El Alamein

by Bryn Hammond

  Oh, it was a miserable thing! I wondered why the hell are we fighting here!? Godforsaken place, no water, nothing. No place to hide. Of course, the desert is not completely flat, there are many folds. Two convoys can pass each other without being noticed at a distance of 100 yards. There are so many folds, you see. The only thing is that movement cannot be concealed because of the dust clouds. That’s the only handicap. 19

  The desert was not pure sand; it was gravel and rocky outcrops, soft sand and steep ravines. Conditions and ‘going’ varied between the coastal strip and the desert proper beyond the line of two steep escarpments which was a limestone plateau. This was largely table flat with some depressions and low-lying ridges. The further south one went, the more rugged and variable the terrain became. During daylight hours the heat of the sun on the exposed desert was relentlessly oppressing. At night, temperatures plummeted and it would be bitterly cold – especially in winter. Sudden heavy rainfall was not unknown and could produce floods and boggy ground preventing tanks and vehicles from moving. At all other times, the dust mentioned by Nila Kanten was a major problem, clogging men’s throats and the engines and tracks of tanks and reducing visibility to only a few yards.

  The desert and its conditions were also a state of mind, depending upon how the individual responded to it. For Major Alf Flatow of the 45th Royal Tank Regiment (Leeds Rifles):

  To see the desert sprinkled with tanks, soldiers, tents and lorries was to see a hot Hades of flies, and sand and discomfort. But I sometimes used to get into the Jeep and drive off alone and then it was different. For a long time we had camping places on what once had been a huge primeval forest. Petrified trunks of trees were lying about half covered in the sand and in one or two odd places trunks were still upright to a height of six or seven feet. To the imaginative it could not fail to thrill or stir in a peculiar manner, but I doubt if half a per cent of the Middle Eastern Force who reached the desert went so far as to look at the desert in this way. It was just ‘a hole and the sooner we leave it the better’ which of course was surely the only materialistic way to look at it.20

  Water, or rather its absence, was also a hugely important influence on how men lived in this hostile environment. Each man was issued with between four and six pints of water a day but a proportion went to the cookhouse for the preparation of communal food. With significant numbers of troops from the Indian sub-continent, water rationing presented particular problems, as Nila Kanten remembered:

  We used to get a gallon of water a day. Out of that gallon sixty-five per cent or seventy per cent went to the cookhouse, for food, tea and everything. The rest of the contribution went for our own drinking and washing. When we joined the army we completely forgot the religion. No purification. Nothing of the sort. We never bothered. The situation made us forget. Nobody was telling us. Even the Sikhs with all their beards and everything, they were the most affected. They had to wash.21

  The water was especially disliked for what it did to tea – a beverage considered such an essential to the British and Commonwealth men’s morale that in 1942 the British government endeavoured to purchase the entire Indian and Ceylonese tea crop. Bombardier Cyril Mount of the 11th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery (RA), told how:

  It was salty so the tea always curdled. When you put evaporated milk in the tea it curdled. Whether the salt was put in to replace the salt we were losing through sweat or whether it was coming from wells that had been contaminated by the sea or from salt in the ground, I don’t know.22

  Maintaining personal hygiene was also difficult because of the shortage of water. Cyril Mount continued:

  The water cart would come up and you could fill up. A lot of us still had our canvas buckets from the horse days which you used to carry on your saddle and so you could fill up your canvas bucket, and you could fill up your water bottle. And you might be able to fill a petrol can and if that was the case, if the water was plentiful, you were alright. You were able to wash, never bath. You may have a sponge-down to get rid of the soreness between your crutch. You’d get sweat rashes and prickly heat and so on. But there were no baths. You were expected to shave.23

  Near the coast, men might be lucky to bathe in the sea, but elsewhere the heat and lack of water posed the risk of illness and disease being spread by inadequate sanitary facilities and attempts were always being made to address this. Cyril Mount recounted:

  Normally people would go off with a spade leaving a good fifty yards from anybody else’s position and dig a hole and afterwards fill it in. Like a cat. Eventually some hygienic officer decided we would have a battery command post latrine and we dug this very deep hole and we put ammunition boxes on the soft sand and we put planks across it and a tin of some sort with a hole in to sit on and people used to go and sit on this throne. Until one day it collapsed and we were back to the old system. It fell in. I don’t think anyone fell in with it! But it did fall in. That was the end of the attempt to civilize us. 24

  Decent latrines were in fact an essential for every unit camp: Trooper Ian King of the 3rd Hussars, described the arrangements:

  The first task on setting up a camp was to dig a latrine, a narrow hole about nine feet long by six feet deep and three feet wide. Over this was placed a box-like structure with holes cut into it. As there was no need for privacy in the desert, the latrine was open to view. Urinals, commonly known as ‘desert roses’, were made from cut-down petrol tins, pierced at the base, filled with stones and slightly canted when set in the ground. These were set some distance from the tents and were hygienic enough because the fierce sun soon dried them. Finding them at night was not without risk of becoming lost in the featureless desert and only the most fastidious used them after dark. It was safer to walk within earshot of one’s friends and kick sand over the wet patch.25

  The desert night was so dark that there was a real risk of a man getting lost when walking even a very short distance in camp – a risk described in a letter home by Lieutenant Charles Potts of the 1st Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment), 8th Armoured Brigade:

  We find one of the biggest snags in the desert is to find our way about on a dark night, when there is no moon. One can lose one’s way going to the latrine only 100 yards away or so, and after walking round in circles for hours one gives up hope of finding the way back, scoops a trench in the sand and sleeps in it, then one wakes up in the morning and finds the camp half a mile away. It’s a great life. Here’s another cyclone going by and a hellofabig one – wow! And another dust storm – again the camp is wrapped in a cloud of white dust.26

  These dramatic desert sandstorms, or gibli, were, like the desert night sky, an incredible thing to behold.

  With the wreckage and detritus of men and battle lying all around the desert, soldiers of all nationalities were plagued by enormous quantities of flies, a problem bitterly recalled by Kannoneer Martin Ranft of Artillerie-Regiment 220, 164. leichte Afrika-Division:

  They were really beastly. They weren’t flies like the ordinary house flies. They were horrid. So much bigger and so much more aggressive. We had those nets over our heads but even with those nets they’d cling against the net, trying to get in your eyes – everywhere where they sensed there was moisture. The eyes and the mouth. All day long you’d walk about like that – trying to flick them away with your hand. And they don’t really go away. They go a little bit and they come straight back again. They were horrible.27

  Sergeant Fred Hunn of the 12th Lancers remembered how his squadron of armoured cars spent some time encamped in an especially fly-blown area:

  The squadron was in a wadi thickly populated by millions of flies which settled in hundreds on the face, hands, everywhere. If one made a mug of tea, within seconds the whole of the brew would become a black mass of heaving insects. Never had so many pests been encountered in all the days spent on the desert. The only relief came when one was covered completely by a mosquito net. Thirty six hours in this place was torture.28

  Despite best endeavours, t
he health of the men suffered and especially during the periods between battles. Cyril Mount recalled:

  Everybody had desert sores. If you nicked yourself on anything – and there were a hell of a lot of sharp edges … wherever you nicked yourself, you immediately got what seemed like every fly in Egypt trying to get onto that sore, on that bit of dried blood and no matter what you did you couldn’t get rid of them. They’d probe. Their little tongue would be probing right inside that wound and eventually they would become septic. People would be going round with their faces bright violet. I don’t know what it was but the MO would paint stuff on their faces and hands. But that didn’t keep the flies away. That just disinfected. It was permanganate of potash or something. But it was a very bright violet stuff and it to some extent stopped the infection from spreading. But you still had the flies coming on it.29

  What helped many men cope with these hellish delights was their youth and general fitness, as Canon Gervase Markham of the 124th Field Regiment (RA) recorded:

  I got this dysentery after a bit. I got boils on my face so had to have bandages all over my face and so looked an awful sight for some time. In fact I had to be sent back and be treated at one time. This was very ignominious because to be classed as ‘undesertworthy’ was a very humiliating thing. But we were all very young and probably very healthy. I was in my twenties and in fact I can remember speaking to a Sergeant who was forty! ‘Forty!! A man like you! You ought to be at home!’ Forty was an ANCIENT age and it was very unusual to find anyone as old as that – most of them were just lads in their early twenties.30

  As in any war, despite all the awfulness some men were exhilarated by the experiences they had and relished the desert’s challenges. The majority however gritted it out, seeing it as something to be endured with only the hope of leave in Cairo, Alexandria or Tripoli and the desire to see the war ended to sustain them. Meanwhile they did what they could to make themselves as comfortable as possible and took what pleasures life offered, as Heinz Werner Schmidt recounted:

  Although it was against orders, we listened every night to the news and to music broadcast from Cairo. The British had a fairly objective propaganda station there. We learned from Eighth Army prisoners that they too listened to the ‘enemy,’ particularly to hear Lili Marlene played from Belgrade or Athens. The sentimental tune reminded us on both sides that there were other things than aerial bombs and desert warfare.31

  As a result of the failure of Operation Battleaxe, Churchill replaced Wavell as Middle East commander with General Sir Claude Auchinleck. The change was effected on 21 June. It was Auchinleck’s fifty-fifth birthday. On the following day, the German attack on the Soviet Union began. Both events had a major influence on the course of the Desert War.

  It was in this context that operations in North Africa for the next twelve months took place. Instead of becoming the main focus of the Axis war effort, North Africa now became of secondary importance. On 26 June Italy accepted the change in priorities when Mussolini sent the first units of a corpo di spedizione Italiano to Russia. This expeditionary corps subsequently grew into an army of 230,000 men, 22,300 vehicles, 1,100 guns, fifty tanks and eighty-three aircraft – a larger organization than Italy deployed in North Africa. These forces could have had a major impact in North Africa but were sent to Russia in an attempt to maintain the illusion that Italy was a significant power.

  On the British side, the new Middle East Commander-in-Chief Auchinleck had been warned by the almost equally new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, that Churchill would expect quick results from an early offensive. However, Auchinleck was a plain-speaking soldier, unable or unwilling to do anything other than offer statements of fact to anyone, including the Prime Minister – no matter how far diplomatic answers might help his cause. He bluntly maintained that launching an offensive with the inadequate means at his disposal was not justifiable. Despite Churchill’s relentless pressure he responded with stark facts to explain his forces’ unreadiness. Intelligence intercepts via the Ultra network suggested the weaknesses of the Axis forces but Auchinleck judged his troops inadequate in numbers and training. Reinforcements were sent to bolster his forces but Auchinleck still maintained, rightly, the inferiority of the tanks and guns with which they were equipped. On each occasion Auchinleck got his way. However, in September, he appointed Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Cunningham to command what now became Eighth Army. Cunningham arrived fresh from success in East Africa where he had retaken British Somaliland, captured Addis Ababa and forced the surrender of the Duca d’Aosta’s forces. The build-up of this army continued with the inclusion of forces from many nationalities including Australian, New Zealand, South African, Indian, Polish and French units. Against them now was the Panzergruppe Afrika (as it became known from August 1941) consisting of three experienced German divisions (15. and 21. Panzer-Division and Division z.b.V. Afrika (Division zur besonderen Verwendung,* which soon became 90. leichte-Infanterie-Division)) and some Italian formations, especially Divisioni ‘Ariete’ and ‘Trento’, which might by now be termed veteran. Another motorized formation, 101a Divisione Motorizzata ‘Trieste’, had joined in August.

  Not until 18 November did Eighth Army open Operation Crusader, by advancing against the southern flank of the Axis forces’ positions. A deception plan was also used to persuade Panzergruppe intelligence that the main attack would not take place until early December and would be a much more ambitious outflanking manoeuvre than the one planned. This succeeded to the extent that Rommel was not in North Africa when the attack began. Eighth Army’s plan relied once more on air co-operation from what was now the Desert Air Force to give them two clear days without serious air opposition. However, bad weather before the offensive resulted in the cancellation of all the air raids planned to interdict the Axis airfields and destroy their aircraft on the ground.

  Cunningham’s plan depended on the destruction of the Afrika Korps and the Italian armour but this came apart when, after a number of inconclusive engagements, 7th Armoured Division was defeated at Sidi Rezegh. The Axis units fought well, including the Italian Divisioni ‘Ariete’ and ‘Bologna’ – a ‘semi-motorized’ formation. Rommel then made a dash for the Egyptian border with the remnants of his Afrika Korps armour and Divisioni ‘Ariete’ and ‘Trieste’ – both placed under his command by Comando Supremo after the success at Sidi Rezegh. He hoped to contact and destroy the main body of Eighth Army. However, he missed his target and Tobruk was relieved on 27 November. Rommel was forced to withdraw his armoured units to fight at Tobruk. His forces were so weakened by the fighting in Crusader, that he later withdrew to defensive positions at Gazala, west of Tobruk, and then all the way back to El Agheila.

  Meanwhile, Auchinleck, realizing that Cunningham had lost belief in the possibility of winning the battle, sacked the army commander and replaced him with Major-General Neil Ritchie from his Middle East Command staff. Ritchie, who had no experience above divisional command, was originally intended as a temporary appointment until a suitable alternative could be found, but ended up leading Eighth Army for more than six months.

  Auchinleck himself saw the tactical lessons of Crusader clearly. Eighth Army was well short of the necessary standards in combined arms tactics to have any hope of defeating its enemies in the short term. As Auchinleck pointed out:

  We have got to face the fact that, unless we can achieve superiority on the battlefield by better co-operation between the arms, and more original leadership … we may have to forego any idea of mounting a strategical offensive, because our armoured forces are incapable of meeting the enemy in the open, even when superior to him in numbers.32

  What Auchinleck leading Middle East Command needed was an Eighth Army commander with ‘grip’ who would appreciate the problem and work to resolve it. Neil Ritchie was never intended to be that man, but Auchinleck was yet to see how far he fell short.

  The wider strategic situation now exercised its influence on the North African
campaign as the Japanese attacks in the Far East saw reinforcements meant for North Africa dispatched to Burma, Malaya and India. The stranglehold on Axis supplies gradually developed by the Royal Navy and RAF was broken by the loss of Force ‘K’ on mines on 18 December, a highly successful and daring attack by Italian mini-submarines (‘human torpedoes’) on Royal Navy battleships in Alexandria harbour and the deployment of Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring’s Fliegerkorps II to Sicily with the explicit purpose of neutralizing Malta and giving support to the Italian–German land forces in the region. Malta was soon being pounded by regular and frequent air attacks. As plans were laid for Operation Herkules – the invasion of Malta – Rommel pushed the British back once more and began planning operations with the capture of Tobruk and a subsequent advance to the Egyptian border as the goals. When Malta was taken, supplies would be easier to dispatch to Panzerarmee Afrika (as it became known in January 1942) and an invasion of Egypt could be prepared.

  Rommel gathered resources and reorganized ready for his attack. In February 1942 he formed a combat detachment, or Kampfstaffel, under his personal command which could be thrown into the fighting at vital points and times to overcome opposition. This formation was well equipped and Rommel himself began to use the SdKfz 250 half-tracks ‘Greif’, ‘Igel’ and ‘Adler’ which were highly mobile and equipped with powerful radio equipment allowing him a greater measure of control over his forces. He was reinforced by more Panzers, especially the Panzer IIIs which were now the workhorses of his two Panzer divisions. Another Italian armoured formation, 133a Divisione Corazzata ‘Littorio’, arrived as well as forty Semoventi da 75/18s, Italian self-propelled guns with a low profile, which proved excellent as support artillery and anti-tank guns. The Italian M13/40 tanks, though increasingly obsolescent, were still welcome as, used against the right targets – including the not so well-armoured British ‘Cruiser’ tanks (such as the Crusader I and II now in use) and ‘soft-skinned’ i.e. unarmoured vehicles and infantry – they could still perform a useful role, freeing up the heavier Panzers for other work. Italian reinforcements also included 105mm guns and 90mm anti-aircraft guns, which could perform as well as the German ‘88’ in an anti-tank role.