by Bryn Hammond
This proved to be one of the last of Fellers’ reports to be intercepted and disseminated by the Axis. Allied intelligence (ironically using Ultra decrypts) had already pinpointed the US Embassy in Cairo as the source of high-grade intelligence, resulting in a change in the American cipher code. Fellers returned to the United States in July before serving in the Far East under General Douglas MacArthur. His detailed reports from Cairo were praised for the valuable information they gave the Americans on the conduct of the war by both Britain and Germany.
On 25 June 1942, Auchinleck finally intervened in an attempt to give Eighth Army the strong leadership it needed. He advised General Sir Alan Brooke of his intention to take over command of Eighth Army, with Major-General Eric Dorman-Smith, the most capable and intellectually gifted officer on his Middle East Command Headquarters staff as his ‘unofficial’ Chief of General Staff. ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith (his nickname came from his prominent front teeth) was a remarkable man with an excellent record of service in the Great War (three times wounded and winner of a Military Cross in 1915) and an interesting inter-war career which included spending his army leaves with Ernest Hemingway in Switzerland, Paris and Pamplona, where he mixed with Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was godfather to Hemingway’s first son. At Staff College he was unconventional and anti-tradition and as he rose in the army he made many enemies and was seen as arrogant. He was a close friend of Basil Liddell Hart, the influential military theorist – a friendship that did not help his standing with many fellow army officers. He had been Director of Military Training, India prior to 1939 and he and Auchinleck worked closely together and got on well. On the outbreak of war, he was commandant of the Haifa Staff College in Palestine before Wavell involved him in some of the planning for Operation Compass. At a time of great crisis, Auchinleck looked to use the best he had. Dorman-Smith represented the best and most senior staff officer available with the skills necessary for the role Auchinleck envisaged. The two men understood each other and had a successful working relationship. It remained to be seen whether they could communicate effectively enough to win over a difficult and resistant group of combat-weary and demoralized commanders.
The task was immense. Time was extremely short. There was no pause in operations to allow a comfortable transition between Ritchie and the ‘Auk’. Anything that could be done to save the situation required instant and definite action. The crisis was such that Auchinleck had abandoned his senior strategic role to deal with what was the most important and definite threat. In choosing to do so, he had already demonstrated the singleness of purpose that Ritchie had lacked, and thereby greatly reduced the chances of success for Rommel’s attack, which gambled on exploiting the command uncertainties he had witnessed at Gazala.
By the time he was photographed at El Daba on 28 June, Auchinleck had enacted most of the critical decisions concerning how he would defeat the Panzerarmee. He no longer needed reports from subordinates to assess the state of Eighth Army’s morale and fitness for battle. He was able to witness it first hand. Part of his command style now was to share the same conditions as those he commanded, their rations and their discomfort. It was an admirable attempt to break away from any accusation of ‘chateau generalship’. It probably made little difference to most men’s opinions of the situation in the short term. It needed time before word of mouth made such a thing widely known in the army but Auchinleck believed in its value. It was one of many small things that earned him the soubriquet of the ‘Soldier’s General’. What was needed most now was an end to defeat and retreat. A demonstration of purpose and resolution and, above all, a victory.
* ‘for special purposes’.
CHAPTER TWO
AN OASIS OF CALM
Claude Auchinleck and Eric Dorman-Smith had made many of their plans for stopping the advance of Rommel and the Panzerarmee on the floor of an otherwise empty Boston bomber that transported them on 25 June from Cairo to Eighth Army Headquarters at Maaten Bagush, between Mersa Matruh and Fuka on the coast. The chief and most pressing need was to abandon Matruh, where Eighth Army ran the risk of being destroyed by the imminent onslaught of Rommel’s forces. Instead units were to withdraw approximately 150 miles back to El Alamein. The latter occupied a position offering natural obstacles in support of the defender; these advantages being absent at Matruh. The deep and almost impassable Qattara Depression to the south and the sea to the north were only forty miles apart here, creating a narrower front that might more easily be defended. Captain Tom Witherby of the 46th Royal Tank Regiment, 23rd Armoured Brigade, explained:
The ‘Alamein Line’ was little more than a line on a map. Much work had been done in 1941 and a little later. There were three posts. The most important of these surrounded Alamein Railway Station and had been likened to a small Tobruk. There were concrete works in a semicircle surrounding the station and extending about five miles inland, so that the defences dominated a distance of about seven or eight miles from the coast, about halfway to Ruweisat Ridge. The central post in the ‘Alamein Line’ was at Bab el Qattara* about twenty miles south from the coast where there were some completed concrete works, but no wires or mines. About the same distance to the south west was the third post at Naqb abu Dweis at a point where a track ran along the side of the Qattara Depression. These three posts were too far apart to be mutually supporting and it was intended that strong armoured forces would manoeuvre round them.1
Preparations were immediately put in hand for Lieutenant-General Sir Willoughby Norrie’s XXX Corps to improve the defences of the Alamein Box and 1st South African Division set to completing the considerable work already done on a defensive system originally laid out by Lieutenant-General Sir James Marshall-Cornwell, whose experience with Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s staff in the Great War had given him plenty of knowledge of the configuration of strongly fortified positions.
After he assumed command of Eighth Army, Auchinleck authorized important fundamental changes which attempted to address two years of tactical error and shaped how Eighth Army would fight from this point forward. Many of these ideas came from Dorman-Smith’s incisive analysis. A vitally important change was the centralization of artillery control at the highest possible level of command. Concentrated control of artillery (as opposed to concentration by location) would ensure concentrated effect, as would the decision not to spread the available forces along a forty-mile front. Concentration of effort as an army and not isolated corps was another absolute necessity, Auchinleck and Dorman-Smith agreed. A reorganization of armoured formations separating Grants from Crusaders would allow the latter to operate in a more mobile role, with the Grants operating within the range of the British field artillery. Armoured car units were to be grouped together in a light armoured reconnaissance brigade. Finally, Auchinleck was persuaded that a stagnating defensive battle might offer opportunities to launch focused attacks on the Italian infantry in the Panzerarmee, which Rommel would be forced to use in the front line.2 None of this sound analysis of Eighth Army’s operational flaws matches the opinion of one XIII Corps junior staff officer of the time that Dorman-Smith was ‘a trenchant critic but not so good when it came to proposing a course of action’ whose ‘principal motive seemed to be to suggest some startlingly novel solution, regardless of whether or not it had a hope of working.’3 Neither did it suggest, as Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Richardson, a fellow Eighth Army staff officer, did, that Dorman-Smith was a ‘dangerous supernumerary’.4 These appear as the responses of men who, as experienced but weary and demoralized desert staff officers, had to endure the sudden imposition of an outsider, whose ‘knees were not brown’5 in their opinion, making sharply critical observations on all they had been doing ‘wrong’ in their war against Rommel.
Disengaging units from their existing positions around Matruh was not going to be easy but it was absolutely essential. Both Auchinleck and Dorman-Smith could see the obvious gap in the dispositions of the Army’
s two corps through which the Axis forces could advance and encircle Lieutenant-General William Holmes’ X Corps, which included 2nd New Zealand Division and was recently arrived from Syria, in its inadequate defensive positions near Matruh. The New Zealanders’ commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, had been unhappy at the prospect of his men being the defenders of Matruh itself, which had all the makings of another Tobruk, and used political pressure (an option always available to the Commonwealth generals who were not answerable to the British government) to secure a redeployment at Minqar Qaim, due south of Mersa.
Eighth Army was still using ‘Jock Columns’ or ‘battle groups’ which had proved too weak in too many actions. Two such formations, ‘Gleecol’ and ‘Leathercol’, notionally defended the gap between the two corps. When 90. leichte-Afrika-Division and 21. Panzer-Division advanced and swept these two formations aside, the feared separation of XIII Corps from X Corps became a reality. Co-ordinated action by the two corps was rendered impossible as poor wireless communications once more let the British down. Holmes and Gott fought separate battles despite Auchinleck’s prior urgings that ‘the corps commanders must be in the closest possible touch so as to ensure that if one corps or part of it has to give ground the other is immediately able to take advantage of the situation by rapidly and boldly attacking the enemy in the flank’.6
Auchinleck had intended to keep Eighth Army fully mobile in a fighting withdrawal to the Alamein defences. However, it was his opponent who dictated events, driving Eighth Army’s scattered units before him. The New Zealanders were forced to fight their way out of an encirclement at Minqar Qaim; Freyberg was wounded in the process. Gott, who had visited the New Zealanders under a heavy bombardment, witnessed the destruction of the division’s transport soon afterwards and assumed the New Zealanders had been wiped out. Meanwhile, Kampfgruppen Kost and Kaiser cut the road east of Matruh, effectively completing the encirclement of X Corps. On the night of 28 June, X Corps’ units attempted to break out. This was accomplished with desperate hand-to-hand fighting in which the staff of Gruppe Menton was especially involved for the Panzerarmee.
In the breakout, Captain Geoffrey Armstrong, an officer in the 11th Royal Horse Artillery, had been ordered by his column commander to clear a way for the infantry with his guns and the regiment’s carriers:
I gave the signal and went forward at carrier pace, compass set at 180° in one hand, revolver in the other and shouting blue murder at the top of my voice. At once we seemed to be among them. Tracer flew in all directions from a score of flashes of light, AP [Armour Piercing] rushed past our ears or kicked up the sand, the Brens from the carriers on either side clattered and flashed. Boche rose from the ground and scattered from our path. We ran them down – and over. I took pot-shots at Huns; my driver was ducked to dashboard level; I glanced at my compass and over the open truck back to my guns. Bullets seemed to pour through quads or bounce at angles from the wheels. One was fired; it blazed and men jumped on to the next one; the mass came on. The carriers creaked steadily forward firing burst after burst and magazine after magazine. I was never so excited in my life.7
There was a tremendous rush of adrenalin and a feeling of exhilaration which found its release when the fight and flight were over. Armstrong continued:
We ran our two miles and pulled up in the first clear space while others came in. Our order of march was gone. We recced round our area, found a Boche column in leaguer on our flank, raked it with fire and withdrew to our bridgehead. Slowly, our nerves relaxed; we began to laugh. We were alive again.8
Another artilleryman, Bombadier Jim Brooks of the 64th Medium Regiment (RA) wrote home describing the chaos his unit experienced in escaping the pursuing Axis forces:
During this withdrawal or should I say stampede, we lived like lords. All NAAFI or Service Corps food dumps were left and we simply went and helped ourselves. Consequently every lorry was loaded up with beer, tinned fruit, fags and sweets. The Gerrys must have done well out of us. I won’t tell you how many men, trucks and guns we lost. I doubt whether the censor would pass it, it was a big loss anyway.9
Lieutenant-General Holmes later estimated that about sixty per cent of his command was saved in the Matruh breakout. By midday on 29 June, the small port had been captured and 10th Indian and 50th Divisions were both in a disorganized mess as they fell back to the vicinity of Alexandria. Considerable quantities of vital supplies had been lost when Tobruk fell. Now the vast supply dump at Belhamed, with 20,000 tons of stores carefully gathered well forward in preparation for Ritchie’s offensive, had to be destroyed. The destruction of supply dumps was not wholesale, but, where it occurred, it did nothing to lift the impression for men already in retreat that they were in a situation of chaos. According to Lance Corporal Douglas Waller of the 1st Rifle Brigade:
One dump we went past, we had time for a breather and we stopped. I said to one of our chaps: ‘Nip over. See if you can get anything out of there.’ The red caps stopped him and said ‘You can’t come in here, we’re going to blow it up.’ So he said ‘Well, can’t I take something?’ but they wouldn’t let us. They just blew the lot up… They were blowing up the dumps of food, petrol, on the way back. As you went down, all the way in the rear there were people saying, ‘Move, move move,’ and keeping everybody moving. It was a complete rout almost – that’s not described in the annals of the British Army – but it was. We were just flapping back until we got to Alamein.10
In fact, although the army was now streaming back in retreat, as Auchinleck witnessed from his roadside position, there was sufficient order established in a very short period of time that, soon after the retreat ended, Eighth Army’s supply infrastructure was fully restored and functioning – an achievement for which the army commander and his staff should be given much credit.
The retreating forces might have been made to suffer more if the Luftwaffe had had the ability to launch air attacks on the traffic on the coastal highway. However, Kesselring’s aircraft were not yet able to use advanced airfields or landing grounds sufficiently far forward to operate in strength against such prime targets. This was not because of problems with aircraft but rather because of difficulties in supplying and maintaining those aircraft, which was hampered by lack of transport for ground crews and for the necessary fuel and ammunition. Instead, the Panzerarmee approached the Alamein ‘line’ – still no line at all but rather a defensive ‘box’ combining minefields, barbed wire and concrete strongpoints around the Alamein station and other defended localities to the south and east – with little air support.
On the other hand, the Desert Air Force was dedicating itself to hundreds of sorties per day. However, instead of responding to requests received from Eighth Army, co-operation between the two had broken down to the extent that Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham, the Desert Air Force’s commander, was setting the targets for his aircraft and had his fighters and bombers doing a shuttle service focused solely on ground attack. Coningham took a considerable risk in telling his pilots to ignore enemy fighters and ordered them not to fly above 6,000 feet. He admitted that it was a lot to ask that they think only of the ground and submit themselves to unmolested attack from above but it was necessary.11
Much criticism was made at the time, and subsequently, of Auchinleck’s re-siting of Eighth Army’s Advanced Headquarters at the eastern end of the Alam Halfa Ridge in the middle of the desert. This was a considerable distance from the Desert Air Force’s headquarters at Burg-el-Arab and a half-hour’s drive from the nearest airfield. Auchinleck clearly did not fully appreciate the importance of air power in the ground battle. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, the head of the Middle East air command, even went so far as to say: ‘This complete failure on the part of the Army even now to understand some of the most elementary principles of modern warfare defeats me’.12 However, two points deserve mention. Firstly, Coningham’s possession of a captured Fieseler Storch light aircraft enabled him to visit Auchinleck and retain touch with
his squadrons in this period. Secondly, Auchinleck’s command style meant that he needed to be in touch, and visibly so, with the formations he commanded. The location of his Advanced Headquarters did this. Co-location of army and air headquarters was a regrettable casualty of this rationale.
As Commander-in-Chief, Middle East Command, Auchinleck had a wider responsibility than the fighting against the Panzerarmee. Now, this strategic vision ensured that the approach to defence at Alamein was not a last-ditch all-or-nothing one. Dorman-Smith was given the task of drawing up an ‘appreciation’ (the bread and butter of a staff officer in initial planning) regarding the defence of Egypt. This document’s most important section described Auchinleck’s intention with which Tedder was in full agreement: ‘to keep Eighth Army in being as a mobile field force and resist by every possible means any further attempts by the enemy to advance eastwards’.13 This was because he recognized, like the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, that ‘the oil in the Persian Gulf was more important to the war than Egypt.’14
Orders were issued on the basis of this ‘appreciation’, firstly by Eighth Army HQ and then by Lieutenant-General Tom Corbett, Auchinleck’s Chief of General Staff (CGS) at General Headquarters, Middle East. On 30 June General Holmes and his X Corps staff were sent back to organize the defences of the Nile Delta in co-operation with Lieutenant-General Robert Stone, Commander of British Troops in Egypt. Problems arose, however, from the misinterpretation of these orders and especially the instructions from Corbett by several Eighth Army commanders. The New Zealand Brigadier, Howard Kippenberger of 5th New Zealand Infantry Brigade, encountered ‘Strafer’ Gott – a prime example: