Alamein (Major Battles of World War Two)

by C. E. Lucas Phillips

  At about the same time as the Wiltshires went ahead, the tanks of the Sherwood Rangers, under ‘Flash’ Kellett, in 10th Armoured Division, emerged likewise in the centre of the divisional front, and we shall see in the next section the vivid and stirring events that occurred.

  Meanwhile, Gentry’s brigade on the left had been pressing forward after a rough passage. On its right 26th Battalion, under Den Fountaine, had fought through to the final objective and, indeed, advanced beyond it. On the left, however, 25th Battalion, led by Ian Bonifant, a young man whom Gentry described as ‘full of fire and guts’, had gained the crest of the ridge, but could get no further, the 2nd South African Brigade on his left flank having been brought to a halt.

  At about 4 a.m. Gentry himself went forward on his new brigade front in a tank of the Warwickshire Yeomanry, who were his supporting armour. It was, he recorded later,[32] a strange journey. Though the undefinable odours of the battlefield hung over all the moonlit scene, the ‘ordinary noises of battle’ had moved on and a strange quiet for a while possessed the captured ground east of Miteiriya Ridge. The little coloured lights marking the new minefield gap along which he travelled stretched ahead, it occurred to him, ‘like some sort of fairyland and it was almost impossible to think of it as a battlefield, strewn with death and destruction beneath the blanket of night. So thorough had been the counter-battery fire of our gunners.’

  As Gentry breasted the ridge, however, the impression changed and the streams of tracer from several machine guns on his left, firing along the length of the ridge, showed him that Poole, his South African neighbour, had been checked. He therefore ordered Bonifant (who had been slightly wounded) to swing back the left flank of 25th Battalion.

  At the same time he saw with satisfaction the tanks of the Warwickshires, under the stalwart Guy Jackson, coming forward and going up just at first light to engage the enemy in the gloom ahead. Gentry knew that it was now too late for the armour to go through to its ultimate mission, but he felt content that the situation was secure. It was the first time that the infantry had ever seen the tanks right up in forward battle positions at first light. Virtually the whole of Miteiriya was in our hands, though not quite all the ground beyond it.

  The South Africans

  The cause of the halt imposed on 2nd South African Brigade was a strong German outpost which had escaped detection in the air photographs and in which the Germans were fresh and unshaken. The Field Force Battalion suffered devastating casualties, which imposed a restraint on the whole brigade. On their left, however, 3rd South African Brigade successfully burst right through to their final objective in a model attack; they did not need to summon the help of 8th RTR, who were on call but who lost a few of their Valentines on mines.

  On the extreme left wing of 30th Corps front the 4th Indian Division carried out a vigorous raid.

  Thus, as Oliver Leese looked at his map early on the morning of 24 October, he had every reason to be satisfied with the achievements of his infantry divisions. On the right and left extremities the objectives had been gained. There were some indentations on each divisional front, but overall, the assaulting soldiers of the Corps had in one night conquered 80 per cent of the ground that their bayonets had set out to seize.

  But, as Field Service Regulations said in the admirable lucidity of its English, ‘The most precious element in war is Time’. Time, as the night began to dissipate, was fast running out, and the armour, charged with the mission of breaking out into the open, stood dangerously on the brink of day.

  THE SAPPERS

  Hard on the heels of the leading infantry there followed the mine-lifting teams. Each division was responsible for making its own gaps. Thus, in 51st Division, in which 152nd Brigade provided the task force, six gaps were made through the first enemy minefield, two being for the Valentines of 50th RTR, and four through the second minefield. The armoured divisions of 10th Corps were to make their own separate passage by the ‘corridors’ that Montgomery had prescribed; the northern corridor, which straddled the boundary between 51st and the Australian divisions, had been assigned to 1st Armoured Division, and the southern corridor, passing through the New Zealanders, to 10th. The progress of the mine-lifting teams of these divisions depended in the first place upon the progress of the infantry, and on the northern corridor the infantry did not get right through on the required path on the first night, but on the southern corridor they did.

  It is on this southern corridor, therefore, that we shall devote our attention for the first night.

  Unlike 1st Armoured Division, 10th did not provide their sappers with a protective force to fight off enemy opposition. Gatehouse considered that the New Zealand infantry, who would be ahead of his sappers, would be quite sufficient protection. In the event, there were a few slight delays. In 10th Armoured Division, therefore, the mine clearing force was composed almost entirely of Royal Engineers, but with detachments of the Royal Corps of Signals and the Military Police. The force was under the command of the divisional CRE, Lieutenant-Colonel Gilbert McMeekan, a tall, strongly-built officer of fine presence and vigorous personality.

  He was very fortunate in the sappers under his command. Those on the strength of the division were 2nd and 3rd Field Squadrons and 141st Field Park Squadron. They were Cheshire units and a large number of the original recruits had come from the New Brighton Rugby Football Club. In 2nd Squadron Major Jack Perrott had as his second-in-command Captain J. C. Rigby, a Cheshire County cap. We shall see more of this squadron on the second night.

  Third Field Squadron was commanded by Major Peter Moore, the fighting sapper who had run the Eighth Army School of Mine Clearance and devised the new drill. That drill was now to be subjected to the severest of trials. The squadron already had a fine record, having fought in the brief, turbulent campaign in Greece as well as up and down the Western Desert. They had had a rough time in the July fighting, having been pitchforked into mine clearance tasks in ill-planned battles. Moore had a good lot of officers, with the tall, thin David Edwards as his second-in-command, and some fine NCOs, including Sergeant Bill Stanton, the stalwart glassblower from St Helens, strict in discipline, courageous leader in action, old enough to be called ‘Dad’; Corporal Hardwick, who had already won the Military Medal; Corporal Herring, a courageous junior leader; and Corporal Ronald Delve, the singing carpenter from Neath.

  These Cheshire squadrons were quite insufficient for the big mine-clearing job that McMeekan had to do and he was lent additional units for the night. These were 571st Army Field Company from Devon and Cornwall (Major Yeates) and 573rd Army Field Company (Major Brinsmead). A further unit, 6th Field Squadron (Major Collins), was directly under command 24th Armoured Brigade at first. Perrott’s 2nd Field Squadron was also not employed on the first night, taking station with 8th Armoured Brigade in the great mustering of tanks on the Springbok Road. The three Scorpions allotted to the division were lent for the first night to the New Zealanders, but achieved little.

  There remained, therefore, three units for the first night’s attack. They were required to clear four 16-yard gaps, which were a continuation of 30th Corps’ ‘Bottle’, ‘Boat’ and ‘Hat’ routes, and a spare route named ‘Ink’. Brinsmead took Bottle on the right, Moore took Ink and Boat in the centre and Yeates took Hat. The routes had to be carried right the way through to the final infantry object beyond Miteiriya Ridge. A reserve, mainly from 141st Field Park Squadron, was under Major Carr.

  The barrage crashed down, the New Zealand infantry closed up to it and the sapper reconnaissance parties, immediately on their heels, stepped out on a compass bearing according to the drill. McMeekan was on Boat route, immediately behind Moore’s squadron; he was perhaps the only man to follow that barrage in a staff car and he sat right out on the roof of it ‘in order to see the troops’. This was the route designated for the tanks of the Sherwood Rangers and for Gatehouse’s own divisional headquarters. That route we also shall follow first.

  There was a No Ma
n’s Land of about a mile before the first enemy minefield, the location of which was well enough known. The gapping parties of 3rd Field Squadron walked forward to within 500 yards of it, with their sandbagged pilot vehicle driven by Sapper Shaw, their mine detectors, their large reels of white tape, their tin mine-markers, their pickets and lamps.

  They waited expectantly for the blue light from the reconnaissance officer, while the guns trumpeted behind them and the barrage roared ahead. McMeekan found it ‘soothing’. The moonlight, not yet obscured by dust, wanly illuminated an other-worldly scene in which the few score sappers seemed to be alone in a realm of noise. ‘We felt rather lonely and naked’, recorded Moore, ‘without any escort of infantry or tanks.’ But this was his only concern. His men had been trained to a hair for what they had to do and each man, as he waited, went through his own part in his mind.

  The blue light showed ahead and they were off. The machine guns began to crackle like electric drills and their tracers flicked along the line. A few shells began to fall. The pilot vehicle, creeping towards the blue light, blew up and burst into flames. Enemy machine guns and mortars turned on it at once, like steel filings drawn to a magnet. Moore, Driver Shaw and one or two others leapt for fire extinguishers and in about ten minutes put out the signal flames.

  Thus there was a trying delay right at the very start. McMeekan looked at his watch. It was 11.20. Twenty minutes late, and time was already the most precious factor. He moved right up and sent runners out laterally across the minefield for news of the other routes. Signals arrived to lay telephone cable, but the shelling increased, the wires were cut and telephone communications were never of any value. Wireless, as we shall find, was little better and throughout the night communications were the one shortcoming that bedevilled him.

  Moore’s sappers got down to work at once in their echeloned teams, sweeping with their detectors, feeling with their fingers, marking and pulling out the mines and taping the sides of the lane. This was the real thing at last after weeks of training. Knowing that time was precious, they worked as fast as their delicate and dangerous task allowed, moving forward yard by yard, eyes to the ground, ears turned to the detector’s alarm, trying to ignore the distracting sounds of battle all around, trying to be cold-blooded in the heat and emotion of conflict. Tellers, Italian mines, a few S-mines and mines of other sorts were lifted from the soil of the Devil’s Garden and made harmless. It was not very difficult work at first, for, the wind having blown away the sand in many places, the mines there lay clearly exposed.

  At first they worked without serious interference from the enemy, but before long a German heavy machine-gun came to life very close on their left hand. Moore dispatched Lieutenant John Van Grutten, the casual young Cambridge undergraduate, to attack it with rifles and hand grenades, and the gun was silenced. The squadron pushed on, got right through the first minefield, lit the little orange and green lamps and sent word back to the Sherwood Rangers that the gap was through. The squadron prepared to move on to tackle the next minefield.

  Moore, however, was anxious. A detachment of Military Police should by now have come forward in lorries with a load of pickets to mark the route forward between the two minefields. There was no sign of them; what could have gone wrong? He looked at his watch. Time was terribly important.

  Then in the dusty moonlight he saw a small figure moving slowly towards him. As the figure came nearer he saw that it was staggering under an enormous load of pickets; by the broad red band round the man’s helmet, he saw also that he was a Provost corporal. He spoke sharply to him:

  ‘Good God, what are you going here? Where’s your lorry?’

  The little corporal answered with unconcern: ‘Sorry to be late, sir. Afraid the lorries got shot up. A lot of casualties, sir. So I’ve carried up as many pickets myself as I could. I’ll be right back for some more, sir.’

  What had happened was that the two Military Police lorries, 100 yards back, had both been hit by shellfire. All the redcaps, including the sergeant-major, had been killed or wounded except for the little lance-corporal. McMeekan arrived on the scene, provided some of his reserve sappers to replace the Provost and looked after their wounded, but the lance-corporal meantime went ahead alone. McMeekan did not see him again, but the route was marked and lit all the way before dawn.

  Third Squadron hurried forward to the next main enemy minefield. They were in the thick of the battle now. The din increased as the enemy weapons replied to our own more vigorously. German and New Zealand dead lay in greater numbers, and many wounded waited anxiously for help to come. The second minefield was found to be much more thickly sown than the first. Trip-wires and the booby-trapped Italian Red Devils became more plentiful. The S-mines were encountered wherever there was dead ground and Moore, crawling to a flank to find a deviation, was saved only by the eye of an alert subaltern beside him from putting his hand down upon the deadly horns.

  As his teams topped Miteiriya Ridge, the enemy’s fire increased in intensity and the sappers’ casualties grew. All their expertness and all their coolness were called for as they handled the infernal machines in the dark, following the precise drill that they had been taught and trying to make themselves insensitive to the devil’s carnival around them. It needed guts to stand up and stay standing up when everyone else was either lying down or running, for they were now right up with the leading infantry beyond the crest of the ridge. In the left of the squadron’s two gaps, two of the detector operators were hit one after the other, but on both occasions the stalwart Sergeant Stanton took his place.

  It was in this second minefield that Moore most felt the need for protective troops to fight off enemy posts interfering with his work. Several enemy machine-guns were now firing at his team from both flanks and although most of the bullets were whistling overhead, a German heavy machine-gun opened accurate fire from only seventy yards away on the right. It became difficult to make progress, for any movement brought immediate fire. Moore was about to send back for his reserve Troop to attack the position, when a New Zealand officer, seeing their difficulty, attacked the position with two of his men with tremendous dash and, amid an eruption of bursting grenades, killed or captured every man in the post.

  While 3rd Squadron was sweeping its way through the second minefield, McMeekan prepared to go forward again, when Moore’s sergeant-major unexpectedly appeared out of the gloom on foot. He had been sent back in a Dingo (Daimler scout car) to report progress, but on the way back between the two minefields the Dingo had been blown up by a stray mine. That meant that there were one or more ‘indiscriminate’ mine sowings between the two main belts, and McMeekan employed his last reserves as teams to clear them.

  About the same time Moore’s reconnaissance officer[33] came back to report that he had been right through to the objective beyond the ridge, ahead of the infantry. McMeekan therefore, his staff car having been knocked out, went forward in his Humber armoured car, with the reconnaissance officer and sergeant-major clinging to the outside. His Intelligence Officer, Lieutenant Alesworth, followed in a sandbagged jeep, with Driver Crump at the wheel. On the way McMeekan picked up a corporal who was moving Moore’s wounded out of the path of the tanks and passed the wreck of the sergeant-major’s Dingo. They began to approach Miteiriya Ridge, with McMeekan standing up in the turret of the car and the other three clinging to the outside of it.

  Half a mile from the crest of the ridge an air-burst shell from an 88 detonated within a few feet of them. The corporal was badly wounded and McMeekan was shattered by concussion. His right ear was bleeding and the ear-drum broken. A tremendous roaring filled his head, which felt about to burst. There was a small wound in his right arm.

  Some New Zealand infantry came up and applied shell dressings to both men. McMeekan sat on the ground, put his head between his knees and in a minute or two felt better. He remounted his armoured car, which was undamaged, and drove on over the half-mile of the rough gradient to the crest of the ridge.


  The shelling was now considerable and many dead lay strewn over the rocky slope. He found that a bank ran along the crest of the ridge and that Moore’s few vehicles were tucked in under it. Moore himself arrived very soon and reported that both his gaps, Boat and Ink, were making good progress, not much behind time and that his teams were, in fact, in front of the infantry. It was 3.30 in the morning and 8th Armoured Brigade was due to start through in half an hour. The urgency of the situation pressed hard upon the two officers. A report came from Brinsmead that Bottle gap was through on the right, but no news could be got from 571st Field Company on Hat. So McMeekan set out to discover for himself, transferring from the armoured car to his jeep.

  Almost quite deaf, he took the wheel himself with Driver Crump beside him, but he had to change places with him when he failed to hear a Maori’s challenge to stop him and a bayonet flashed menacingly against the side of the jeep. A hundred yards on another party of Maoris roared at them and Crump said: ‘They say we’ve run into a minefield, sir.’ McMeekan dismounted and found a trip wire wrapped round the back axle.

  It was a near squeak, but as the two men bent to remove the wire, McMeekan saw to his delight a German skull-and-cross-bones sign with the warning Achtung Minen. He had stumbled on the Germans’ own gap through their minefield.

  Close by he found also the reconnaissance party of 571st Field Company. McMeekan learnt from the sergeant in charge that, led with great daring by Lieutenant Herbert Darville, they had been right through to their objective beyond the ridge, had put up their guiding light and were waiting for the gapping party to work up to them.

  By now McMeekan realized that there were no infantry in front of him, that 6th NZ Brigade had been unable to gain their objective on this front, and that he and his sappers were the foremost troops. He was not deterred. There was still just time to make a path for the armour if the German gap was a safe one. He decided to test it.