Binks fired immediately. The red tracer darted to the target and a Mark III leapt into flames. On Cullen’s gun there was a momentary delay as his layer’s hand, seized with excitement, froze on the gun. Cullen promptly knocked him aside and took over himself. Extremely cool and resourceful, he immediately clean knocked-out two tanks. Wood, on the right, did not fire at once. Baer darted over to him and found that the breechblock, fouled by sand, would not close. He knocked it up with an empty cartridge case and Wood fired. For the remainder of the action Baer stayed in the pit, he and Bombardier Percy Walker knocking up the breechblock for every round until it cleared.
All four guns were now scoring. Their shots struck home like hammers on an anvil, glowing red as they drilled through the steel walls. In two minutes a dozen tanks were crippled, half of them in flames. The nearest column then turned to face the guns with their frontal armour and attack them. As they came on, they struck with every weapon in their armoury — with machine-gun, high explosive and the shrill scream of close-passing armour-piercing shot. The gunners, filled with exaltation at their swift success, stuck to their guns and gave shot for shot. A great long-gunned Mark IV Special bore straight down upon Cullen, approaching to within 100 yards, ‘hideously menacing’, its machine-guns blazing and its bullets penetrating the gunshield. Cullen stood fast and he and Binks hit it together.
A minute later Binks’s gun, after having knocked out four tanks, was smashed to pieces by a direct hit. Except for himself, all his detachment were killed or mortally wounded, one of them having his head severed from his body. Cullen, a model of steady hand and heart, was also hit, together with his excited layer, Gunner Evans. On the gunners’ left, some of Irwin’s platoon also engaged vigorously. Three tanks and a self-propelled gun fell to Sergeant Pearson, but his own gun and Sergeant Brett’s were, in turn, knocked out. Meantime, bursts of fire from the Rifle Brigade machine-gunners streamed out on the enemy tank crews as they sought to escape.
These few guns it was, therefore, that brought Rommel’s counterattack to a standstill on this sector. Surprised and shaken, with half his forty tanks halted in confusion and several of them burning fiercely, and finding himself now attacked frontally by 2nd Armoured Brigade as well, the enemy commander called off his attack, withdrew and took cover in low ground to the west of Kidney Ridge, twenty-five minutes after he had begun his intended attack.
This, however, was only the first phase of the afternoon action. On observing the reverse to his comrades ahead, the commander of the enemy second wave, which was advancing in their rear, detached 15 Mark III tanks in a direct assault upon the island outpost. They came in head-on, advancing cautiously on the northern sector and making brilliant use of ground in their approach. It was the most dangerous attack that had yet been made against the garrison and only two guns — those of Sergeant Hine and Sergeant Miles — now remained that were in a position to oppose them. It looked very much, indeed, like the end of things. Seeing the critical situation, Lieutenant Barry Holt-Wilson, who, as we have noted, had been manning a gun in another sector with Sergeant Ayris and Rifleman Chard, swung it right round from front to rear. The three guns had an average of only ten rounds of ammunition left.
Sergeant-Major Atkins, from his slit trench at A Company’s little command post, watched enthralled. He felt as though he were witnessing a Wild West film, with tanks for horses. He saw his machine-gunners with their weapons closely following the turrets of the panzers, ready to burst into fire the second that the tank crews leapt out. He saw the guns of Hine and Miles likewise following their targets in their sights and, as the panzers drew closer and closer, he asked himself: ‘Why the hell don’t they open fire?’
Because of the enemy’s shrewd use of small folds in the ground, effective fire could not be brought to bear until the range was very short indeed. As they came on, the panzers lashed the detachments with machine-gun fire, especially that of Sergeant Miles. Miles was hit and his detachment forced into their slit trench. It certainly looked like the end. The juggernauts were almost on top of them.
Sergeant Swann, however, whose gun had been knocked-out earlier, seeing Miles’s gun unmanned, crawled out from his position thirty yards away under the stream of bullets and manned it alone. The guns of Hine and Holt-Wilson stood their ground in the most determined fashion and at about 200 yards all three opened fire. Swann continued to load, lay and fire alone, until Miles’s detachment, inspired by his leadership, jumped forward and joined him.
As in all the previous encounters, the effect was shattering. All four of the leading tanks were knocked out. Two others in the rear of the leaders were also knocked out. All six went up in flames. Last to be destroyed was a Mark III that Swann hit at 100 yards and as he did so Wintour, watching from the battalion command post, and giving physical expression to the exhilaration that filled every man who witnessed the spectacular action, leapt up and down with excitement, shouting:
‘He’s got him, he’s got him, he’s got him!’
The remaining nine tanks of this assault force promptly backed and took up hull-down positions about 800 yards away, whence, immune from the fire of the 6-pdrs, they kept up a galling fire with their machine-guns. From the last tank that Swann had knocked out a man was heard screaming with agony and his screams were heard in all the remaining hours to come.
The three guns that had repulsed this dangerous attack were now left with only three rounds each. Squatting in their gun-pits, the detachments, expecting the attack to be renewed, made ready to use them up to the very last. So certain had it appeared that the position was going to be overrun that Marten, on orders from Turner in the command post, had burnt all codes and maps.
The enemy, however, Germans and Italians alike, had now had quite enough. The scene of desolation in and around the island outpost was staggering. Nearly seventy tanks and self-propelled guns, all but seven being of the enemy, lay wrecked or derelict, many still burning and the black smoke from their fuel trailing forlornly across the desert. To these were added the shattered remains of several tracked and wheeled vehicles. Hanging out of the open turrets of the tanks, or concealed within their bowels, were the charred corpses of their crews who had been unable to escape the flames. Around them sprawled the bodies of those caught by the riflemen’s machine guns. Within or immediately on the perimeter of the island were seven British tanks and one German, and the wreckages of sixteen bren-carriers, several jeeps and ten guns. Five other guns had been damaged; out of the original nineteen, not more than six remained that could be relied upon to engage.
Within this panorama of desolation and death there still remained, however, some 200 gallant men, red-eyed, coated with dirt and sweat, hungry and thirsty, but their spirit even higher than when they had first set out. Within their desert keep, as the crimson sun began to damp down its fires and to tinge with blood the funeral plumes of smoke from the dead tanks, they waited calmly with their few remaining guns and their last rounds of ammunition for a final attack that never came.
They waited also for night, which, whatever might be its fresh perils, they had been told would bring them relief. There had been good wireless communication all day with 7th Motor Brigade and Marten had been talking freely to Charles Wood, but at 5.40 Bosvile himself spoke on the air and said:
‘Friends will come and take your place at dinner time. You are to wait until they are happily settled in your place. Your carriages will then arrive and take you home.’
Marten asked: ‘Will it be an early dinner or a late one?’, and was told:
‘The fashionable time.’
This typical radio cross-talk meant, though Turner and Marten did not know it, that one of the Sussex battalions of 133rd Lorried Infantry Brigade had been ordered to relieve the garrison at about 9 o’clock that night. The codes having been destroyed, Bosvile could give them no more information.
When last light came at 7.30 the enemy tanks to the north-west were seen to pull out from their hull-down positions an
d move farther back to go into night leaguer. Twenty minutes later they were seen nicely silhouetted against the pale evening sky and such guns as could bear in that direction, in a spirit of jubilant defiance, shot off the last of their ammunition against them, scoring one hit at 1,200 yards.
Some hours before this, Turner had been overcome by the heat and the effects of his head wound. The company commanders and the adjutant therefore held a conference when darkness had fallen to determine the measures to be taken. Their chief anxiety now was that the enemy might mount an attack by infantry, which they had small chance of withstanding. However, they made such preparations as they could, contracting their perimeter, and decided meantime to evacuate the wounded as soon as it was fully dark, without waiting for their relief.
No attack actually developed, but soon afterwards the enemy could be seen and plainly heard very close in on three sides collecting wounded and towing away the tank casualties considered repairable. The man wounded when the last tank was hit was still screaming. No offensive action was taken against these parties, however, as the garrison’s own wounded were being collected for evacuation. For this purpose there remained three jeeps, six bren-carriers out of the twenty-two that had started, and one lorry, which had been unaccountably left in the position the night before and which, lying in a hollow to the east, had miraculously survived. So also had Baer’s White scout car, riddled with bullets and shell splinters.
It was now 9.30 and there was no sign of the relief. Holt-Wilson went round the whole position and removed the breech-blocks of every RB gun that still remained serviceable; Baer did the like for the RA guns.
At 10.30 our artillery started shelling the German leaguer to the north-west. The enemy thereupon broke leaguer and his tanks began making straight for the garrison, forming a new leaguer very close to it. There was still no sign of relief, the Sussex battalion having, in fact, been completely misdirected by the same sort of map-reading discrepancies which had led Turner’s force itself astray. Bosvile accordingly gave Marten permission to withdraw.
At 11.15, weary in body but not in spirit, the gallant company withdrew in good order, leaving behind them the bodies of their comrades who had won the soldier’s highest honour.
One 6-pdr was successfully towed out by the gunners of 239th Battery — that of Sergeant Ronald Wood.
This heroic action illustrates not only the typical minor mischances and pitfalls of battle and of desert battles in particular; it illustrates not only the splendid fighting spirit and battle discipline of the two units that took part; it illustrates also the helplessness of tanks against good anti-tank guns, stoutly manned, even when sited on ground of no natural advantage.
The immediate lesson that was read to the whole of the Army was that, when equipped with their own 6-pdrs, the infantry could themselves see off a tank attack and inflict severe losses upon the enemy. The battalion and their Royal Artillery comrades, in resolutely holding ground that in itself was worthless, had that day struck one of the stoutest blows that helped to win the Alamein victory. They had destroyed or disabled more enemy tanks than had so far been destroyed or damaged in any single unit action and had shot one of the most crippling bolts in the destruction of Rommel’s counter-attack of that day.
The action gained such fame throughout the desert, becoming somewhat embroidered in the retailing, that a Committee of Investigation was appointed a month later to examine the ground, count the still remaining carcasses of the enemy tanks and sift all the evidence critically. Their inquiry was searching. They analysed the performance of every single gun. Taking into consideration the number of wrecks that had by then been removed by ourselves or by the enemy, the committee concluded that the minimum number of tanks burnt and totally destroyed was thirty-two — twenty-one German and eleven Italian — plus five self-propelled guns, and that certainly another fifteen, perhaps twenty, tanks had been knocked out and recovered, making a grand total of fifty-seven. A few tracked and wheeled vehicles had also been destroyed. Only a very few of the tanks recovered could have been repaired before the battle ended.
This phenomenal success had not been won without its cost in flesh and blood, but, speaking relatively, the cost had not been grievously severe. Of the total force of less than 300 who had started out from the Highland lines, seventy-two riflemen and gunners had been killed or wounded, to which number were to be added some RE casualties, not ascertained. The figure would have been very much higher if they had not been well trained in the principle of ‘dig or die’ and in the craft of concealment.[63]
Montgomery was naturally delighted. This was just what he wanted. In due process of time there came the Victoria Cross for Victor Turner, the DSO for Bird, the DCM for Sergeants Calistan and Swann and Rifleman Chard and the Military Cross and the Military Medal for those who were selected from the many more who earned them among that gallant company.[64]
REPULSE OF THE COUNTER-ATTACK
The action by 2nd Rifle Brigade battalion group was, however, the only significant success of 1st Armoured Division on the 27th. The armoured brigades, as we have seen, were unable to penetrate the enemy crust and progress more than a few hundred yards towards the Rahman Track. Their tanks and artillery, however, continued to inflict a great deal of damage and they were well placed to meet Rommel’s own attack under Von Thoma. This broke down everywhere as completely as it had done at the Snipe position.
Even before the counter-offensive was launched, the Stukas, the CR 42s and the Messerschmitts 109s which were to support it in the air, were met and engaged by sixteen American Kittihawks and twenty-four British Hurricanes and the enemy formation was completely broken up with the loss of five aircraft at a price of three Hurricanes in the Allied Squadrons. In the more westerly of Von Thoma’s two main thrusts the operations were under 21st Panzer Division and it was the Rifle Brigade’s unexpected stand that was primarily responsible for its failure.
The other main thrust, against the Australians on Point 29 again, was assigned to the formidable 90th Light Division, fresh from its long rest in reserve. Their attack was crushed at the start by very heavy and well-directed artillery fire in great volume, backed by some devastating bombing by ninety British and American day-bombers. So crushing was the artillery fire and the bombing that 90th Light, fine fighting troops though they were, never closed with the Australian infantry.
The counter-attack was watched by Rommel himself. ‘Every artillery and anti-aircraft gun which we had in the northern sector’ he recorded, ‘concentrated a violent fire on the point of the intended attack. Then the armour moved forward. A murderous British fire struck into our ranks and our attack was brought to a halt by an immensely powerful anti-tank defence. There is, in general, little chance of success in a tank attack over country where the enemy has been able to take up defensive positions.’[65]
To his wife he wrote characteristically: ‘No one can conceive the burden that lies on me.’
When Von Thoma reported the situation to him at eight o’clock that evening, the only orders that Rommel was able to give were that all positions must be held and that no major penetration of the front by the British could be allowed.
THE ‘WOODCOCK’ AFFAIR
There is a postscript to be written to these hard-fought operations of D plus 3 and D plus 4 and that an unhappy one.
First Armoured Division was due to be relieved by 10th Armoured Division on D plus 5,28 October. As a first step in the relief, Lumsden had ordered up 133rd Lorried Infantry Brigade, under Brigadier Alec Lee, with its battalions of the Royal Sussex Regiment to take over the tasks of 7th Motor Brigade on the night 27th/28th. This involved the relief of the Snipe garrison and the capture of Woodcock.
Arriving at short notice on a front unknown to them, the Sussex Brigade were unhappy victims of a confused situation and of the inexperience of the armour commanders in infantry assault operations. Parts of three divisions — 51st and 1st and 10th Armoured — were sitting on the same piece of desert and th
e armour were astray on the map. Lee, on arrival at Bosvile’s headquarters, which was under fire, could get no information. After some hours Lumsden and Gatehouse themselves arrived and told him that he could expect no assistance in his preparations. They said that all he had to do to take Woodcock and Snipe was to ‘walk through’, but that he would be given ample artillery support and that the two armoured brigades would be up at first light. It was very obvious to Lee that Lumsden and Gatehouse were acting under pressure from the Army Commander.
Not liking the situation at all, Lee and his battalion commanders set out to fulfil their mission as best they could that night. As we have briefly recorded, the attempt to relieve Snipe, which was made by 5th Battalion of the Royal Sussex, went astray. The battalion reached what it believed to be the right piece of desert and dug in. The attempt on Woodcock was a sadder story. It was made by the 4th Battalion, of which Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald Murphy had taken command only a few days before.
The attack was to begin at 10.30 in the dark hours before the moon rose, supported by a very simple artillery plan prepared by Ebbels, but severe congestion in the minefield gaps caused the battalion to be twenty minutes late at the start. On the right of the attack confusion attended the operation from the outset. Here the battalion found their advance obstructed very soon after it had begun. But it was not the enemy who obstructed them, but 1st Gordon Highlanders, across whose newly-won position at Aberdeen the battalion’s axis had been directed. There was an unfortunate clash. One of Lieutenant Harry Gordon’s sentries, on challenging, was shot through the head. The light of a burning truck then showed the advancing figures to be British, ‘coming on in very good order and aggressive spirit.’
The advance was resumed after the mistake had been discovered, but shortly afterwards the battalion found itself being heavily fired on from the left. The reserve company was sent to suppress this opposition but was nearly annihilated in the attempt.
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