Alamein (Major Battles of World War Two)
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He did not know that Trieste had not even stayed to make a report, and were now nothing but a rout.[85]
Nothing, it seemed to Von Thoma, could convince Rommel. He, therefore, decided to go out again on a personal reconnaissance in his tank. According to the somewhat romanticized account of Colonel Fritz Bayerlein, his chief of staff, he was in a fatalistic mood. He took his greatcoat and the small sailcloth bag with which German generals were supplied. He took also his ADC, Hartdegen, with a wireless set.
Some time later Hartdegen returned to Bayerlein and said: ‘The general does not want me any more, and he says the wireless is no use now. All our tanks have been destroyed. What has happened to the general I don’t know.’
Anxious for the safety of his commander, Bayerlein hurried forward in a small armoured car to find him. Had Von Thoma made up his mind, he wondered, to die, to offer himself to the British guns?
So thinking, Bayerlein tells us,[86] he hurried forward and soon found himself in the thick of the conflict. What in fact he ran into was the concluding phase of the action between 1st Armoured Division and the remains of Von Thoma’s once formidable command, the command which had ranged the desert for so long, which had hammered the British from Gazala to Alamein and whose powerful tanks had so often joined battle with the weaker British armour — The German Afrika Corps, pride of the German Panzerarmee Afrika. Its pride was now humbled in the flames of their funeral pyre and in the wreckage that strewed the desert waste. In the middle of the wreckage stood its commander, the lean, tall warrior of twenty wounds, ‘the epitome of courage’, the acknowledged master of tank warfare, the veteran who had fought in the white wastes of Russia, the plains of Poland, the mountains and valleys of Spain and in two campaigns in France.
‘A hail of armour-piercing shot,’ Bayerlein tells us,[87] ‘was whistling all about me. In the noontime haze I could see countless black monsters far away in front. They were Montgomery’s tanks, the 10th Hussars. I jumped out of the armoured car and, beneath the burning midday sun, ran as fast as I could towards Tel el Mampsra. It was a place of death, of burning tanks and smashed flak guns, without a living soul. But then, about 200 yards away from the sand-hole in which I was lying, I saw a man standing erect beside a burning tank, apparently impervious to the intense fire which criss-crossed about him. It was General Von Thoma. The British Shermans were closing up… Von Thoma stood there, rigid and motionless as a pillar of salt, with his canvas bag in his hand.’
The picture is a little overdrawn, but we can make allowances. The water-colour painted by Henri le Grand, who was serving with 10th Hussars, shows us a less fiery scene, yet dramatic enough.
There had been a brisk engagement between that regiment and the remnant of Von Thoma’s command. The Crusader Squadron, under Major R. M. Milbanke, had been leading the advance of the Tenth. They had encountered the German tanks, who, standing back far out of Crusader range, had picked them off one by one and brought them to a halt. Milbanke himself was hit. Archer-Shee then came up with his heavy squadrons and the panzers were forced back. Raymond Briggs’s own tank, however, was knocked out by an 88 but not set on fire; the photograph shows it at this moment, with the smoke from some of Archer-Shee’s burning tanks trailing down the idle wind. Here and there were the remains of some wrecked or abandoned equipment, but otherwise the scene now was one of the desolate emptiness of the ‘open’ desert — the dun and rolling desert, limitless, barren, forbidding, roasting under the midday sun — over which the ‘black monsters’ of the conquering British armour were methodically advancing.
Unexpectedly there appeared over the crest of a dune a single Mark III tank. It was immediately assailed and burst into flames. The commander and crew were seen to leap out, but were pinned to the ground by shellfire from 11th RHA, whose OP tank was right in front. A tall figure was seen to detach itself from the others and walk slowly forward. From the facings that glittered at his shoulder and collar, and by the outsize binoculars that he carried, he seemed to be someone of importance. The shooting stopped. The OP tank of 11th RHA moved forward; so also did the Dingo Scout Car of Captain Grant Washington Singer, a young officer of exceptional charm and outstanding gallantry, who had greatly distinguished himself throughout the battle. He was leading the Reconnaissance Troop, one of whose duties was to collect prisoners. Singer, standing up in his Dingo, was the first to reach the tall, slowly-moving figure. The German, his greatcoat over his left arm, saluted and gave himself up.
Singer took him back in the Dingo to Archer-Shee and reported:
‘I’ve got something here, sir. I don’t know what it is, but it looks good.’
The prisoner, who spoke a little English, himself gave the answer. It was General Ritter Von Thoma.[88]
At the same moment some 300 Germans, who had hitherto been concealed in slit trenches right in among Archer-Shee’s tanks, rose to their feet, took off their steel helmets, put on their soft caps and surrendered as one man.
With that symbolic episode we must end our story. It was the beginning of the end of the war, though a span of two-and-a-half years still had to run its course before the ultimate collapse of Germany in Europe. In the words of Winston Churchill: ‘It may almost be said: “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat”.’ Hitler or no Hitler, Rommel and his army now fled. ‘Anything,’ Rommel said, ‘that did not reach the road and race off westwards was lost.’
Much indeed was already lost. The tactical defeat was crushing, but the statistical defeat was also immensely impressive. The German divisions had been reduced to skeletons. The Italians had been broken to bits. The Littorio, Trento and Trieste Divisions had been almost wiped out and the Ariete was very soon to meet its doom. In all, the enemy had lost 55,000 men out of the 108,000 with which he had started. Of these, 25,000 had been killed or wounded and 30,000 taken prisoner, among whom were 10,724 Germans. Many more were to be added to the tally as the pursuit went on. More than 1,000 guns of all sorts had been captured or destroyed. In tanks, not less than 320 had been totally lost and many more put out of action.
The British losses, heavy enough in the first infantry attacks, were in the final analysis surprisingly light for a force that was constantly attacking. They totalled 13,560 killed, wounded and missing. Only 2,350 were posted as killed but most of the missing, who numbered 2,260, were also killed. United Kingdom troops incurred 58 per cent of these casualties, the Australians 22 per cent, the New Zealanders 10 per cent, the South Africans 6 per cent. Five hundred tanks had been knocked out, but only about 150 totally destroyed; we still had another 600 or so. One hundred and ten of our guns had been knocked out by shellfire, most of them being anti-tank guns.
In the air, significantly enough, the enemy’s losses had been numerically lighter than our own. His amounted to eighty-four; ours to ninety-seven, of which seventy-seven were British and twenty American.
The 4th of November marked the beginning of a new story in the golden annals of Eighth Army. Rommel, for reasons that belong to that story, just escaped absolute destruction for a little longer, but much else flowed to the immediate credit of the Allied accounts. Tedder’s pilots were able to push up to the Martuba airfields to cover the critical Stoneage convoy to Malta and the valiant isle was saved, never again to be imperilled. The free world rang with the renown of Eighth Army’s commander and his soldiers. To Eisenhower’s liberation forces about to land in French North Africa the victory gleamed as a signal of promise. To the good people at home it shone as a beacon of hope in their darkness.
To the more immediate concern of the soldiers of Eighth Army and their comrades of the Desert Air Force the day marked not only the conclusion of a resounding victory but also the start of the no less victorious pursuit. That pursuit led them a great deal farther than they had ever imagined: not merely to Tripoli, but even as far as Tunis — the distance from London to Moscow — where, joining hands with Eisenhower’s British-American forces, under the tactical command of
General Alexander, they forced the final capitulation of the combined armies of Von Arnim and Rommel. Thus was the whole continent of Africa freed of the enemy, the Mediterranean reopened to Allied shipping and a springboard provided for the assault upon Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’ itself.
These pages have not been intended as a commentary or critique, except as the incidents of the day demand. They are primarily a narrative. When all is said and done, Alamein stands out as a great feat of arms, a soldier’s battle and not merely a general’s exercise, which owed its triumph to the guts and fighting spirit of Montgomery’s soldiers, to his own high mastery in the technique of the most unforgiving of all professions, to the sustained support of the Allied pilots in the air and to the repeated mistakes, which his adversary so shrewdly invited him to make, of Erwin Rommel.
Appendix A: Eighth Army Order Of Battle
on 23 October 1942 (slightly modified and including forward elements only)
Lieutenant-General B. L. Montgomery
(BGS: Brigadier F. W. de Guingand)
HQ EIGHTH ARMY
Formations directly under command included: 1st Army Tank Bde (42 and 44 RTR), who provided Troops to man the Scorpions; 2nd and 12th AA Bdes.
Army Troops included: Tank Delivery Regt, 1st Camouflage Coy, RE, 566th and 588th Army Troops Coy, RE, Eighth Army Signals, 4th Light Field Ambulance, 200th Field Ambulance.
10TH CORPS
(Lieut-General Herbert Lumsden)
(BGS: Brigadier Ralph Cooney)
1ST ARMOURED DIVISION (Major-General Raymond Briggs)
2nd Armoured Brigade (Brigadier A. F. Fisher): The Queen’s Bays, 9th Lancers, 10th Hussars and Yorkshire Dragoons (motor battalion).
7th Motor Brigade (Brigadier T. J. B. Bosvile): 2nd and 7th Battalions The Rifle Brigade and 2nd King’s Royal Rifle Corps (60th Rifles).
Divisional Troops
12th Lancers (armoured cars)
RA: (CRA, Brigadier B. J. Fowler): 2nd and 4th RHA, 11th RHA (HAC), 78th Field Regt (less Troops with other divisions), 76th Anti-Tank Regt and 42 Light AA Regt.
RE: 1st and 7th Field Sqns, 1st Field Park Sqn. Attached: 9th Field Sqn and 572 Field Park Coy.
Others: 1st Armd Div Signals, two companies R. Northumberland Fusiliers, 1st and 5th Light Field Ambulances.
Attached: ‘Hammerforce’ (artillery and armd cars).
10TH ARMOURED DIVISION (Major-General A. H. Gatehouse)
8th Armoured Brigade (Brigadier E. C. N. Custance): 3rd RTR, Nottinghamshire Yeomanry (Sherwood Rangers), Staffordshire Yeomanry, 1st Buffs (motor battalion).
24th Armoured Brigade (Brigadier A. G. Kenchington): 41st, 45th and 47th RTR and 11th KRRC (motor battalion).
133rd Lorried Infantry Brigade (Brigadier A. W. Lee), added from 44th Division: 2nd, 4th and 5th Royal Sussex Regt and one company R. Northumberland Fusiliers.
Divisional Troops:
The Royal Dragoons (armoured cars).
RA: (CRA, Brigadier W. A. Ebbels): 1st, 5th and 104th (Essex Yeo) RHA, 98th Field Regt (Surrey and Sussex Yeomanry), 84th Anti-Tank Regt, 53rd Light AA Regt.
RE: 2nd and 3rd (Cheshire) Field Sqns, 141st Field Park Sqn; attached: 6th Field Sqn, 571st and 573rd Army Field Coys.
Others: 10th Armd Div Signals, 3rd, 8th and 168th Light Field Ambulances.
8TH ARMOURED DIVISION (Major-General Charles Gairdner). This division was reduced to a headquarters staff and some non-operational troops only. 10TH CORPS TROOPS: 570th Corps Field Park Coy RE, 10th Corps Signals, 12th and 151st Light Field Ambulances.
13TH CORPS
(Lieut-General B. G. Horrocks)
(BGS: Brigadier George Erskine)
7TH ARMOURED DIVISION (Major-General A. F. Harding):
4th Light Armoured Brigade (Brigadier M. G. Roddick): 4/8th Hussars, The Greys and 1st KRRC (motor battalion).
22nd Armoured Brigade (Brigadier G. P. B. Roberts): 1st and 5th RTR, 4th City of London Yeomanry and 1st Rifle Brigade (motor battalion).
131 Lorried Infantry Brigade. See under 44th Infantry Division.
Divisional Troops:
Household Cavalry Regt, 11th Hussars and 2nd Derbyshire Yeomanry (armoured cars).
RA: (CRA, Brigadier Roy Mews): 3rd RHA, 4th and 97th (Kent Yeomanry) Field Regts, 65th Anti-Tank Regt, 15 Light AA Regt.
RE: 4th and 21st Field Sqns, 143rd Field Park Sqn.
Others: 7th Armd Div Signals, 2nd and 14th Light Field Ambulances.
Under command: 1st and 2nd Free French Brigade Groups and 1st Free French Flying Column.
44th Reconnaissance Regt (from 44th Division).
44TH INFANTRY DIVISION (Major-General I. T. P. Hughes):
131st Infantry Brigade (Brigadier W. D. Stainer): 1/5th, 1/6th and 1/7th The Queens’ (became incorporated in 7th Armd Div on 1 Nov.).
132nd Infantry Brigade (Brigadier L. G. Whistler): 2nd Buffs, 4th and 5th Royal West Kent Regt.
133rd Infantry Brigade. See under 10th Armd Div.
Divisional Troops:
RA: (CRA, Brigadier H. R. Hall): 57th, 58th, 65th and 53rd Field Regts, 57th Anti-Tank Regt, 30th Light AA Regt.
RE: 11th, 209th and 210th Field Coys, 211th Field Park Coy and 577th Army Field Park Coy.
Others: 44th Div Signals, 6th Cheshire Regt (machine-gun battalion), 131st and 132nd Field Ambulance.
50TH INFANTRY DIVISION (Major-General J. S. Nichols):
69th Infantry Brigade (Brigadier E. C. Cooke-Collis): 5th East Yorkshire Regt, 6th and 7th Green Howards.
151st Infantry Brigade (Brigadier J. E. S. Percy): 6th, 8th and 9th Durham Light Infantry.
1st Greek Infantry Brigade Group (Colonel Katsotas): 1st, 2nd and 3rd Greek Battalions, 1st Greek Field Artillery Regt, 1st Greek Field Engineer Coy, 1st Greek MG Coy, 1st Greek Field Ambulance.
Divisional Troops:
RA: (CRA, Brigadier Claude Eastman): 74th, 111th, 124th and 154th Field Regts, 102nd (Northumberland Hussars) Anti-Tank Regt, 34th Light AA Regt.
RE: 233rd and 505th Field Coys, 235th Field Park Coy.
Others: 50th Div Signals, 2nd Cheshire Regt (machine-guns), 149 and 186 Field Ambulances.
13TH CORPS TROOPS: 118th and 124th RTR (dummy tanks)
4th Survey Regt RA (part), 578th Army Field Coy and 576th Corps Field Park Coy, RE, 13th Corps Signals.
30TH CORPS
(Lieut-General Sir Oliver Leese, Bt.)
(BGS: Brigadier G. P. Walsh)
51ST (HIGHLAND) INFANTRY DIVISION (Major-General D. N. Wimberley):
152nd Infantry Brigade (Brigadier G. Murray): 2nd and 5th Seaforth Highlanders, 5th Cameron Highlanders.
153 Infantry Brigade (Brigadier D. A. H. Graham): 5th Black Watch, 1st and 5/7th Gordon Highlanders.
154th Infantry Brigade (Brigadier H. W. Houldsworth): 1st and 7th Black Watch, 7th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
Divisional Troops:
RA (CRA, Brigadier G. M. Elliot): 126th, 127th and 128th Field Regts, 61st Anti-Tank Regt, 40th Light AA Regt.
RE: 274th, 275th and 276th Field Coys, 239th Field Park Coy.
Others: 51st Div Signals, 1/7th Middlesex Regt (machine-guns), 51st Div Reconnaissance Regt, 174th, 175th and 176th Field Ambulances.
2ND NEW ZEALAND DIVISION (Major-General B. C. Freyberg, VC):
9th Armoured Brigade (United Kingdom) (Brigadier John Currie): 3rd Hussars, Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, Warwickshire Yeomanry and 14th Foresters (motor infantry).
5th NZ Infantry Brigade (Brigadier Howard Kippenberger): 21st, 22nd and 23 NZ Battalions, 28th Maori Bn.
6th NZ Infantry Brigade (Brigadier William Gentry): 24th, 25th and 26th NZ Bns.
Divisional Troops:
2nd NZ Divisional Cavalry Regt (light tanks).
NZA (CRA, Brigadier C. E. Weir): 4th, 5th and 6th NZ Field Regts, 7 NZ Anti-Tank Regt, 14th NZ Light AA Regt.
NZE: 6th, 7th and 8th NZ Field Coys, 5th NZ Field Park Coy.
Others: 2nd NZ Div Signals, 27th NZ Bn (machine-guns), 5th and 6th NZ Field Ambulances and 166th
Light Field Ambulance (for 9th Armd Bde).
9TH AUSTRALIAN DIVISION (Major-General L. J. Morshead):
20th Australian Infantry Brigade (Brigadier W. J. V. Windeyer): 2/13th, 2/15th and 2/17th Australian Infantry Bns.
24th Australian Infantry Brigade (Brigadier Arthur Godfrey): 2/28th, 2/32nd and 2/43rd Australian Infantry Bns.
26th Australian Infantry Brigade (Brigadier D. A. Whitehead): 2/23rd, 2/24th and 2/48th Australian Infantry Bns.
Divisional Troops:
RAA (CRA, Brigadier A. H. Ramsay): 2/7th, 2/8th and 2/12th Aust Field Regts, 3rd Aust Anti-Tank Regt, 4th Aust Light AA Regt.
Engineers: 2/3rd, 2/7th, 2/13th Aust Field Coys, 2/4th Aust Field Park Coy, 2/3rd Aust Pioneer Bn.
Others: 9th Australian Div Signals, 2/2nd Aust Bn (machine-guns), 2/3rd, 2/8th and 2/11th Aust Field Ambulances.
4TH INDIAN DIVISION (Major-General F. I. S. Tuker):
5th Indian Infantry Brigade (Brigadier D. Russell): 1/4th Essex Regt, 4/6th Rajputana Rifles, 3/10th Baluch.