’
Alert and keyed once more, like runners poised for the starting pistol, the detachment, at their action positions, awaited the ultimate order. There was a tingling silence over all the desert as the moon and the multitudinous stars looked down on an army waiting to spring.
At forty seconds before Zero, when the first shell was due to burst on its target, came at last the order:
‘B Troop, fire!’
The Battle of El Alamein had begun.
The storm of fire tha
t burst was an experience never to be forgotten by those who heard it. The trumpeting of the ‘Alamein barrage’ echoes still within every man’s memory. It had not the volcanic violence of the great barrages of the First World War, such as those of Arras and Amiens, when the staccato barking of the serried ranks of field guns was fortified by the deep-throated roar of the heavy howitzers and the sharp cracks of the 60-pdrs, yet there was a quality in the clamorous roar that was peculiarly memorable. It had a tremendous and imperious assurance. It rang with confidence. It proclaimed itself irresistible. It told men that at last a firm hand was now directing the great orchestra with professional mastery.
Everywhere men who were not engaged stood and watched entranced at the long line of leaping gun flashes ripping open the night sky for thirty-eight miles and listened to the urgent and compelling roar, drowning the sound of the aircraft passing overhead. The oldest hands felt the spell of the moment. Freyberg, Telefan though he was, stood ‘fascinated and awed’, muttering to himself about the greatness of the cause for which they fought. At Kippen-berger’s armoured command vehicle ‘the maddening incessant clamour of the guns became deafening. A whole field regiment was firing directly over our heads from a few hundred yards back. The waiting group of officers and orderlies stood on the lee side to get some shelter from the uproar and the concussion’.[28]
Commanders of divisions and brigades found it difficult to go back to their headquarters and wait for news. Their hearts and thoughts were with the gallant battalions and the mine-lifting teams now on tip-toe. In the Highland Division the thoughts of one officer flew to Macaulay’s lines on the Angel of Death, as the steel shards, with a sound as of a multitude of wings, swept unseen overhead.
Alamein (Major Battles of World War Two) Page 15