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el alamein
a n d t h e s av i n g o f t h e m i d d l e e a s t
1942
peter willett
bl 1932–1937
p i c t u r e d o n pa g e 1 0 0 t h i s y e a r at w e l l i n g to n
T
here were two battles of
El Alamein fought by the
British 8th Army against the
German and Italians in the
deserts of Cyrenaica and
Egypt in 1942. The first lasted for most of
July and the second overlapped the months of
October and November. All the glamour of a
decisive victory attached to Second Alamein,
while First Alamein appears to have had the bathos of a stalemate. In its way First Alamein was
equally decisive, because it stopped the seemingly irresistible advance of the German-Italian
Panzer Armee Afrika, under the charismatic
General Erwin Rommel, and saved the whole
Middle East from falling to the Axis powers.
The advance had started in Cyrenaica with
the British defeat at the Gazala line and the fall
of the much-disputed port of Tobruk. Defeat
turned into rout, and when the advance was
eventually stopped at El Alamein — where the
sea in the north and the impassible Qattara
Depression in the south funnel the fighting
front to a width of only 40 miles — it had
covered 350 miles in little more than a month.
Much of the credit for the stabilisation
of the front after that catastrophic retreat
belongs to General Sir Claude Auchinleck [Bd
1896 –1901], Wellington’s most distinguished
military alumnus. He was Commander-inChief Middle East and took on the additional
heavy responsibility of the command of 8th
Army at the height of the retreat when
the former commander, Neil Ritchie, had
lost control.
Auchinleck’s staunchness,
determination and clear-sightedness were vital
factors. To those of us serving in the 8th Army
his ability to discern that the Axis forces were
at the end of their tether seemed uncanny,
though it transpired later that he was greatly
helped by information from the code-breaking
of Ultra German military communications.
Von Mellenthin, an officer on Rommel’s staff,
wrote of him: ‘Auchinleck was an excellent
strategist, with many of the qualities of a great
commander’. Although ‘the Auk’, as he was
familiarly known, was replaced by Generals
Alexander and Montgomery as Commanderin-Chief and Commander 8th Army during
August, the Auk continued to play an
important role, later doubling as Commanderin-Chief of both the Indian and Pakistan armies
during the period of transition to Partition in
1947. Thanks largely to the fighting spirit of
the 9th Australian Division, a fresh formation
brought into the line at First Alamein, defeat
was nearly turned into a stunning victory.
In the end the disorganization, inseparable
from such a long retreat, denied Auchinleck a
triumphant conclusion to First Alamein.
The experiences of my own regiment
in First Alamein, The Queen’s Bays, were
typical. Such Crusader and Grant tanks as
we could still muster were in a parlous state
of repair and were repeatedly in and out
of workshops.
We fought as composite
regiments, even as composite squadrons,
with elements of other regiments as tanks
and crews became available. Such confusion
did not make for effectiveness in action and
was compounded by the current lack of a
reliable system of communication between
tanks and infantry. Lack of communication
may have made the difference between
stalemate and victory on that arid stretch
of desert with its steep-sided depressions,
low rocky ridges and swathes of soft sand.
The July stalemate was followed by a lull
during August. At the beginning of September
Rommel launched his last despairing bid to
break the Alamein line, but his attacks did not
even dent the 8th Army’s defences of dug-in
tanks and infantry on the crucial Alam Halfa
ridge. Rommel was forced to withdraw, and
abandon for ever all hope of reaching the Nile
Delta and the Suez Canal.
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here
Those familiar lines from Henry V’s
Agincourt speech found an ec ho in the
minds of many members of the British 8th
Army as they pursued the remnants of the
routed German-Italian Panzer Armee Afrika
the wellington college year book 2010/2011
westward from El Alamein in November
1942. These sentiments of mixed relief and
elation were shared widely by the British.
The Prime Minister Churchill deemed the
victory so far-reaching in its importance that
he authorized the nation-wide ringing of
church bells, silent since the outbreak of war,
in celebration; and much later he stated, with
pardonable hyperbole: ‘Before Alamein we
never had a victory. After Alamein we never
had a defeat’. It was the culminating stroke
of a kind of deadly ping-pong that had taken
place across the coastal deserts of Egypt and
Cyrenaica for two years, in which offensive
and counter-offensive had driven the opposing
forces to and fro every few months.
The effects of the victory, for which
Australian, New Zealand, South African and
Indian forces shared credit with the British,
were momentous. The battle was followed
by an advance of 1,300 miles in 28 weeks,
from El Alamein, 70 miles west of the great
Egyptian city of Alexandria, to a link-up with
Anglo-American forces coming from Algeria
and the capitulation of all the Axis armies in
the region; it put the entire littoral of North
Africa into Allied hands and opened the way
for the invasion of southern Europe; it saved
the Middle East, the vital source of oil supplies,
from the imminent threat of being overrun by
Axis forces; it freed the Mediterranean, closed
since the fall of France, for allied shipping; it
permitted the re-supply of the valiant island
of Malta, half-starved and devastated by aerial
bombardment; and it destroyed for ever the
myth of the invincibility of the charismatic
commander of the Panzer Armee, Erwin
Rommel, and finally established the reputation
of the 8th Army commander, General Bernard
Montgomery, as the most famous British
General of the Second World War.
My own most vivid recollections of the
battle are of the final, crucial phase associated
with the operation code-named ‘Supercharge’.
For three days the 9th Australian Division
had been biting deeper and deeper into the
Axis defences and edging ever closer to the
vital coast road — a process called ‘crumbling’
by Montgomery. The Australians had forced
Rommel to concentrate most of his best troops
in the northern, coastal sector. ‘Supercharge’
involved a night attack by two infantry brigades
against weakened enemy defences three miles
further south. The infantry advanced 6,000
yards, and the 9th Armoured Brigade (the
3rd Hussars, Warwickshire Yeomanry and
Wiltshire Yeomanry) then passed through
with the aim of breaching the anti-tank line on
desert features known as Tel (hill) El Aqqaqir
and the Rahman track, so to open the way
for the tanks of the 1st Armoured Division to
the empty stretches of desert beyond and the
prospect of cutting off the axis lines of retreat.
So essential did Montgomery consider the
success of the whole operation relied on the
breakthrough by the 9th Armoured Brigade
that he declared that he was prepared to
accept 100 per cent casualties for the sake of
it. In the event the three regiments fought
with the utmost gallantry and determination
and inflicted heavy casualties, but they did not
succeed in piercing or destroying the line of
German 88mm guns, the most effective antitank weapon in the world.
I was the commander of a troop of three
Crusader tanks in a Squadron of The Queen’s
Bays in the 2nd Armoured Brigade, which
formed the principal tank component of
the 1st Armoured Division. The other two
squadrons of the regiment were equipped
with American Shermans, a much more
effective weapon than the Crusader. A
Squadron was a peculiarly ow formation. For
the first half of the battle it was commanded
by John Tatham-Warter [C 1928 –1933], an
extremely brave and efficient officer who was
killed directing the squadron from the back of
his tank on the day after ‘Supercharge’; he was
succeeded by Jackie Harman [Hl 1933–1938],
who had a most distinguished military career,
becoming a full General and Deputy Supreme
Commander of Allied Command Europe, and
being appointed kcb. Peter Gill [Bn 1935–
1940] was another of the four troop leaders.
When we emerged in the half-light of
dawn from the lanes cleared for us by the
sappers through the enemy minefields, we
could see a mile ahead of us all the evidence
of a desperate battle in progress. Streams
of tracer criss-crossed the sky, shells burst
incessantly, flames and clouds of black smoke
billowed from stricken tanks, and the whole
area was shrouded in a curtain of fine dust and
sand churned up by the tracks of manoeuvring
tanks. We were halted by 88s firing out of the
darkness on our right flank when still half a mile
short of the 9th Armoured Brigade’s battle.
Presently an extraordinary apparition became
visible from the direction of the Rahman
track. A white amorphous shape appeared
amid the swirling dust and smoke, at first
fleetingly, like some ghostly apparition from
another planet. Gradually its outlines became
more distinct, and finally it was revealed as a
man, hatless, walking slowly and deliberately
towards us. It was Lieutenant-Colonel Peter
Sykes, commanding officer of the Wiltshire
Yeomanry, who had bailed out unwounded
from his knocked-out tank, wrapped in a
white Hebron sheepskin coat against the
chilly desert night air, making his way on foot
to an assembly point for survivors in the rear.
We were held up for two days in front of
Tel El Aqqaqir and the Rahman track. The
infantry attack and the action of 9th Armoured
Brigade had pointed a dagger at the heart
of the Axis defences, and Rommel had to
eliminate us to have any hope of restoring the
situation. He made strenuous efforts to do so
by means of the heaviest and most sustained
artillery bombardment that I experienced in
the course of the war, and by persistent tank
attacks. They were in vain. Every attack was
repulsed by the fire of our Sherman tanks with
their powerful 75mm guns, and the result was
the virtual destruction of th e finest German
armoured formation, the 21st Panzer Division,
as a cohesive fighting force.
On 4th November, just twelve days after
the battle began, the final break was made
through the front of the disintegrating Italian
Trieste Division. Rommel could not believe
what was happening and repeatedly denied
the reports of Von Thoma, the commander
of the Afrika Corps. ‘If the Trieste were in
trouble they would have told me’, he said. In
the end Von Thoma went out in his command
tank to see for himself, only to be knocked out
by the advancing British and taken prisoner by
Lieutenant Grant Singer of the 10th Hussars.
That night he was invited to have dinner with
Montgomery, who was keen to hear about the
progress of the battle from the enemy point
of view, and learnt that Grant Singer had been
killed in action later that day. Von Thoma
wrote a charming letter of condolence to
Singer’s parents from captivity and so added a
civilized footnote to the story of the Second
Alamein battle.
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