El Alamein Read online

  BRYN HAMMOND

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Road

  CHAPTER TWO

  An Oasis of Calm

  CHAPTER THREE

  Diminishing Returns

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Little Man with White Knobbly Knees

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Summer Madness

  CHAPTER SIX

  Something Old, Something New

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  An End Has a Start

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Attrition

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘La Caduta Degli Dei’

  CONCLUSION

  The End of the Beginning

  ORDER OF BATTLE

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

  ENDNOTES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In Cambrai 1917: The Myth of the First Great Tank Battle, I made full and proper reference to the support and encouragement of friends and family in the preparation and completion of that book during difficult times. The same people have continued to support me and I must offer once more my thanks for their innumerable kindnesses and generosity.

  First and foremost, I must thank Abby, Holly and Bryn. Their patience with me during the writing of this book and their pride in their dad’s achievements is rewarded by a second ‘mention’. This means they are now twice as famous as they were before.

  I would also like to thank my wonderful family especially my mum, Margaret, for practical help as well as huge amounts of love, and my brother and sister, Dave and Sarah and their families and loved ones. Dad would be so proud of us all for what we all continue to achieve.

  Amongst my fantastic friends, Alan Jeffreys, Philip Dutton, Chris McCarthy and Lee Murrell all generously supported me in practical ways with book loans, advice and encouragement. Alan – a fine historian in his own right – also read early drafts of the text and commented on my Great War perspective on the Second World War. The indomitable Peter Hart found time in his punishing work programme to read draft material and offered comments on my work, none of which can be printed. John Paylor, George Webster and Laurie Milner also gave great help by reading drafts and providing helpful comment. Had they been given more time, they would have made even more valuable contributions than the great help they did offer. Tim Roberts deserves a special mention for the opinions he shared on the relative strengths and weaknesses of British and German armour. Steve Grace and Donald Hislop were especially good at tolerating the idiosyncratic ways of an author with a deadline.

  At the Imperial War Museum I was greatly assisted by many members of staff including Julie Robertshaw, Marius Gasior, Sarah Paterson, Tony Richards, Simon Offord, Richard McDonough, Richard Hughes, Sabrina Rowlett, Victoria Rogers, Jane Rosen, Alison Duffield, Alan Wakefield and Ian Proctor. Staff at the Durham County Records Office and National Army Museum were also extremely helpful. A particular thank you goes to Pam and the ladies of Balderton Library and to Nottinghamshire County Council’s Library Service who found me many obscure volumes on the Desert War from the Basement Library in Nottingham. Use your local library – you’ll be amazed by what you can find there!

  I must thank everyone at Osprey but especially Kate Moore, Marcus Cowper and Emily Holmes for patience and encouragement throughout the period in which this book came into being. I hope they will all be proud of the end product. They all worked very hard and were extremely tolerant of my faults.

  Two historians, Corelli Barnett and Niall Barr, deserve mention for producing excellent books which considered Alamein but who, between them, left a sufficiently large opportunity for a book of this type to make an additional contribution. I urge all readers of this book to read The Desert Generals and Pendulum of War as well, if they have not already done so.

  Particular thanks must go to all those individuals who gave me permission to quote from the sources for which they hold copyright. Similar thanks must go to the publishers of the various books from which I have quoted for allowing me to do so. I am grateful to The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, Victoria University of Wellington Library and the New Zealand Ministry of Culture and Heritage for kind permission to publish extracts from Infantry Brigadier by Howard Kippenberger and various volumes of the Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War series. I hope all those I have been unable to contact or trace, despite my best endeavours, will grant me their forbearance.

  The quotations from letters, diaries, personal accounts and oral history interviews used in this book have occasionally, where necessary, been lightly edited for overall readability. Punctuation and spellings have been largely standardised, material has occasionally been re-ordered and irrelevant material has been omitted, usually without any indication in the text. Nevertheless, changes in the actual words used in the original sources have been avoided wherever possible.

  Bryn Hammond

  December 2011

  PREFACE

  The desert was the novel element. Despite a twenty-five-year gap, many of the difficulties faced by those fighting in North Africa between late June and early November 1942 were reminiscent of those encountered by the British and Germans in the Great War. The manner in which memoirists, other writers and historians have approached the three ‘headline’ battles – First and Second Alamein and, sandwiched between them, the battle of Alam Halfa – raises a number of familiar issues. Many of these centre on the cult of the personality that surrounds two of the three chief protagonists, Montgomery and Rommel, but others have contributed to the mythology that surrounds the battle: a misapprehension of events, the ready acceptance of some accounts of participants without consideration for the context in which they were prepared and the motivations in producing them, and a failure to connect with the wider strategic context. This is all familiar ground, in many ways – but the desert remains unique.

  There was no single ‘Battle of El Alamein’ nor, strictly speaking, can the fighting be simply split into ‘First’ and ‘Second Alamein’. These names are convenient devices imposed by historians to provide structure to the events of the period. Each of these chronological periods of fighting comprised many different attacks and counter-attacks. Many were interconnected. Quite often they were not. The British gave many of their attacks the status of ‘Operation’, but much of the fighting featured Eighth Army in defence and was not so easily labelled. This was like the desert. Vague areas of seemingly featureless sand and gravel given ‘labels’ in attempts to make sense of something otherwise incomprehensible – a practice reminiscent of the naming of British trenches in the Great War where many struggled to make sense of a bleak and alien landscape – the ‘empty battlefield’.

  The origins of this book lie in a decision to research and describe the important events of a period of conflict in the Second World War using techniques already proved in looking at a crucial battle of the Great War – the 1917 battle of Cambrai. The personal accounts of participants have once again been used to support and enhance a narrative of the military operations and strategic background and to make a vitally important connection between the decisions of politicians and generals and their very real ‘life or death’ consequences for men in battle. This has allowed the narrative to develop and explore important tactical and technological contributions by individuals who frequently get ignored in accounts of warfare that focus solely on the senior commanders.

  This book, I hope, goes beyond the ‘Rommel versus Monty’ approach, which sees ‘Rommel’ as a cipher for the Deutsch–Italienische Panzerarmee and ‘Monty’ as an odd, but successful chap who fought ‘Rommel’ and won. The senior commanders feature in this account for their importance in leading and or
ganizing the men who did the fighting and the dying. Montgomery, Rommel and Auchinleck defined the broad framework for military operations, with their decisions being especially connected to the wider strategic situation. This was never more clearly demonstrated than in regard to Rommel’s decision to continue his offensive drive into Egypt which provoked the fighting at Alamein, or in Auchinleck’s assumption of command of only one of the armies (albeit the crucial one) that made up his enormous Middle East Command.

  As this narrative is intended to show, there are other ways to make sense of the battle than solely through the consideration of the actions of the three main generals involved. In support of this approach, the narrative steers away from general use of ‘Monty’, ‘the Auk’ and ‘the Desert Fox’, although all three terms were in currency during the period under consideration. A biographer might consistently refer to his subject, as indeed he does, as ‘Monty’ but an army commander is no one’s ‘mate’ and such terminology is, therefore, unhelpful to an approach that does feature ‘mates’ in combat.

  In the final stages of preparation of this book, two reminders arrived that the events described here are connected to men alive still today. A local newspaper article regarding the return of a ninety-three year-old veteran to the battlefield with his family was one. This followed the sudden and unexpected contact from the son of Major Tom Bird, who commanded 2nd Battalion, The Rifle Brigade’s Anti-Tank Company in the action at ‘Snipe’ and who is very much alive today. An opportunity to meet a man who added a DSO to his MC and Bar in the fighting was the outcome. I hope all survivors of the battle will feel that this book does justice to the hugely important events in which they participated.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE ROAD

  A photograph capturing a moment in time, and hinting at a dramatic story. In it, a line of vehicles travelling along a long, straight road watched by a solitary soldier, dressed in shorts with long socks and wearing no hat, without obvious signs of rank on his well-worn tunic. The photograph was taken at El Daba in Egypt on 28 June 1942. The road was the coastal highway from Tobruk in Libya to Alexandria. The vehicles carried the retreating units of the British Eighth Army, comprehensively defeated in recent fighting by their German and Italian opponents and now falling back to defensive positions around the railway halt at El Alamein. Here it was hoped they might stop their opponents’ seemingly inexorable advance. The man watching with paternal concern was General Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief of all British forces in the Middle East, who in time of great crisis had recently assumed command of Eighth Army, and was now preparing for its greatest test of the war. The road stretched back to the horizon suggesting the long road travelled in the Desert War that had finally led to this critical moment.

  With the fall of France and Italy’s entry into the war on 10 June 1940, British expectations that Italy would ally itself with Nazi Germany were realized. New theatres of operations became a definite concern for the British as territorial possessions, dominions and protectorates came under threat from a new enemy which saw British forces and territories overseas as its primary targets. The Italian Duce, Benito Mussolini, fearful that the war might end without his Fascist empire becoming a reality, hoped to occupy and annex French and British colonies and Egypt, which was a British protectorate. This would give him control of the Suez Canal and considerable influence on world trade, allowing Italy to dominate the central and eastern Mediterranean.

  Their nation’s entry into the war was both surprising and unwelcome to many Italians. The most senior commanders knew just how ill-prepared the country was. The reaction of many was one of surprise and despondency – indeed, as Tenente Paolo Colacicchi of the Granatieri di Sardegna recalled:

  In fact, of no enthusiasm at all. Marshal Balbo, who was the governor of Libya and one of the four Fascists – the Quadrumvirs of Italy – was apparently playing billiards when the news came through Italy had declared war and he was so angry that he picked up the billiard balls and smashed all the glasses in this billiard room. He was absolutely furious because he knew the position there and he had a lot of friends in Egypt among the British.1

  Italo Balbo was dead less than a month later, killed when his plane was shot down by Italian anti-aircraft fire whilst over Tobruk harbour, but Maresciallo d’Italia Pietro Badoglio, of the Italian Comando Supremo, continued to counsel against Mussolini’s annexationist ambitions. There was little military ardour amongst the Italian troops in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica either, as Paolo Colacicchi confirmed:

  I was commanding a platoon then in a machine-gun battalion on the Tunisian front and I was told to call my men and tell them we were at war now with France (this was a few days before France gave up) and Britain. And the main reaction amongst my men was ‘What about our mail? Aren’t we going to hear from home anymore?’ Which is symptomatic, I think, of the type of man we had there. These were not all young; they were not even good troops. There were some recruits, but there were very few and they were tired and wanted to be home. They were thinking of home, they were thinking of leave and they were thinking of their fields left unattended. They certainly had no imperial or aggressive dream about them. This was one of the problems.2

  Despite this lack of will amongst many of his subjects, the Duce was not to be denied. In August 1940, Italian forces occupied the British protectorate known as British Somaliland, and Mussolini turned his attention to Egypt, defended by a small, but relatively modern (by comparison with its opponent), Western Desert Force. This consisted of 7th Armoured and 4th Indian Divisions with elements of 6th Division from Palestine. Commanded by Lieutenant-General Richard O’Connor, it comprised approximately 36,000 men. On 9 September 1940, Maresciallo d’Italia Rodolfo Graziani, who had replaced Balbo as commander of Italy’s North African forces, was finally persuaded to invade Egypt with the X Armata (Italian Tenth Army) of 80,000 men. After an advance of sixty miles, the Italian force (chiefly composed of unmotorized infantry formations) stopped at Sidi Barrani and set up fortified camps. This was disappointing for O’Connor who had plans to annihilate them if they moved on Mersa Matruh.3 The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Wavell, resisted pressure from Prime Minister Winston Churchill to launch an immediate counter-attack. Instead, he and O’Connor began planning an unconventional all-arms surprise attack on the Italian camps.

  The plan depended on co-operation from the aircraft of Air Headquarters Western Desert and especially from Air Commodore Raymond Collishaw’s No. 202 Group. Despite his aircraft chiefly being obsolete Gloster Gladiators and increasingly obsolescent Bristol Blenheims operating with no radar and an unreliable signals network, Collishaw’s guiding principle was that obtaining and retaining air superiority were essential before any other task, even close support for troops in an advance or retreat, could be attempted with any reasonable hope of success. Nevertheless, he and O’Connor forged excellent relations. Chiefly, aircraft were to ensure that the initial advance of almost seventy miles by O’Connor’s force was not detected and reported by Italian reconnaissance planes.

  Although O’Connor was not a tank officer and had never worked with large armoured forces, this was not a barrier to his successful use of the tanks available to him. There was considerable experience in his command of military exercises in desert conditions, which the British had acknowledged for many years as ideal for armoured warfare. In the inter-war years several formations trained there and, in 1938, Major-General Percy Hobart had trained the ‘Mobile Division’ (7th Armoured Division’s predecessor) in modern armoured warfare theory. Although Hobart was no longer in command by late 1940, 7th Armoured’s training put it in good stead for the role envisaged by O’Connor, as O’Connor himself explained:

  The ‘Infantry’ tanks from their name were there to assist the infantry’s advance and help them in every possible way and they were obviously used for that. The 7th Armoured Division with its much larger radius of action could be used in a way – especially in
this fine desert country – for getting behind and cutting off troops – in fact in the way strategic cavalry used to be used.4

  O’Connor’s unsophisticated approach to the operation was based rather more on common sense than military theory:

  It’s quite true I had read most of [Basil] Liddell Hart’s ideas in his books but at that time the ordinary officer of my ‘height’ in the army didn’t really have any great reason for adopting his point of view. We had our own regulations, our own instructions and I don’t think that I considered very greatly Liddell Hart’s any more than I considered our own Field Service Regulations. In our very small operation, I can’t think I said to myself, ‘Now, what would Liddell Hart have done?’5

  On 9 December 1940, after a long and difficult approach march, shielded by the light reconnaissance units of 7th Armoured and Collishaw’s aircraft, O’Connor’s infantry with Matilda heavy tanks in close co-operation attacked and routed the Italians. Within two days, 38,000 prisoners, seventy-three tanks and 237 guns had been captured.6 Soon Bardia and Tobruk had fallen. The Italian forces fell back into Libya but were harried all the way and eventually outflanked and trapped. This culminated in a further heavy Italian defeat on 5 February 1941 at Beda Fomm and the surrender of X Armata with the loss of 130,000 prisoners, 400 tanks and 1,200 guns during the campaign. British losses were 1,744 killed, wounded or missing. O’Connor, having reached El Agheila, was for pushing on into Tripolitania in the hope of completely driving the Italians from Libya, despite being at the end of considerably extended and, therefore, attenuated supply lines. Wavell prevented him from doing so.

  The campaign was a masterpiece of all-arms co-operation based on established principles and was possible because of the quality of the highly trained forces at O’Connor’s command. In this regard it harked back in many ways to the later battles on the Western Front in 1918. It was the high water mark of British military operations in the Western Desert for over eighteen months but, for many, it was the radix malorum of all subsequent failings in those operations. This was through the inappropriate application of its lessons, through the slavish adherence of first 7th Armoured and then other armoured formations to an erroneous tactical doctrine, and because it gave the misleading impression that all Italian formations could be easily overcome in battle.