Alamein (Major Battles of World War Two)

by C. E. Lucas Phillips

  Certain incidents we can observe a little more closely through the smoke and dust: Currie himself, standing boldly erect, bearing a charmed life, right in among the enemy guns; Pat Hobart close behind him, his staff duties shed, the world to him a sudden bewilderment of gun-blasts, chattering machine-guns, heavy shot that screamed by in red or white darts, or hit and ricocheted with high parabolas into the sky. A tank, narrowly missed several times, moved away a few yards to take evasive action, but the wrath of Currie fell upon its commander instantly. Moving his tank alongside, Currie shouted above the din, as the armour-piercing shot flashed between them: ‘Where the hell are you going, you windy little…? Get on!’

  Such is the general picture of this Balaclava charge. A clearer view of its course of events is given us if we follow first the action of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry in the centre, where there was very nearly a complete break-through.

  Here, as throughout the approach march, the van was entrusted by Alistair Gibb to the Crusaders of B Squadron under the stalwart figure of Major Tim Gibbs. Alistair Gibb, in pursuance of the Army Commander’s order, was prepared to lose the whole of the squadron, but expected to get through on their heels with his heavies.

  Major Gibbs began his attack with eleven tanks all in unsound condition. His was the only compass in the whole squadron that worked. His Besa machine-gun was unserviceable, his 2-pdr very nearly so and his radio in very bad shape. At the start he had gone out on foot to give his Troop leaders verbal orders, knowing that, once the attack was launched, he could exercise little control.

  The attack of B Squadron was a complete success. They reached the Rahman Track. They got right in among the enemy guns, dug-in tanks and machine-guns before the enemy knew what was happening. There was complete consternation as the Crusaders swept in in the dark. Few of the enemy weapons could be brought to bear. On every side the German and Italian gunners and infantry were throwing up their hands, fearful of being crushed to death. Others were streaming back, leaping into whatever transport was available and making off. Four officers jumped into a staff car and began to move off. Gibbs, having no other weapon at hand that he could trust, took a pot shot at the car with his .45 revolver, and to his astonishment saw it go up in flames.

  Gibbs thought that the battle was won. His squadron went up and down crushing the trails of enemy guns. Finding no other opposition, he radioed successfully to Alistair Gibb that the way was clear and then himself drove on for 1,000 yards or more towards the Aqqaqir Ridge.

  Then, as the sky paled, the storm burst. In his own words (to the Author) ‘the whole world seemed to blow up at once’. The big guns disposed in depth had seen him in the early light. Tom Elson’s Troop, which had done so well at Miteiriya, all burst into flames almost simultaneously. In two minutes Gibbs’s squadron was reduced to two tanks — his own and that of Lieutenant R. Balding. He took refuge in an enemy gun-pit, to await the arrival of the heavy squadrons of Lord Cadogan and Henry Awdrey.

  As he waited Gibbs saw, away on the left flank, a force of armour approaching in the distance in the early morning mist. He took it for the Warwickshires, whom he expected to be just there, and thought that all was well. Intending to collect the crews of the tanks that had been knocked out, he drove out of his protective gun-pit. He was immediately assailed by the tanks approaching from his left flank, which were, in fact, a counter-attack column of 21st Panzer Division. He replied to their fire as best he could with his ineffectual 2-pdr as the leading panzers got to within 400 yards of him, when his own tank, which had been repeatedly hit, was shot up in flames, his wireless operator killed and he himself hit in both legs. He was hit again as he dragged out the dead man. With his gunner and driver, he made for Balding’s tank, which, collecting a few more survivors, made its way back miraculously under a hail of fire from everything that the enemy could bring to bear. All but one of those clinging to the hull of the tank were hit again. Gibbs was hanging on to the ankles of Sergeant Wenham in front of him when a bullet shot through his arm and killed the sergeant.

  Meanwhile, Alistair Gibb had ordered his heavy squadron to follow through. They had reached the Rahman Track when the dawn storm burst. They in turn became its victims as the armour of the panzers, now within a few hundred yards, added their fire to that of the heavy guns on the slope of Aqqaqir and to the fire of all sorts from the nearer enemy who had forsworn their surrender. Cadogan’s squadron was astride the track when, in a few minutes, it was almost completely wiped out. His own Grant was on fire and two of his crew killed. He saw with dismay the whole Troop of Lieutenant Allen Pennell, well beyond the track, shot up in flames almost simultaneously. He began to collect the wounded and tried to get them back, but the infantry of 152nd Brigade were firing at everything on foot that moved in their direction. The other squadron of the Wiltshires met a similar fate and Henry Awdrey was also ‘brewed up’.

  Alistair Gibb’s command tank ‘Trowbridge’ was hit likewise and its high octane petrol flamed up in the morning air. He, Christopher Thursfield (his adjustant) and the crew leaped out, but the driver was killed by machine-gun bullets as he did so. After having been pinned down for a while by the machine-gun crew that had so lately surrendered, Gibb and Thursfield made a dash for a wrecked truck, in which they found the wireless still working. There Gibb reported to Currie, saying that he had no wireless contact with any of his squadrons but that he thought B Squadron was through. Soon afterwards he was hit in the arm by the fire from our own infantry.

  On the Wiltshires’ right very much the same course of events attended the forceful attack of 3rd Hussars under Peter Farquhar. In the first spectacular fifteen minutes, Michael Eveleigh’s squadron, leading the assault, crashed through and well beyond the line of guns in the most determined manner. Thus Lieutenant Charles Dorman found himself ten yards away from a battery of four 50 mm guns. His Troop knocked them all out. Almost simultaneously Lieutenant Kenny’s Troop knocked out another battery of four farther away to his left. Both Troops then came under fire at the hour of first light from the 88s sited farther back or to a flank, and three or four tanks were quickly in flames. Eveleigh, observing a third battery of four guns in action beyond the road, called upon Kenny, Dorman and Lieutenant Hill-Lowe to follow him and attack them. Kenny at once responded but his tank was immediately hit and blown up and he himself never seen again. Dorman’s tank was hit, too. Only five tanks were left in that Squadron, but, in the words of their leader, ‘it was no use stopping now and the only thing was to keep going’. This they did, but Eveleigh’s own tank was soon shot-up in flames by a battery of Italian 47 mm guns at a range of twenty yards. Ejected from the tank by his gunner and wireless operator, Corporals Rafferty and Holton, Eveleigh ran round to the front to extricate his drive and co-driver, Sergeant Good and Trooper Brooks, but found their apertures locked fast by the shock of the hit and the armour plating already red-hot. Seeing the Italian gunners shooting at his other two men with small arms, he emptied his revolver at them. Dorman, observing what had happened from the right, swung round, engaged and wiped out the Italian battery, while Eveleigh made his precarious way back through the field and, sickened by the repulsive smell of burning bodies, was picked up just in time by Farquhar himself with his revolver empty and his ammunition expended.

  Meanwhile, Farquhar, observing that Eveleigh’s squadron was through, ordered Major Alan Dawes, commanding C Squadron, to move up at once. Like most of the brigade, he had now no wireless contact and to give Dawes his orders he had to dismount and walk over. Observing the concentration of fire now on the remnants of Eveleigh’s Squadron, he ordered Dawes to go through on their right, where there was a slight eminence. It was now almost full day.

  His orders, however, must have been misunderstood, for when Farquhar returned to his own tank, which was itself being repeatedly hit, he saw to his dismay that C Squadron was going straight into the furnace. He knew they were going to certain death, but could not stop them. In a few minutes Dawes was killed and mos
t of his squadron wiped out. Undismayed, the remainder still went on, led by Second-Lieutenant Chesworth, but nearly all fell to 88s on the northern flank or to a squadron of Panzers from 15th PZ Division, which now came up behind their protective cover. Only two or three tanks in C Squadron came out of that fiery ordeal of fifteen minutes.

  Farther south, the Warwickshires, accompanied by their Foresters, had gone a little off-course as a result of the minefield divergence, thereby unwittingly creating a partially open flank for the Wiltshires as the tanks of 21st Panzer Division made their counter-attack. There they fought their own battle. It was begun very quickly when Lieutenant Ted Parish, ‘very small but very brave’ as his squadron leader described him, attacked and destroyed a battery of four Italian guns. Very soon the whole regiment, as it followed Peter Samuel’s Crusader squadron into the fight, was heavily engaged, encompassed by enemy on all sides, fighting the enemy guns, dug-in tanks and machine-guns at close range and dropping grenades on the German and Italian infantry. As the darkness dissipated, the Warwickshires’ tanks became outlined against the Eastern sky, so that, as Lakin thought as he glanced to the rear, they looked like ‘damned great houses’. They immediately began to take heavy casualties, but stood their ground, doing great damage and sacrificing all but seven of their tanks.

  Guy Jackson, though faint with the onset of jaundice, stood up in his tank throughout, surveying the action like a master watching hounds draw a covert and urging on his squadrons with phrases of the hunting field. ‘The fox,’ he called into his microphone, ‘will break cover any minute and the hunt will be on. Don’t go back a yard’. Lakin, his own tank in flames, his gunner mortally burned and his driver and loader badly burned also, made his way on foot over to Jackson after ‘a hellish half-hour’ and found him ‘like the rock of Gibraltar, with his big pennants flying bravely’, and his over-heated gun firing rapidly at all sorts of targets until it was hit, while Sergeant Court gave him magnificent support.

  Thus all along the brigade front the combat waxed to a climax in the cold dawn mist and, as the eastern horizon glowed blood-red in the pre-dawn, Currie, watching anxiously for the arrival of 2nd Armoured Brigade, whom he expected at this moment to break through upon his heels, saw no sign of them in the lightening sky behind.

  All that he could see was a world of devastation — devastation of the enemy, indeed, their shattered guns sprawling at crazed angles, their detachments lying dead, but devastation of his own brigade also. As far as the eye could see lay the terrible record — tank after tank burning or wrecked, the smoke of their burning mingled with the cold mist, the crimson shafts from the eastern sky tincturing all objects with the hue of blood. Only here and there could he see a tank still defiantly shooting it out with the more distant guns and the tanks of Africa Corps. He was very angry, very bitter. In fulfilment of his orders, he was ready to sacrifice all if Fisher’s brigade had been there to crash through whatever ragged breaches he had torn in the enemy’s wall of guns.

  It might be thought that, after such a devastating experience, the remaining handful of tanks would have had little further stomach for the fight, but such was far from the facts. They extricated themselves in good order and continued the fight, their offensive spirit unsubdued. The half-dozen heavy tanks of 3rd Hussars, on Farquhar’s orders, took post in line facing west and continued to engage the 88s, which had caused most of the damage, and he sent Heseltine with two Crusaders 1,000 yards to the north to keep observation for the threatened counter-attack by 15th Panzer Division. His own battered tank, hit again and again, Farquhar had had to abandon as a wreck. All that then remained of the whole regiment’s tanks, fit to continue action, was eight; they had started the battle with thirty-five. Only four officers of the regiment were alive and unwounded; twelve had been killed.

  These are but a few glimpses discerned through the smoke of this fiery action, an action unique in military annals, in which the British tanks fulfilled their mission in blood and fire, and one which we may surely call heroic. Nearly every squadron leader’s tank in the brigade was destroyed. In the Wiltshires every tank fought its own fight under its officer or NCO and most of them fought it to the death. Virtually every tank in the regiment was lost. One of them had been hit with such violence, at twenty yards’ range, that it had been bowled clean over and lay on its side.

  When the battlefield was inspected very soon afterwards, thirty-five enemy guns were found knocked out within 100 yards of the burnt-out tanks. Of these, 3rd Hussars claimed seventeen and the Wiltshires fourteen. Some of the tanks were found at the very mouths of the guns. Three hundred prisoners had been taken and there would have been many more if there had been any troops to gather in those who offered surrender in the battle of the gun-line.

  In the words of Freyberg himself, ‘it was a grim and gallant battle right in the enemy gun-line. Although the 9th Brigade did not reach its objective and had heavy casualties, the action was a success, as the enemy gun-line was smashed’. Montgomery, sending the brigade his thanks and congratulations, told them that their exploit had ensured the success of the operation.

  The price paid by Currie’s regiments was slightly lower than the Army Commander had allowed for. Out of the ninety-four tanks with which they had gone into battle, they had lost seventy-five and out of some 400 officers and men who had manned them they had lost 230. For the whole night’s operation their total tank losses were 103.

  The nineteen tanks that remained rallied on the right and continued to fight under 1st Armoured Division in the further operations which we shall presently witness, and in which, still full of fight, they had the satisfaction of knocking out several German tanks.

  Nevertheless, it had been a terrible ordeal. Guy Jackson, having brought back what was left of the Warwickshires, collapsed as he got out of his tank. Currie was asleep on his feet. Briggs, who met him later in the morning, found his eager spirit ‘worn with fatigue, harassed with distress’ at the agony of his regiments and ‘very bitter that 2nd Armoured Brigade had not arrived in time’. We shall judge for ourselves in the next chapter how valid his grievance was.

  When, a little later, Gentry brought up 6th New Zealand Brigade to take over from the Durhams, he went forward to discover the dispositions of the tanks on his front. He found Currie, fully dressed still, asleep on a stretcher beside his tank, with a dozen or so other tanks dispersed around him. Gentry hesitated to wake him, but decided that he must. He shook him and, when Currie awoke, said:

  ‘Sorry to wake you, John, but I’d like to know where your tanks are’.

  Currie waved a tired hand at the little group of tanks around him and said:

  ‘There they are’.

  Gentry, puzzled at his reply, said:

  ‘I don’t mean your headquarters tanks. I mean your armoured regiments. Where are they?’

  Currie waved his arm again and replied:

  ‘There are my armoured regiments, Bill’.[74]

  Chapter Nineteen: The Hammering Of The Panzers

  (2 November)

  THE BATTLE OF TEL EL AQQAQIR

  Tiger though he was, Currie remained deeply affected for many weeks afterwards by the grievous losses among his regiments in their self-immolating attack. He continually asked both himself and his friends if he had done right. To that question, however, so far as he and his brigade were concerned, there could be but one answer. They had obeyed orders. Freyberg, with professional detachment, remarked:

  It may be argued that it was a costly and incorrect method of using armour, but, if we are to believe General Von Thoma, it may well prove to have been the deciding factor in breaking the German line, though advantage was not taken of the breach until later.[75]

  The qualification with which Freyberg ended his comment illustrates the controversy that followed over the immediately subsequent operations of 1st Armoured Division, and their relationship to those of Currie’s brigade. To the sorely-tried Hobart and to most others who followed Currie on that morning, th
e ‘crash action’ (to employ a gunner’s term, entirely appropriate to Currie) was a fully justifiable use of armour in the circumstances. But to Briggs and others of hard experience:

  The plain truth is that armour cannot charge concealed or semi-concealed guns behind a crest and get away with it. Those have to be dealt with methodically by stalking, HE fire and artillery concentrations and this takes time. If 2nd Armoured Brigade had been closer up, the story would merely have repeated itself.[76]

  On the other hand, it might be argued that the loss of impetus initiated by 9th Armoured Brigade endangered the Army Commander’s plan. Montgomery did not want Rommel to retreat; he wanted to break through, swing up to the coast, encircle and destroy his enemy. If 2nd Brigade had been right on Currie’s tail, they would have suffered severely but might have crashed through. So it can be argued.

  In retrospect, we should treat the charge of Currie’s brigade as part of the larger and the most momentous action about to be begun by 1st Armoured Division, to the success of which they paid a sacrificial contribution beyond facile assessment. In their Homeric hour they had severely shaken the opposition to Briggs’s division. It is beyond question that 3rd Hussars and the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry made a definite breach in the Rahman Track. Farther south, as Lakin remarked laconically (to the author): ‘You may say that we did not make a real breach, but we certainly made a bloody good dent.’ It was daylight that defeated the brigade, exposing them to the fire of the heavy guns disposed in depth on the Aqqaqir Ridge to the west and north-west. Farquhar and others still maintain confidently that, had the attack not been postponed for that half-hour, the two regiments could have overrun these also and won their final objective.