by Bryn Hammond
With only one unwounded sergeant and a mortally wounded officer left in A Company, the company’s few survivors were fatalistic:
We sprawled there in that hot bowl not expecting to survive. Then came a lull and what seemed a relative quiet. We heard them coming. They were not keeping their voices down. On the contrary, they seemed to be talking excessively loud. Possibly to frighten us. Suddenly they were standing above us shouting, and ordering us by signs to take off our equipment and come out.74
The 1/5th had reached its objective only to find itself surrounded by men from Fallschirmjäger-Brigade Ramcke and Divisione Paracadutisti ‘Folgore’. The prisoners were hustled through a minefield and barbed-wire defences. Then Italian soldiers took all their equipment. Fred Daniels picked up the tale:
To our surprise an English-speaking Italian who came up shortly afterwards told us who we were and knew all about our units. During our short march to a waiting lorry, the soldiers conducting us noticed our shirt pockets and were soon searching for and confiscating fountain pens, wallets, watches and rings. We learned later that there were known cases of our chaps having fingers cut off when they refused to part with wedding and other rings of sentimental value.75
The paratroopers had allowed the two leading companies to get well inside their defensive system before opening fire, and then their heavy machine-gun fire had made withdrawal impossible; all had been taken prisoner, killed or wounded. Jack York, with Battalion Headquarters, was a fortunate survivor:
As a result of this action, the first to be fought by the battalion in this campaign, we lost about eight or nine officers, and nearly 300 NCOs and men. The sudden loss of so many of our comrades put the rest of us into a state of depression and low spirits, and it was a very hard task for the battalion to pull itself together.76
Elsewhere, both 1/7th and 1/6th battalions took all their objectives. According to Colonel Dennis Gibbs of 1/6th Battalion:
That perhaps, albeit unpleasant enough, was the easiest part of the operation. Reorganisation on the objectives in what seemed to be a very open, naked and coverless sandy arena was quite another matter. We were in that situation, pretty visible to the enemy, and under mortar and shell fire for a couple of days or so, and were then relieved. All in all the battalion did extremely well but we had several sad losses including two splendid Officers – Arthur Trench and Jim Priestly. The former was badly wounded in assisting with his company to repel a counter-attack at night. I went forward to see him and his company. As he lay wounded he said to me, ‘We really knocked them back, didn’t we, Colonel?’ I can remember this and his quiet, brave and almost smiling face so well.77
Soon after the battle, Gibbs was told of Major Trench’s death:
I think this was one of the biggest shocks one sustained up to that period of the war. I had seen soldiers die and soldiers wounded; I had been at Dunkirk. I had amongst many, both military and civilian refugees, been the target of German dive-bombing, but, somehow, nothing had affected me so personally up till then as those one or two deaths in September 1942 at Deir-el-Munassib, perhaps, partly, because it was my ‘command,’ and deaths within it were part of me.78
The action of 131st Brigade at Deir-el-Munassib, coming as it did, in the build-up to Montgomery’s major offensive, has not received much attention. It almost certainly influenced Montgomery’s thinking regarding his attack plans and definitely reassured the Panzerarmee commanders that they still had the measure of their opponents. Like Beresford, it demonstrated the fighting abilities of well-led Italian troops and especially Divisione Paracadutisti ‘Folgore’.
On 30 September, as Operation Braganza was being decisively beaten, the ‘Star of Africa’ fell. Flying a relatively new Messerschmitt Bf-109G, the ‘ace’ Hauptmann Hans-Joachim Marseille was forced to bail out when the cockpit filled with smoke from a fire in a fractured oil pipe. In doing so, he was struck by the aircraft’s tail rendering him incapable of opening his parachute. At the time of his death he had 158 confirmed claims for aircraft he had shot down.79 Yet his death, like his most successful days at the beginning of the month, did not have a significant influence on the desert campaign. The Desert Air War was already being won by Coningham’s strategy, a developing superiority in numbers (if not types) of aircraft and important tactical differences between the opposing ai forces. The last of these depended on the Desert Air Force fighter pilots conducting unglamorous tasks such as escorting bombers with courage and determination. Attacks on airfields and supplies would yield, in the long run, better results than aerial combat with their opposite numbers.
Fundamentally, there was a flaw in the Luftwaffe’s approach to the Desert Air War – a fact acknowledged by a fellow ‘ace’ from Marseille’s Gruppe in Jagdgeschwader 27, Oberleutnant Werner Schroer:
I think one of the great vices of the German fighters was the growth of ‘free-lance hunting’. Free-lance sorties (Freie Jagd) against enemy fighters were the most popular missions. Perhaps we could have shot down more bombers, but it is possible that we were not too interested – they had tail gunners. I have sometimes wished I could get a Ju52 or Ju87 in front of my guns, but I never had such luck!80
Schroer himself may have shot down as many as six fighters in a single day during September 1942 and had 114 ‘confirmed claims’. However, between 30 May and 4 November 1942, he was credited with having shot down just two bombers. Similarly, another ‘ace’ (with 59 ‘victories’) from the same Jagdgeschwader, Leutnant Hans-Arnold ‘Fiffi’ Stahlschmidt, who was killed on a Freie Jagd on 7 September, never claimed a single bomber. The Freie Jagd may have been popular with Luftwaffe pilots, but it was losing them the Desert Air War.
* The Star of Africa.
CHAPTER SIX
SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW
With the Panzerarmee’s defeat at Alam Halfa, matters returned to a familiar state of affairs so far as the higher direction of British military operations. The Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, demanded an immediate return to the offensive by Montgomery who, in turn, sought time to absorb reinforcements and train men in the use of new equipment. Churchill wanted a British victory over Rommel before the Anglo-American landings in Algeria and Morocco planned for early November 1942. Circular arguments over the need to capture airfields in Cyrenaica by mid-November to protect convoys engaged in the continued supply of Malta and, thereby, maintain it as a threat to his enemies’ supply routes, could not be ignored by Montgomery. But any attempt to overcome the Axis defences, and especially the already-extensive and growing minefields, required moonlight. The September full moon period would be too soon to complete preparations, so the fourth week of October was chosen. Crucially, Montgomery enjoyed the full support of Alexander, his immediate superior, over this matter.
By its very nature, the relatively narrow frontage with secure flanks occupied and defended by Eighth Army in July and September now served to limit options for its offensive operations. One accusation laid at their door by their adversaries was that Second World War British Army generals understood only positional warfare and not more fluid operations.1 This, then, was an opportunity for the same generals to attack in familiar and favourable circumstances. It would be necessary to breach the strong defensive positions of the Axis forces in one or more places and then to expand rapidly through the gap made. Montgomery settled early on making two simultaneous attacks: the main one in the north and a lesser one in the south.
On 14 September, he issued his ‘General Plan’ for the battle – to be known as Operation Lightfoot.2 The following day he discussed it with corps and divisional commanders. The plan in outline was for four infantry divisions of Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps (9th Australian, 51st (Highland), 2nd New Zealand and 1st South African), with massive artillery support and tanks of 23rd Armoured Brigade in close co-operation, to break the Panzerarmee defences in the northern attack, establishing bridgeheads for armoured operations. Immediately, the armour of Lieutenant-General Herbert Lumsden�
��s X Corps would go through passages cleared in the minefields and take up position on the Axis supply routes, provoking the intervention and, hopefully, consequent destruction of the German and Italian tanks. In the south, the tasks of Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks’ XIII Corps, including 7th Armoured Division, were explained by Montgomery to his protégé, Harding:
7th Armoured Division was on the south flank – the left flank. The task that I [Harding] was given would be to launch an attack against the enemy’s position on my front working up from the south from Himeimat which was a particularly awkward feature northwards, primarily to hold the German armour down there and prevent them from being able to be moved north to take part in holding the main offensive. I was told personally by Monty: ‘Your job is to keep 21 Panzer down here by offensive action but, at the same time, to keep your division in being so that it can take part in a further offensive, in pursuit or whatever, later on.’ So it was ‘Heads you win, tails I lose’.3
Amongst Eighth Army’s most senior commanders many had served on the Western Front in the Great War.4 This had grounded them in the necessary principles for dealing with an enemy well-established in prepared positions of strength incorporating sophisticated defensive techniques. The German Teufelsgarten (‘Devil’s Garden’) minefields and wire defences were not the 1918 Hindenburg Line, but those who had been part of Haig’s British Expeditionary Force (BEF) – including Montgomery – knew, as a consequence of their experience, what was necessary. As liaison officer Carol Mather recognized:
Monty’s idea, we thought, initially, was going back to the First World War. It was really. He was the first person to make proper use of artillery. He concentrated the artillery. The divisional artillery or the corps artillery. Previous to that the artillery had been used in ‘penny packets’ and ‘jock columns’ and small battle groups and this kind of thing.5
Positional warfare offered an ideal opportunity for the concentration of artillery resources under divisional, corps or even army command. Montgomery had a very capable senior artilleryman in Brigadier Sidney Kirkman (who had replaced the unfairly sacked Noel Martin), but he now took a close personal interest in the development of the artillery plan for his battle. This task was assigned by Kirkman to Brigadier Bryan ‘Frizz’ Fowler, Commander Royal Artillery (CRA) of 1st Armoured Division, and a hand-picked group of artillerymen, including Major Brian Wyldbore-Smith (otherwise known as ‘Madcow-Jones’). The ‘first class’ Fowler was ‘very experienced – [he] knew the desert backwards and he’d been a gunner all his life’.6 Nevertheless, Montgomery continually shaped the process as the plan was developed. Brian Wyldbore-Smith recounted:
He gave us what his plans were and we then made a plan to support each of those attacks which we submitted to him and he then amended as he saw fit: ‘No, I want more guns on here and less guns on here and more artillery fire and a longer and a deeper artillery barrage here’. Every single regiment – of which there were probably 30 regiments – each had in writing what its role was in the fire plan [with] variations in case there was a difference in how the battle went. It was vast – must have been about 30, 40 or 50 pages, I should think.7
Working around a single table the artillery planners continually refined arrangements:
You worked as a team. You’d say ‘Let’s deal with Attack A’, which was the attack on the coast, and then you’d produce a plan for that. Then you’d see what you’d got left available for Attack B, which was the one inland. Then you’d say ‘we’ve got a bit too much in the north than in the south’ and you’d try and adjust it. Then you’d have to save something for eventualities. You’d go on like that till you’d got a plan. You’d produce a first draft, give that to the CRA and he’d alter it or approve it and that would go to Monty’s headquarters.8
Appropriately, given that more than twenty years had elapsed, the technical and mathematical aspects of gunnery had become more sophisticated since the Great War. Yet their importance to the weapon’s successful use would have been well understood by artillerymen of the earlier conflict. Advances always aimed, essentially, at improvements in accuracy and effectiveness. For Montgomery, ‘the concentration of artillery and mortars [was] a battle-winning factor of the first importance’.9 Hence his desire for centralized command of his army’s artillery: concentration of resources, but also concentration of impact. Thus the artillery plan ultimately had a sophistication that included synchronization from the BBC time signal and calculations to ensure that shells from guns of all calibres fell on their targets at precisely the same time, but was still based on important principles such as gun calibration, and meteorological checks.10
A creeping artillery barrage had been employed for Operation Braganza in late September and was championed for the coming attack by Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg and his CRA, Brigadier C.E. ‘Steve’ Weir. Weir remains a highly regarded artillery tactician but it is remarkable that this is based, at least in part, not on innovation but on a return to principles of artillery use tried and tested in the Great War and, specifically, his reintroduction of the creeping barrage at Alamein. Whilst ultimately chiefly employed in this attack as a directional aid to the infantry, its use depended on 25-pounders calibrated for the greatest level of accuracy to minimize risk of casualties amongst the attacking infantry.
The artillery depended on accurate maps. Most of these were made by 512 Field Survey Company and 46 South African Survey Company. A drawing section of 514 Field Survey Company was attached, principally for locating and plotting enemy battery positions on specially prepared 1/25,000 scale maps. The maps would be used by the counter-battery organization for concentrating artillery fire onto Axis gun positions and defences. Meanwhile, this counter-battery work of locating enemy gun batteries for them to be ‘silently registered’ and targeted at Zero, began in earnest. This was helped by a flaw in their opponents’ methods, as highlighted by Captain Vero Bosazza of 19th South African Field Park Company:
In September, the Artillery must have drawn attention to the fact that the Axis artillery and particularly the 88mms either did not have alternate positions, or did not use them. The 88mms positions with desultory fire were easily identified. Sometime before this, a British Survey Company officer came up and helped us with ‘secret’ and unmarked (except for a steel pin), trig. stations far forward. At the same time, tubular scaffolding towers were erected, one being near the ruins on the Springbok Road, another further south and a low one, on the Alamein Ridge. Their headquarters were an underground plotting office in the 9th Australian lines.11
The flash-spotters were from 4th (Durham) Survey Regiment (RA). One of these was Captain Jack Scollen:
Flash-spotting began, with theodolites set up on steel towers erected by the Royal Engineers to give as much forward visibility as possible over the flattish desert. Headquarters plotted the bearings to enemy gun-flashes which were reported by the OPs and passed on the resulting locations to the Counter-Battery Officer. But, apart from occasional shelling, there was a strangely quiet atmosphere as preparations proceeded for the next battle. Here and there in our area there were dummy guns, carefully camouflaged as though they were the real thing, but there was a policy of artillery silence to deny the enemy, as far as possible, information about our actual artillery positions.12
Captain Vero Bosazza regularly visited the survey unit as its work progressed:
Most of their work was done at night but they maintained a 24-hour watch and gradually built up what no Army Commander wants his enemy to do: an accurate plot of the order of battle of almost his complete artillery.13
This vital work depended to a great extent on the scaffolding towers which, to Bosazza’s amazement, remained untouched throughout September and October:
The remarkable thing about these towers is that they were distinctly visible, with a sandbagged position for the observer at the top. To make the towers stable, they were very well guyed with steel cables and I doubt whether they could have been knocked down
by arty fire. I doubt whether the Axis Commanders ever really appreciated what was being done from these towers, for I think much more determined efforts by Stukas or direct fire from ‘88s’ would have been attempted. After all, the top of these towers presented to an ‘88’ no more difficult a target than say a stationary tank.14
Artillery was vital to Montgomery’s plan and all these preparations were intended to ensure that when the attack opened, the Royal Artillery would immediately establish fire superiority.
As his corps and divisional commanders set to work to develop detailed plans, Montgomery devolved much of the planning to four key men. His close interest in the artillery planning should not diminish the important role of Sidney Kirkman, whom he had brought out with him from Britain. Kirkman had overall responsibilities beyond the artillery plan and the medium- and field- artillery, and these included co-ordination between artillery formations across Eighth Army. The other men were his chief of staff, Brigadier Freddie de Guingand; the Chief Engineer, Brigadier Frederick Kisch; and Brigadier Sir Brian Robertson, the head of administration.15
Guingand was responsible for co-ordination of operational planning across all of Eighth Army, whilst Kisch and his sappers applied themselves to the many practicalities of the forthcoming assault and especially the problem of getting through the minefield defences. Robertson’s work was critical for the forthcoming battle. The tenacious, dour and ruthless ‘business manager’16 was responsible for the army’s logistical arrangements – including the supply of petrol, oil and lubricants (POL), the provision of motor transport, the establishment of prisoner of war cages, the creation of forward dumps and the stockpiling of supplies. Great stocks of ammunition were accumulated and hidden in the sand at pre-determined, but as yet unoccupied, gun positions. Robertson demonstrated an ability to address a problem’s scale with a proportionate solution. An example was his requisitioning of all captured German ‘jerrycans’ – the ‘excellent stout returnables with a hinged, air-sealing, levered stopper’17 used for transporting petrol. They were given to X Corps so that its tank operations would not be impeded by fuel shortages caused by using British petrol ‘flimsies’ which had a tendency to leak.18