Alamein: The turning point of World War Two

Bird took care when he wrote home. He knew that his father must be aware of what he was going through. The extraordinary, bizarre, once-in-a-lifetime experience of war. But he did not want to cause his parents any undue worry. He had good reason. His brother had been killed at Calais in 1940 and the loss was achingly raw. His brother’s death he knew was at least in part why he was here. Not for revenge but from a sense of justice. He felt the need to right a wrong against a foe who must in any case be defeated at all costs. A foe so monstrous that they stood against everything he held dear.

As always, then, he had tried to lighten the tone of the letter, writing with schoolboyish expression about his friends and comrades as if they were all about to take part in some momentous rugby match: ‘Hugo Salmon still my second-in-command and Jack Toms is another great standby. I should hate to be without either of them now…I may not write again for a little bit. Best of love, Tom.’

That was it. His father he knew would see through the last line and know instantly why he would not be able to write ‘for a little bit’. His mother though must suspect nothing. For her to know that her only surviving son was about to be thrown against the might of the German army would kill her or at least drive her mad.

And their enemy was mighty. Of that he had no doubt. Over the past two years they had conquered most of Europe and had run circles around the British army in North Africa. Now though it might just be their turn. The talk in the mess was all about the newly-arrived ordnance. Hundreds of tanks, great war machines that rumbled forward on tracks, unstoppable, able with a single shot to destroy a house. Tanks. That was what this battle, this war, was all about. The Germans had started out with many more, and better. Tanks filled him with dread. He had a secret fear of being crushed beneath a caterpillar track. A fear which he had never told anyone. A fear that had him waking in the night in a cold sweat. Tanks.

Bird wished to God that they had just a few of the new Sherman tanks with them. Instead, they had guns, the new six-pounder guns that they said could take out a tank with ease. He had yet to see it. And now they were under his command. He had been thrilled to get his own company. He had been promoted to major now and had a bar to his MC as well. He’d won that back in July at Gazala. He had been in the south with the Free French in the Bir Hakeim box, fighting the Italian Trieste and Ariete Divisions and the Twenty-First Panzers. He’d taken a column of twenty-five lorries carrying food and ammunition through minefields to reach the beleaguered French in their strongpoint. And once there, the commanding officer of the French garrison, General Koenig, had persuaded him to break out. They’d done it and saved 27,000 men from being taken. On top of that he’d captured fourteen Jerry prisoners and not had a single casualty among his own men.

It was more, far more than he had thought he would achieve when he had joined back in ’40. He knew that it had much to do with Colonel Turner’s opinion of him. People had wondered why he had joined the Rifle Brigade, or the Sixtieth Rifles as the colonel liked to refer to them. For of course they were not a brigade at all but a regiment, one of the finest and proudest in the British army. A regiment that had come out of the colonial war as a response to the American practice of using light infantry skilled with smoothbore rifles. A regiment that had fought with pride against the French in the peninsula.

The colonel was a sound chap. More than that, a father-figure, or as Bird often thought of him, like a kindly housemaster from his old school. The regiment was like that. An extended family. The mess was filled with Etonians and Wykehamists. Sometimes Bird sympathized with the newly-commissioned officers who had to infiltrate this public-school elite. ‘Temporary gentlemen’ were not always welcome in the mess. He did not mind them himself, but there were others who did. The lads were good enough though. They’d come through a lot in recent weeks. They were Londoners mostly, Eastenders, most of them conscripted into the ranks. But none the worse for that. And then there were the old sweats, the NCOs. They’d taken to the new men, had spent some time on them and it had worked. Bird felt that now he was in command of an efficient fighting unit. In fact they constituted a formidable little brigade; 2nd Battalion had three motorized infantry companies, a carrier platoon, a machine-gun platoon and most importantly his four platoons of six-pounders, sixteen guns in all. Aside from that the colonel had also been given an attached force of another eleven guns from 239 battery of 76 AT regiment RA.

They were all mounted on ‘portees’, lorries from whose flat-bed top the gun could be slid down and into position. It was not an ideal method of transport, slightly Heath Robinson-ish. But it gave them mobile anti-tank power and that was vital in this war of machines. All day they had been sitting here, keeping watch over the minefields. Static and in support. It was not his way and he was impatient to be in the action. But Bird knew that their time would come and when it did, he knew too that they would acquit themselves with honour, whatever the odds.

FIVE

6.00 p.m. Tactical HQ, Eighth Army The beach, El Alamein General Bernard Law Montgomery

It was, anyone could see, a superb defensive position. And he cursed himself for not having been the man who had found it. For this was Auchinleck’s position, a defensive line chosen by the General whom he had been brought in to replace. Auchinleck – the man who had failed in all else but this. The chance to define this sublime line which ran for forty-five miles from the Mediterranean in the north, due south across the desert to the impassable vastness of the great Quattara Depression. It was the last line of defence between the enemy and Cairo. The perfect place to make a last stand. Here it was that they had fallen back to in the face of the enemy’s last attempt to take the city. Here it was that they had regrouped and rested. And it would be from here, he knew, that they would attack.

He looked at the map spread out before him on the table which stood in the middle of his small command caravan and traced a line along it from north to south. Forty miles of front line, all of it more or less level but with two passages of high ground: Ruweisat Ridge and Alam Nayil. Though on the map it looked flat, Montgomery, like the men who had lived out there in the desert, some of them for two years, knew that it was far from that. That it was marked by small hillocks and dunes, dips that seemed as hard to climb as ravines and sheer drops that could catch you off your guard and swallow you up. And it was not just sand, but rock and everywhere was punctuated by clumps green bushes of sharp camel-thorn. There were no roads and precious few houses. In short, it was the perfect terrain for modern, mechanized warfare. And ‘modern’ was a word that he liked very much. The whole essence of modern warfare could be reduced to three things: concentration, control and simplicity.

In short it was about modernity. It was the only way to win. Complete change in the British army. Dunkirk had taught him that. But it had taken till now to bring it in. Two long years. So many of the old guard had gone now, he thought, and they were so much the better for it. There was Ritchie, sacked after the Gazala disaster in June and his replacement Corbett who everyone knew to be an idiot. ‘A complete fathead’ his chief of staff had called him. So Gott had been brought in. Old ‘Strafer’ Gott. And it had been he that Montgomery had replaced. Though it had been unfortunate that it should have happened the way it had with Gott being killed in a plane crash. Montgomery had simply been the next man in line. In truth he knew that the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, had turned Churchill’s ear.

And what great good fortune to have been given such a chance. Surely God was rewarding him for his faith over the years and his devotion to the army. The army had been his life. Was still. Of course his late wife Betty had been so dear to him and her sudden and quite unexpected death, exactly five years ago this month had left a dreadful vacuum in his life that could never be filled. But at least he had their son, David, now thirteen. He’d left him at school at Winchester when he’d come out here, in the care of his former headmaster from prep school. David was just a boy, but, he reflected, he was not that much younger than so many of the ‘men’ he now led.

He turned to see his ADC, John Poston, a twenty-three-year-old captain in the 11th Hussars. Poston was a pleasant Old Harrovian, a good horseman who had been in the desert since 1940 having joined straight from school. He was only ten years older than David, he thought. A fine, handsome young man with a pair of honest and engaging pale grey eyes. He had taken to young Poston instantly on his arrival in the desert, and had asked for him in particular. Well, he had also been poor Gott’s former ADC and he clearly knew the ropes. Wouldn’t drive him into a minefield as young Spooner, the ADC he had brought with him from England, had done on his first day. Montgomery smiled at the boy’s clothes. Like so many of his officers, particularly those in the cavalry and yeomanry, he had adopted his own style of dress: suede desert boots, spotted silk cravat, corduroy trousers. Montgomery indulged it. He knew Poston to be somewhat apart from the class-conscious society of the mess and admired him for his simple professionalism. Hadn’t he himself been somewhat unorthodox in his own dress? He followed Wellington’s dictum; what mattered was not following the drill book to the letter but the quality and professionalism of the man. Besides, hadn’t he re-written the drill book?

‘Did you realize, John, that we have the longest supply routes the history of warfare has ever known?’

‘I think I overheard you say as much to the Field Marshal, sir.’

‘What very sharp hearing you have.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

Montgomery tugged at his right earlobe, a habit of which he was hardly aware but which was often remarked on behind his back. ‘No matter, you should know in any case, John. It is true. Although unlike Herr Rommel of course, our lines are not at full stretch. It will be all about materiel, this battle. Rommel needs fuel and he needs ammunition and according to our intelligence, he does not have sufficient supplies of either.’

Intelligence, he thought, was everything, worth fifty thousand men on the battlefield. And they had the finest intelligence in the war – Ultra. The code-breakers at Bletchley Park were now able to break the German Enigma code. Since 1941 they had been receiving intelligence based on radio messages from Fliegerführer Afrika. But he knew too that intelligence alone could not win a battle. It was down to the generals and it was down to the men. In his case men who were itching for victory, the men of Eighth Army. Men who had fought at Gazala and been twice up to Benghazi. The ‘Benghazi handicap’ they liked to call it. Men who had run from Tobruk to be able to fight again. Well, this was their battle and everything was at stake. Not just the Allies’ vital hold on the Middle East and Suez. But also he knew, as Churchill did, the war itself and indeed his own position as leader of the nation.

He looked again at the map. Of course they could have stood at Sidi Birani or Mersa Matruh. But the present line was superb, unassailable. And it exploited the fact that there were only three ways by which Rommel could attack them. In the north in the gap between Ruweisat Ridge and the railway line, in the centre where they were strongest and in the south.

He had to admit, no matter how it galled him and it surely did, that Auchinleck had been right. Of course, he would never have admitted that in public, or indeed in private to anyone. It was all-important that the men should believe that the new man in charge of them had his own plan and his own original methods. He had shown them as much from the moment he had taken over, had made them the fighting force they now most surely were. Fitness was the key. Physical exercise and a sense of purpose. Drill, drill and more drill and battle training. For now they were ready. And now he knew they could win.

He did not intend to defend. Rommel had had his chance, had attacked in June and had failed. Concentration, control and simplicity. The holy trinity of the battlefield had defeated him at Alam Halfa. They had lured him in and destroyed his strength bit by bit. Rommel had overplayed his hand and now it was their own time to attack. Well, of course that had apparently also been Auchinleck’s plan. But Churchill had perceived that Auchinleck’s heart was not in it, and the men knew it too. They could tell a soldier’s true feelings. Auchinleck had made too many plans for the evacuation that he felt must follow their defeat. That was no way to treat an army, to act as if they had been beaten already.

Emerging from his reverie, Montgomery turned back to Poston: ‘Do you think the men are really ready for it now, John? The big attack?’

‘More ready than ever, sir. They’ve had enough of fighting a defensive war.’ Poston paused and smiled, then went on: ‘Do you recall, sir, that joke circulating in Cairo back in August, when you’d just arrived. They said that General Auchinleck’s defence plan was to allow Rommel to break through right up to Cairo. But that when the Germans reached the Gezira Club in the capital all the staff at GHQ should instantly turn out with their sidearms and chase him back to Tripoli?’

Montgomery laughed, that strange high-pitched laugh that made his features appear even more birdlike. When he spoke it was with weak ‘R’s, turning them to ‘W’s which coming from anyone else might have appeared comic.

‘Very good, John. Yes, I do seem to remember that one. I think we can afford to be a little more positive now, don’t you?’

‘You’ve worked miracles, sir. Nothing less.’

‘We’ve a different army now, John. And we’re going to use it.’

He knew that he had achieved something important. He had got rid of all the belly-aching, and had told his staff quite bluntly on the first day that if any man wanted to continue to invent lame reasons for not doing his job then he could get out of it at once. They were staying here. And if they could not stay and win and remain alive then they would stay here dead.

He had also decided that the plan of battle should be known to everyone from general to private soldier. And so he had attempted to visit them all. Not just the Brits, but the Aussies, the New Zealanders, the Indians and the rest. He had even taken up the offer of an Australian slouch hat which he decorated with regimental badges as he toured the other Divisions.

He knew that his presence had had an effect on the men. Freddie de Guingand, his chief of staff, had told him that the sick rate dropped off dramatically. In fact men were desperate to return from sick leave so as not to miss the big push. He was confident that now every single one of his soldiers felt a part of the plan. All that he had to do was to make sure that it worked.

He looked again at the map and this time traced another line, to the west of his original. Rommel’s own position was certainly impressive, but it had a fundamental flaw. What had Bill Williams called it? An Italian corset strengthened by German whalebones. Yes, he liked that. A bit like Wellington at Waterloo, strengthening his Belgian and Dutch regiments by placing them beside a battalion of seasoned British veterans. But it was not quite the same here.

He wondered where they would be now without Williams. He was the finest intelligence officer that Montgomery had ever encountered: an Oxford Don with a quite brilliant brain, now a major in the King’s Dragoon Guards. And Williams had said something further to him. The phrase continued to go around in his mind. If they could separate the German whalebones from the soft Italian corset they would smash through the Italians. It was simple and quite brilliant, and Montgomery had readily adopted it as his own.

So they would attack. Alam Halfa had paved the way. Ultra had revealed the losses. Fifty-one German tanks destroyed and more damaged and over 3000 German and Italian casualties.

Churchill, impatient as ever and keen to please the Allies, had sent Montgomery a peremptory memo telling him that it must be in September. Of course he wasn’t having any such nonsense. They would never have been prepared and he told Churchill as much. He would not risk men’s lives in a premature offensive. General Alexander, the commander-in-chief, had presented Churchill’s case, but Montgomery was having none of it. He would launch the offensive in his own time; four days after the anniversary of Betty’s death. The twenty-third of October looked set to be the perfect night. Tonight.

‘John, is Freddie back from Alex?’

‘Yes, sir, he’s in his HQ I believe.’

‘His HQ?’

‘He’s adopted an old Italian pillbox, sir. Made it quite like home apparently. Still smells a little.’

‘Very good. Then I think we might pay him a visit, don’t you?’

Both men stepped out of the caravan and walked over to the former Italian strongpoint which now acted as the HQ for Freddie de Guingand. It was draped with camouflage netting and around it some armoured cars had been dug in, connected by shallow slit trenches. He was pleased that Freddie should be so close at hand.

They were complete opposites, it occurred to him, and not for the first time. Freddie de Guingand was fourteen years his junior. He had first met him at TA HQ in York in 1923. Montgomery had been teaching soldiering skills and young Freddie, devilishly handsome at twenty-two, a trainee second lieutenant, had impressed him with his perceptive intelligence. Despite their shared love of golf and bridge, how very different they were. Freddie forever living on his nerves, highly strung, a lover of wine and women; an inveterate gambler, an epicure. And he himself, Montgomery. Calm, self-controlled, abstemious. Those at least were the virtues which he liked to claim as his own, the heights to which he aspired.

He had decided to make Freddie his chief of staff almost instantly after having taken up the command of Eighth Army. Chief of staff: his invention. The army did not work on that principle. It believed that the army commander could use his staff officers himself. But Montgomery knew that a good CoS was essential to coordinating any campaign. That was surely what had cost the other generals in the desert their commands. That was why he was here. With Freddie at his side – Berthier to his Napoleon – and Alexander, the overall commander, behind him, he had the framework of an unassailable team. If only he could be sure that he could rely on all his corps commanders: Horrocks, Lumsden and Leese. Brian Horrocks he had known in the Great War and had personally appointed to XIII Corps. As for Leese, he had taught him at Staff College back in 1926 and had appointed him like Horrocks on his own merit. But it had been at Horrocks’ suggestion that he had given Lumsden X Corps and he already felt uneasy about it. Lumsden was certainly a game fellow. Lanky, dashing and with a liking for sartorial excess, he had been an amateur jockey before the war. But Montgomery disliked the arrogance that went with it. He might be a tremendous horseman and have a creditable handicap at golf, but he was not sure that the man had enough real ‘pep’ for such a plan as he had in mind. And therein, he suspected, might lie something of a problem.

Ducking beneath the low lintel of the pillbox, difficult even for his diminutive frame, Montgomery entered with Poston as ever close behind. ‘Freddie? Ah, there you are.’

De Guingand stood and saluted then grasped a thick sheaf of papers from his desk. ‘Sir. I have the latest sitrep here. I was just coming to find you and hand it over.’

Montgomery stared at him and a brief smile flickered across his face. He shook his head in a fatherly manner. ‘Don’t be silly, Freddie. You ought to know by now. You know I never read any papers when I can get the person concerned to tell me himself. Put all that bumpf away. See if you can find General Leese and ask him to dine with me. Oh, and why don’t you join us? Shall we say seven o’ clock? Outside my caravan. Don’t be late.’

Their frugal meal began at precisely seven o’ clock. But the food was of no great consequence to Montgomery. They sat within a large tent of mosquito netting into which the flies had still managed to gain access and dined as was his habit on bully beef and lemonade. But he was more concerned with the words of his corps commander and chief of staff. Leese went on: ‘As I was saying, I toured the positions today, sir. The men are mad keen, especially the Highlanders. They know they’ve got the Australians and New Zealanders on their flanks. They say they feel safe, sir. That’s the extraordinary thing really. They’re so remarkably confident. Never seen the like. And they really understand the plan.’

Montgomery smiled and tugged at his earlobe. ‘Thank you, Oliver. That’s most reassuring.’ He turned to de Guingand: ‘How d’you find the food, Freddie? Not a patch on what you sampled in Alexandria, I’ll bet.’