Alamein (Major Battles of World War Two)

by C. E. Lucas Phillips

  General Briggs’s intention was to maintain his attempt to drive right through to the Skinflint report line on the Rahman Track, which, as we have seen, was the enemy’s main lateral supply route. There, from positions of his own choosing, he hoped to invite attack from the German armour and destroy it.

  Though the enemy was constantly laying fresh minefields, it was now mainly the anti-tank gun that was arresting the armour. The ground westward of the Oxalic ridge was extremely exposed and was securely covered by these guns. Briggs, therefore, resolved to attack two of the enemy’s fortified localities by night with his motor infantry and to use these localities as firm bases from which his armoured brigades — the 24th still being under his command as well as his own 2nd — could thrust westward to Skinflint. One of these fortified localities, disclosed by air photographs to be heavily gunned and wired, and known by the code-name of Woodcock,[57] lay on the north-west of Kidney Ridge, and the other known as Snipe,[58] and less heavily defended, about a mile to the south.

  It had been Briggs’s intention to attack Woodcock only on the night of the 25th, using both 2nd Battalion King’s Royal Rifle Corps (the ‘60th Rifles’, William Heathcoat-Amory) and 2nd Battalion The Rifle Brigade (Victor Turner). We shall go back a day to record in outline what happened then, as it formed the prelude to the larger work to follow and because it shows the problems of the desert war in startling form.

  Turner’s battalion had by midday on the 25th only just completed their exacting mine-clearance task, when he and Heathcoat-Amory were hurriedly summoned to the headquarters of 7th Motor Brigade to receive orders for the operation from Bosvile. Briggs himself was there. Bosvile was using as his HQ one of the new Churchill tanks which 1st Armoured Division had received for running and maintenance trials (not for operations) and its stout armour gave valuable protection against the shell fire under which the armoured formations’ conferences were so often held.

  Having received their orders, the two COs set out to reconnoitre a start-line, jolting forward by jeep along Star Route in the stifling hour of the mirage. At the end of this route were two stone cairns, which they agreed would serve them excellently. They then went farther forward to make contact with Roper-Caldbeck commanding 1st Black Watch, on the Highland Division’s Black Line, through whose terrain they would have to pass in their attack.

  The meeting took place under some high-velocity shellfire and a carrier of the Black Watch was hit and ‘brewed up’ within twenty yards of the three COs as they talked. To their astonishment, the riflemen were told that the faint ridge they could see ahead, which they would have to cross, was still held by the enemy and that 5th Black Watch, under Thomas Rennie, was actually to attack the outpost pointed out to them as Stirling that very night, with the same Zero hour as their own.[59] This took the riflemen aback, for Roper-Caldbeck’s location of Stirling revealed a difference in map reading, between 1st Armoured Division and 51st Division, of 1,000 yards.

  Turner and Heathcoat-Amory returned to their brigade headquarters in what Turner described as ‘considerable doubt and confusion’ and their proposed attack for that night was, naturally, cancelled. Rennie’s operation against Stirling, as we have seen, was carried out successfully, as well as Campbell’s against Nairn.

  At 4 p.m. next day, the 26th, however, Turner and Heathcoat-Amory were again urgently summoned to Bosvile’s headquarters. Briggs, who was again there himself, had now decided to attack Woodcock with 60th Rifles only and to launch 2nd Rifle Brigade on Snipe. The twin operations were to have top priority and to be supported by all the available artillery in 10th and 30th Corps. At first light on the 27th, 2nd Armoured Brigade was to move forward to Woodcock and 24th Brigade to Snipe, as their ‘pivots of manoeuvre’. It was thus what is popularly termed a ‘two-pronged attack’.

  Time was exceedingly short. Zero hour was 11 p.m. and only a couple of hours or so of daylight remained. Turner, assured of his own division’s confidence in their map reading, hurried off through the dust and the intermittent shells to collect his scattered companies, and he sent Lieutenant Dick Flower to arrange a start-line that would not inconvenience the Black Watch. He then collected his officers and gave out his orders from Roper-Caldbeck’s command post.

  He had only just finished doing so when Flower returned to say that he had fixed a start-line, but that Roper-Caldbeck was still convinced that Highland Division’s map locations were right and the armoured division’s wrong. This gave Turner ‘a bad fright’, as he worked out that, if this were so, the artillery plan to support his attack would catch the flank of 5th Black Watch in their new position.

  Very concerned at this danger, he broke away from his Order Group and made such speed as he could through the darkness to the headquarters of 7th Motor Brigade yet once more, leaving his second-in-command, Major Tom Pearson, to collect the battalion and their accompanying gunners and sappers and dispose them on the start-line.

  At Bosvile’s headquarters he ran, unexpectedly, into a formidable gathering of the ‘top brass’ — Lumsden, Briggs, Wimberley and ‘Frizz’ Fowler (Briggs’s CRA), besides Bosvile. Turner put the urgent problem to them, whereupon Briggs observed with apparent decisiveness:

  ‘My CRE has surveyed in Star Route and he tells me that it is not more than 200 yards out at any point throughout the whole length of its six miles.’

  Wimberley countered, however, by saying with equal emphasis: ‘I am quite sure we are right, as we have walked every damned yard of the seven miles from our home minefield to where we are now, and we can’t be wrong. So we can’t be far off the mark.’

  Lumsden chimed in with one of his light-hearted racing analogies and said:

  ‘Come, gentlemen, I think we might make a book on this.’

  ‘You seem to forget, sir,’ Wimberley said, ‘that I am a canny Scot, and, what’s more, I’ve an idea that you are, too.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lumsden replied with a laugh, ‘I think we might risk a bawbee or two!’

  Fowler brought the discussion back to a more practical note. ‘As far as this attack is concerned,’ he said, ‘there is no real cause for alarm, as my fire plan will be over-safe for the Black Watch.’

  It was now the turn of the man most concerned in the controversy.

  ‘In that case, sir,’ Turner broke in, ‘it will be no bloody good to me at all.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is too late to alter anything now,’ Fowler said.

  ‘Very well. I shall just have to form up as if the Armoured Division’s interpretation is correct and if it isn’t, I shall just march on the flank of the falling shells.’

  With this very unsatisfactory conclusion, Turner hurried off into the night to his battalion, already waiting on the start-line.

  The attack on Woodcock by 60th Rifles is best related first. Accompanied by some guns of 76th Anti-Tank Regiment, the battalion began its advance in clouds of dust raised by the barrage and by its own bren gun carriers, which, in the motor battalion method, preceded the soldiers on foot and caused them great difficulty in keeping direction. Overcoming a little opposition, they followed, as best they could, the shadowy clouds and the noise, and when the noise stopped they stopped also and put themselves in a posture of defence.

  First light, however, showed Heathcoat-Amory that he was south of Woodcock and in an exposed position that would be wholly untenable by day. He, therefore, moved at once to a more secure position. The arrow had missed its mark in the murk of desert war.

  THE GREAT STAND AT ‘SNIPE’

  A little farther south, the small mixed force that Victor Turner was to lead in the attack on Snipe had been hurriedly assembling in the dark, moving gingerly through the mines. We shall associate ourselves with this exploit as intimately as possible, for it was in every sense remarkable. Not only was it to show the British soldier in one of his finest hours, not only was it unexpectedly to deal one of the most telling blows against the German counter-attack that matured next afternoon, but also it was to illustrate in the mo
st vivid fashion how the mischances, misunderstandings and dark uncertainties that beset the soldier in a vague and confused situation can be overcome by his own self-reliance and battle discipline.

  Let us first look at some of the men who were to give these valiant proofs.

  The force allotted to Turner for this exploit consisted of his own battalion of the Rifle Brigade, the residual part (after casualties) of a battery of 76th Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, and sixteen sappers of 7th Field Squadron, Royal Engineers, under a ‘damned good’ subaltern, as Turner called him, Lieutenant N. Graham.

  The riflemen and sappers had been through a very trying time on the Minefield Task Force. After three days and two nights continuously on a mission that taxed their nerve and their stamina, they had been able to snatch only a few hours’ sleep. Indeed, Tim Marten, the Rifle Brigade adjutant, had not slept for five days. The riflemen had been operating in separate and dispersed companies on different minefield lanes, and they had now to be hurriedly collected together and launched into an operation for which a motor battalion was not intended and for which it was not properly equipped.

  For, as noted briefly in Chapter Eight, a motor battalion was very strong in fire power but very weak in numbers. It was trained as a highly mobile, semi-independent unit for ranging far and wide in the open desert. Its strength lay in the thirty-three bren-carriers of its Scout platoons, its anti-tank company newly equipped with sixteen 6-pdrs, its machine-gun platoons equipped with the Vickers gun and its platoon of 3-inch mortars. Unlike the majority of conventional infantry units, it was highly efficient in radio telephony.

  In addition, 2nd RB quite unlawfully possessed a number of machine-guns which they had ‘salvaged’ from wrecked British aircraft and installed in their carriers and with which they had delighted during the desert war in sallying out at night like moss-troopers to ‘beat-up’ the enemy leaguers.

  Thus the only men armed with the rifle, bayonet and grenade of the assault soldier were the men in the three ‘motor companies’, who numbered only some ninety in all, unless the machine-gunners discarded their Vickers. Casualties in the mine-clearing had reduced this number to seventy-six and the bren-carriers were down to twenty-two. Indeed, the whole combined force of riflemen, gunners and sappers in the epic battle now to be fought numbered less than 300.

  Victor Turner himself was a Regular soldier of moderate but solid build, prematurely bald, very energetic and lively, with fifteen months’ experience of desert warfare. Some of his officers and men had had more. In his battalion there was a dash of Irish, but, otherwise, the rank and file were nearly all Londoners and very largely from the East End; the coming action, indeed, was to prove once more that in a tight corner there is no better fighter than your Cockney. It was characteristic of a Rifle battalion that most of the men, and several of the officers also, such as Turner himself and Tom Bird, were of small stature.

  Except for some recent reinforcements, they were young desert veterans who, like the other Rifle regiments, had been accustomed to serving as handmaids to the armour, playing the less spectacular role on many a turbulent stage. They were not afraid of tanks, which they had faced many times, and were accustomed to living hard, to getting a move on and to fending for themselves in the most trying situations. Many of them were Regular soldiers and several had already been decorated.

  Prominent among the men were: the swarthy and handsome East-ender, Sergeant Charles Caliston, formerly a champion boy boxer, very strong, finely co-ordinated in physique and highly thought of by his officers; the strongly-built, four-square Regular, Sergeant J. E. Swann; the smart Sergeant J. A. Hine from Acton, another Regular already wearing the Military Medal; Sergeant Ayris, from Limehouse; the puckish Sergeant Miles, from Southwark; Corporal A. Francis, ‘magnificent Cockney’ and a modern edition of the 1914 ‘Old Bill’, tremendously reliable and always seeking where he could help; Sergeant G. H. Brown, who was reputed once to have stolen a railway engine, but who had won a very fine DCM; Company Sergeant-Major Jack Atkins from Skegness, slender and intelligent; the squat, tough Sergeant Dolling and the equally tough Rifleman D. A. Chard, often in trouble when not fighting. All these and others we shall see standing up without the blink of an eye to the repeated assaults of the German and Italian tanks.

  The companies were commanded by David Bassett (A company), Michael Mosley (B), Charles Liddell (C) and Tom Bird (Anti-Tank Company), who had already won the Military Cross and Bar; ‘Tim’ Marten, highly intelligent and fortunate in having a sense of humour, has been noted as Turner’s adjutant.

  The anti-tank platoons were commanded with a fire and spirit at times little short of the spectacular by Lieutenants J. E. B. Naumann, J. E. B. Toms, J. B. D. Irwin and A. B. Holt-Wilson; all but the last-named were to be hit and knocked out during the coming fight.

  Allotted to the battalion for this exploit were eleven gun detachments and other details of 239th Anti-Tank Battery, from 76th Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery. Five of these guns, however, did not succeed in arriving at the rendezvous and the remaining one and a half Troops were led by Lieutenant Alan Baer, very tall, very lean and angular, an Oxford undergraduate, who commanded G Troop. He was a keen musician, an interest he shared with Alex Barclay, CO of The Bays, who was a friend of Cole Porter’s and who kept a jazz band recruited from Joe Loss’s dance orchestra.

  With Baer was another Troop commander, Second Lieutenant Fred Willmore, an athletic young man, recently commissioned and wearing the ribbon of the Military Medal. He brought only two guns of his Troop (Sergeants Wood and Hillyer), his other two having been blown up on mines during the Division’s struggle to get forward on the first day.

  The regiment had originated from North Wales, having, before conversion, been a Territorial battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. There was fine material in these detachments: the thick-set, hefty Sergeant Bob Smith, a steelworker from Sheffield, very strong in body, stalwart in morale and a fine inspiration in battle: Sergeant Cullen, a quiet, well-educated and exemplary Scot; the steady, well-turned-out Sergeant Ronald Wood, and others whom we shall notice.

  These gunners of 76th Anti-Tank Regiment were more experienced with the 6-pdr than the riflemen, who had had little practice with it so far. As befitted those whose task was to await, while under close fire, the menacing onset of tanks, their great quality was their steadiness. Before leaving to join Turner, Baer had been warned prophetically by Major R. A. Wyrley-Birch, the Rhodesian, second-in-command of the regiment and one of the most experienced desert fighters: ‘From all the signs, I should think it highly probable that you are in for a death-or-glory affair.’

  Turner likewise gave the warning to his Order Group that this would be a ‘last man, last round’ assignment, and Baer, as he listened, experienced that mixture of excitement and self-doubt which is the experience of most men at the challenge of the ultimate test. The men, for their part, listened quietly and gravely.

  One other small group was added to Turner’s force — Captain Noyes, 2nd RHA, who, with his signallers, came as FOO.

  Such in outline was the composition of the little force hastily assembled in the lines of 1st Black Watch for the attack on Snipe.

  The moon was getting later now. The ground, beyond the Oxalic line of ridges, changed suddenly from hard rock to treacherous soft sand and a scattering of low camelthorn scrub. It became almost entirely featureless and extremely exposed, except for the usual small, anonymous folds in the desert and except for an oval mound about three-quarters of a mile in length, seen on the map as a 35-metre ring contour[60] and rising to 37 metres, which we shall accordingly call Hill 37, for it is important to our story. The exposed nature of this terrain was, indeed, one of the chief reasons why 1st Armoured Division had so far been unable to get on beyond Oxalic.

  In short terms, what Turner was called upon to do with this force was to make a night dash through enemy-held country, to establish an island of resistance until the arrival of 24th Armoured Brigade next
morning and to continue holding it while the tanks operated forward.

  The orders that Turner had given a few hours before to his mixed force required that the advance should be on a bearing of 233 degrees, ‘unless the barrage comes down on a different bearing, in which case you follow the barrage’. Zero hour was 11 p.m. The advance was to be led by two bren-carrier platoons in the usual motor battalion method, followed by A Company on the right and C Company on the left on foot, with B Company following up.

  All the guns, however, were to remain on the start-line under his second-in-command, Major Tom Pearson, together with the third Scout platoon, the wireless sets, the doctor (Captain Arthur Picton) and his ambulances and the Section trucks, carrying water, rations and ammunition, until the ‘success signal’ was given by the attacking companies.

  As for consolidation tasks on capture of the objective, all that Turner could do was to give each company a sector of the compass, A Company having a sector of 140 degrees facing north-west to north-east, B Company about the same facing south-east to southwest, and C Company completing the circle round to the northwest again. The anti-tank guns were apportioned to these sectors for all-round defence.

  On his arrival at the start-line only a few minutes before the barrage was due, Turner, in no little anxiety of mind, found that his command had also got there only twenty minutes before. The moon not yet being up, the night was very dark and cold and the move forward of the sub-units out of the minefield lanes, now 18 inches deep in fine dust, had been made in conditions similar to those of a dense night fog. Two of the anti-tank portees had collided and, together with their guns, could go no farther. The start-line was under intermittent shellfire, but the force just had time to dispose itself in the order of attack before the barrage, which was due to begin at Z minus 5. They began to move up at once and at 11 o’clock the barrage was in full blast.