Alamein (Major Battles of World War Two)

by C. E. Lucas Phillips

  The reconnaissance party had a detector mounted on bicycle wheels, which they called a ‘pram’. Conscripting Crump into the reconnaissance team, McMeekan made off over the crest to the German lines. Two men operated the pram, with McMeekan and three others lined out on either side, looking for any fresh marks in the sand which might show that the enemy had closed the gap at the last hour: six men ahead of the whole army, strolling slowly along, eyes glued to the moonlit ground.

  The enemy, himself uncertain of the position, was maintaining a curtain of desultory shell and machine-gun fire along his side of the ridge. Impelled by the urgency of the hour, the little sapper party paid no heed to the fire, but McMeekan was careful to keep a man glued to his less deaf ear.

  The luck could not last long. About 150 yards beyond the crest, two machine guns opened up close on their left, the tracers flicking just over their heads, narrowly missing. They dropped to the ground and McMeekan made a rapid appreciation. He contemplated completing the reconnaissance by crawl, but his watch showed him that it was already 4.30. No time. With three gaps swept and a fourth clear for at least halfway, he thought he would be justified in calling the armour forward. The roaring in his head forgotten, he felt all Africa within his grasp if the tanks could be shepherded through within an hour. He crawled back with his little team as fast as he could.

  He hurried back to Boat gap, where his armoured car still was, to call on the armour by wireless. But both the wireless set and the operator had been badly shaken when, at the moment of his having been blasted by the air burst, he had fallen on top of them. He wished ardently that he had had his own Signalman McKay with him.

  It was maddening to him that the whole plan might fail because of a single faulty wireless. He jumped into his jeep again and drove as fast as he dared back down the Boat gap and found that 8th Armoured Brigade was already rumbling up. He shouted to the first squadron leader that the way was clear, and close behind he found Neville Custance, the brigade commander, himself. Custance told him that the column on the Hat route was well up but, as was to be expected, did not know what was in front. McMeekan replied: ‘Very well, sir, I will go over and guide them.’

  He made his way across with the greatest difficulty, obstructed by wire, trenches and gun-pits, found to his disgust that the column on Hat had received orders to halt and doubled back again to Boat, bent on urging the armour to hasten forward before first light. He found a gunner officer and asked for the use of his wireless to speak to brigade headquarters. The gunner demanded to see his identity card and McMeekan produced it, fretting at the delay. A few seconds later another gunner asked for it, and the card fell from McMeekan’s hand, which was quivering with rage and impatience. Then Douglas Packard, commanding 1st RHA, whose guns were coming into action under shell-fire just behind, turned up and took the irate, determined and almost stone-deaf CRE to see Custance personally.

  But it was too late. Half an hour too late. The tanks of Flash Kellett’s Sherwood Rangers ahead had been brought to a halt by the enemy.

  While McMeekan had been trying to get the Hat route opened up, the sappers of 3rd Field Squadron had been ‘working like demons’ to complete Boat. Moore, like his CRE, was getting more and more anxious about time. A hard driver in training, in action, like other good leaders, he encouraged and guided and was always on the spot when he was most wanted. Before long, like Brinsmead on Bottle, he was ahead of the New Zealand infantry, but his men were as steady as rocks under the continuous fire as they crept forward, sweeping, marking, lifting, taping.

  It was getting on towards six o’clock and the sky was beginning to change from black to grey and the stars to fade as he watched his men work through to the very end and saw a sapper put up the last marker. Then he turned and raced back as fast as he could through the gap that had been made. At the end of it, in the expanse between the two minefields, he saw the tanks of the Sherwood Rangers lined up, nose to tail, waiting for the word to go forward. He jumped on to the leading tank and shouted to the officer in the turret:

  ‘For God’s sake, get up as quickly as you can, or you’ll run into trouble.’

  The tanks moved immediately, and Moore himself led them forward. They climbed up the rocky slope and came up on the crest. Moore could see the stalwart Sergeant ‘Stan’ standing at the head of the gap in the half-dark, boldly waving them on. They answered his signal and as they debouched from the head of the gap their black shapes became silhouetted in the dull grey light before dawn.

  A few hundred yards ahead a screen of dug-in anti-tank guns in the enemy’s main battle position was waiting for them. There was a terrible ‘clang’ as the tank that Moore was leading was hit by a solid shot. He at once ran back to the next tank in the line and guided it round in front of the first. Within a few feet of him it suffered the same fate. He ran back for a third, with a like result.

  In the first five minutes six were hit and burning. In a very short time the Rangers had lost sixteen tanks. The markers put up by the sappers were knocked down by shell fire, so that other tanks, trying to open out to a flank, went into the minefield.

  Faced with this situation, Flash Kellett tried to call forward the machine gunners of The Buffs, who formed part of his Sherwood Rangers regimental group, to suppress the enemy anti-tank guns. He could get no answer from them on the radio. He therefore summoned his field gunner, Major David Egerton, commanding B Battery, 1st RHA, whose OP tank, a Honey, was next to his own in the column. Could he, Kellett asked, do anything about those chaps in front?

  Egerton, a young Regular officer, looked through his spectacles into the pre-dawn, which was still too dark for discerning anything at a distance but solid, black objects. The intimidating streams of red tracers from the German 50-mm wove their patterns all around, and the flames of burning tanks glowed on either hand. But all that he could see ahead were the flashes from the enemy’s guns, dug in on the reverse slope of a slight fold in the ground, a few hundred yards away. He said:

  ‘I don’t think I can do any good, sir, but I’ll have a try.’

  He called his battery into action. They were still in the long column in the Boat minefield lane, between the second and the third squadrons of the Rangers’ tanks. In the confines of the minefield gap it was impossible for the guns to deploy. Captain Peter Jackson, commanding the ‘gun group’, without hesitation decided that the only direction to go was forward.

  Pulling the eight 25-pdrs of the two Troops out of line, he led them through the din and deployed them in a ‘crash action’ in the open, some 300 yards beyond the minefield, Downham Troop on the right, Sahagon Troop on the left. It had all the atmosphere of a horse-artillery action in the old tradition, in front of the whole army. So close were they to the enemy that a German 50-mm gun was attacked and silenced by Lieutenant Pat Grant with hand grenades.

  The two Troops opened fire immediately over open sights, but the only targets they could engage were momentary flashes in the night from unseen weapons. These, as Egerton knew, were poor targets for a gun and fall of shot could not be observed. The shapes of his own guns, however, were dimly silhouetted and began to be more clearly revealed as the sky grew paler. They came at once under heavy fire, from anti-tank artillery, machine guns and rifles, but resolutely continued to engage.

  Egerton’s own tank, 200 yards ahead, was hit. Deprived of mobility and communications, he walked back to his battery through the hubbub. He found both Troops to be suffering heavy casualties, men dropping at the guns every minute. They continued to engage, and here and there the flashes began to diminish.

  The approaching dawn, however, brought an end to the gallant little action. Seeing the Rangers’ tanks themselves beginning to withdraw to the cover of the ridge, Egerton gave the order: ‘Cease firing; prepare to withdraw.’

  The hump-backed ‘quads’ drove up in the dissolving gloom, led by the Troop-sergeants with the steadiness of a drill-order. Their distinctive shapes, familiar to the enemy in many a lively action, brou
ght a new access of fire. The quads drove on, wheeled right and left of their Troops, hooked on to their guns and drove back, very fortunate that only one of them was knocked out.

  Some twenty wounded still lay out on the ground to be picked up and evacuated. David Mann, leader of Downham Troop, began to do so but was himself mortally wounded. Jack Tirrell, leader of Sahagon, an ex-ranker officer who already wore the ribbons of the MC and DCM, had better luck and got his wounded out piled high on his Honey. It was almost full daylight and, as the crimson radiation of the approaching sun glowed behind the rocky crest of Miteiriya, the funeral plumes of the smoking tanks were dyed blood-red.

  When everyone else had vacated the position, Egerton himself and such other officers as remained walked quietly away in the morning light and, as they did so, Jackson was wounded by a 50-mm shell that burst between him and Egerton.[34]

  Meanwhile, Moore and his sappers were manning some German trenches, prepared to help the infantry against an enemy counterattack. To Driver Flinn, who was perhaps the first man to drive a vehicle beyond the ridge, this was the worst part of the night, but he drew comfort from the nonchalance and dry humour of Corporal Delve. A Stuka attack passed almost unnoticed, for, as Flinn said, ‘a couple of dozen bombs in the middle of that lot meant nothing’.

  The order came from McMeekan for the sappers to withdraw, their task completed. Flinn drove some of them back in his Chev. to the area ordered a mile or so back. He then made two further trips up to collect wounded, bringing back New Zealanders, sappers and several badly burned men, in great pain, from the Rangers’ tanks. The minefield gaps, now revealed to the enemy, were under observed fire and a long-range duel between the tanks had begun.

  Dirty, tired, thirsty, 3rd squadron withdrew full of pride that they had done their job. So excellent had been their training that they had not suffered a single casualty from mines; nor, indeed, had any other RE unit in the division. They relaxed and began to brew up for breakfast. Sergeant ‘Stan’ took off his steel helmet. A shell burst about seventy yards away and a splinter from it embedded itself in his skull.

  The other sapper units in 10th Armoured Division had maintained the renown of their Corps with no less spirit. ‘The mad bastards are way ahead,’ a New Zealander had said when Flinn, driving up his stores lorry, stopped to ask where they were. In 573rd Company, on Bottle route, Second Lieutenant Eric Smith was leading the sweeping party ahead of the infantry beyond Miteiriya Ridge. Various enemy machine guns were traversing the area in their methodical fashion. Smith, already himself wounded, carefully observed the arcs of each gun as revealed by their tracers. As each in turn swivelled towards him, he dropped his team to the ground, resuming between the lulls.

  In the 571st Company Lance-Corporal Harold Greatrex was driver of the pilot vehicle. It was blown up and he was wounded. Refusing medical aid, he unloaded his stores and carried them forward to the sweeping party 300 yards ahead, making four journeys through the enemy’s counter-barrage.

  All along the 30th Corps front, as well as in the sector north of Himeimat, where 13th Corps were attacking, the dust-clouded moon looked down on similar exploits. Only on Miteiriya Ridge, however, did the sappers succeed in making a way for the armour right through to the final goal, for in the other tank corridors the infantry themselves were brought to a halt.

  Thus the mine was the weapon that most seriously obstructed the break-out of Eighth Army’s armour. On Miteiriya Ridge an extra half-hour of darkness would have done the trick, though whether, even so, the armour could have got through is a question that the next night’s operations were to answer. By any test, however, the achievements of the New Zealand infantry and of 10th Armoured Division on this night stand out as exploits of the highest order.

  THE ARMOUR

  While the actions precedent to their own were taking place, the two armoured divisions of 10th Corps were awaiting their turn to go forward in a ‘regulating area’ on the Springbok Road south of El Alamein station.

  This they had reached after an intricate approach march brilliantly planned by the staff. They were a formidable and impressive force, numbering more than 5,000 tanks, guns and vehicles of various sorts. Their minefield task forces, however, had gone ahead with the infantry, as we have seen on 10th Armoured Division’s corridor, and their field guns, other than those in close support of the armoured brigades, had previously taken post to join in Eighth Army’s fire plan.

  At the Springbok Road, still maintaining wireless silence, they refuelled, removed muzzle-covers from the guns, fed belts of ammunition into the Besa and Browning machine guns and were strictly marshalled in their order of progress. The enemy positions lay six miles ahead of them on the south and nine on the north. They were not to move until 2 a.m. when 1st Armoured Division, using the Sun, Moon and Star routes, was to make its way up to the northern corridor, and 10th Armoured by Bottle, Boat and Hat to the southern.

  Lumsden’s orders to Briggs and Gatehouse were that their divisions, having cleared their own minefield gaps through the territory won by the infantry, were to deploy on the Pierson Bound, approximately a mile ahead of the infantry on the north and two miles on the south, putting out anti-tank screens with their infantry brigades on their open flanks. From this bound it was intended, after reconnaissance, to move on another three or four miles to the Skinflint report line running south-eastward from Tel el Aqqaqir, with the hope of bringing the enemy armour to battle there.

  Briggs, on the northern corridor astride the boundary between the Australians and the Highlanders, intended accordingly to deploy 2nd Armoured Brigade on a line just west of that insignificant kidney-shaped ring contour which has already been briefly mentioned and which gave its name to the ridge in which it was a depression, with 7th Motor Brigade forming a flank on the right.

  Gatehouse, having two armoured brigades in his division on the southern corridor, placed 24th Brigade on the right and 8th on the left, with 133rd Lorried Infantry Brigade following to form a defensive flank to the south.

  At the Springbok Road the waiting divisions saw ahead of them the long, continuous flickering of the gun flashes stretching away into the night as far as the eye could reach and heard their insistent clamour. In a tank of the Warwickshire Yeomanry Clive Stoddart, watching the moon, thought of moonlight steeplechases and of the pictures in the dining room at home. It was bitterly cold and as the men of the armour shivered in the moonlight the first flush of excitement at the magical opening of the barrage began to flag a little. Their own entry into the stormy waters ahead was not to be so dramatic as the infantry’s — no hidden start-line, no Zero Hour, no barrage. They would crawl slowly into battle, their fortunes in part dependent on those of the soldiers ahead of them. All were keenly looking forward to the performance of the Sherman in its first battle. They prayed above all that they would be able to get through the last minefield and out into the open among the enemy before daylight. As they waited, a lone German aircraft dropped a single bomb on 2nd Armoured Brigade.

  Since we have already seen 10th Armoured Division going up into action in the southern corridor, it is 1st Armoured, and particularly its 2nd Armoured Brigade, that we shall follow as they begin to drive across the Springbok Road at 2 a.m. They crept forward in line ahead at the prescribed speed of three miles in the hour, following the long fine of masked lamps that lit the three Corps routes. It was a difficult and tiring speed for the wheeled vehicles.

  Almost nose-to-tail, the brigade advanced in the accepted desert manner in three regimental groups, the Bays (Lieutenant-Colonel Alex Barclay) on Sun route on the right, 9th Lancers (Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Grosvenor) on Moon in the centre and 10th Hussars (Lieutenant-Colonel Jack Archer-Shee) on Star. In each regimental group the Reconnaissance Troop led in scout cars, followed by two squadrons of tanks, regimental headquarters, the third squadron, the affiliated battery of 11th RHA in their new Priests, a squadron of the Yorkshire Dragoons as motor infantry, a battery of 76th Anti-Tank Regiment, the bofors
guns of 42nd Light-Anti-Aircraft Regiment and finally the echelons of supply lorries carrying ammunition, petrol and water for the tanks. Briggs, Fisher and Bosvile were on Moon route with their small tactical headquarters.

  As the columns progressed, great clouds of fine white dust, churned up by the tank tracks, obscured everything. Very often even the tank or vehicle in front could not be seen and the march became a nightmare for the choked and blinded drivers. Reaching what had been our own front line, they passed through gaps in our minefield that had previously been cleared by 275th Field Company, RE, and emerged into No Man’s Land, where the crumps of bursting shells ahead and the rattling of machine guns began to challenge the trumpeting of the guns behind.

  The leading squadrons reached the captured enemy forward localities ahead of time at 4 a.m., found the gaps that had been cleared by the sappers of the Minefield Task Force under Victor Turner and followed their tiny coloured lights forward. At the second minefield, however, they were brought to an exasperating halt, for Turner’s force was having to fight its way through against the battle outposts left by the infantry. The Companies of 2nd Rifle Brigade and the troops of tanks were now being engaged on all three routes and in the centre the opposition had been strong enough to require a company of the Yorkshire Dragoons to be called forward from the rear of the regimental column. Thus it was not until well after first light that the second belt was cleared and the armour able to go through. Turner’s Force then encountered further minefields which had not been known to exist.

  As dawn approached and the leading tanks were still barely halfway to their Pierson Bound, the COs of the armoured regiments, still in close column and hemmed in by mines, found themselves faced with the kind of predicament that Lumsden and Gatehouse had foreseen. They had three courses open to them: to push on ahead of the infantry regardless of mines and anti-tank guns; to remain in their lanes nose-to-tail; or to risk deployment where they stood. The first and boldest course was to invite either glory or disaster, the second would be to present a golden target to enemy guns and aircraft and the third would risk losses from mines.