Alamein: The turning point of World War Two

‘Where?’

‘Cairo of course. D’you think it’s really possible?’

‘Don’t you? You heard Colonel Karl. We’ll get there.’

‘Werner, how long have you been out here?’

‘A year exactly.’

‘And what have you seen in that time?’

‘Victory in our grasp. We’ve almost beaten them. We took Tobruk didn’t we? Then Alam Halfa. Perhaps this time we’ll get them. We just sit here and wait for them to throw themselves at us and then when they’re spent we counter-attack with everything we’ve got.’

Ringler smiled: ‘But do you think they’ll be spent? And what do we really have?’

‘We still have the panzers. Two divisions of them and the Italians too. Some of them aren’t half bad. The paras…’

Ringler cut in: ‘How many tanks do you think we’ve actually got, Adler? Real tanks I mean, German tanks?’

‘I don’t know. Four hundred. Maybe more?’

Ringler laughed: ‘My dear Werner. I was talking to this boy from Panzerarmee HQ and he told me that the last intelligence was that we had no more than two hundred and forty serviceable panzers. And there’s worse. We’ve no fuel. Well, not enough for more than a few days. Certainly not enough to punch through the Brits and get to Cairo.’

Adler stared at the ground and shrugged his shoulders.

‘That’s just hearsay, Ringler. I believe we can do it. And you must too. As officers we have a duty to believe in our victory. We owe it to the men, and to ourselves. You know that’s defeatist talk. You should be careful what you say to people.’

Ringler walked outside for a moment. His head had suddenly begun to ache and he felt weary. The schnapps, he supposed. An eerie silence hung over the desert. It was a beautiful evening and extraordinarily peaceful. He took another sip of beer and re-entered the tent.

As he did so Monier, the battalion sergeant-major and also its finest singer, coughed to clear his throat and began to sing. It was a familiar folk song from the Rhine. Soon the battalion officers and their guests were in full voice.

The song finished but just as it did Adler stared at Ringler and smiled. Then he began to sing. A very different song this time and of a more recent vintage, but one with which they were all familiar.

Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen!

SA marschiert mit mutig-festem Schritt.

Kam’raden, die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen,

Marschier’n im Geist in uns’ren Reihen mit.

Raise high the flag! Ranks close tight!

The stormtroopers march with bold, firm step.

Their comrades shot by the Reds and Reactionaries,

They march in spirit within our ranks.

The Horst Wessel song, the marching song of the Nazi party. The song which had carried Hitler to power. In the off beats when in a band cymbals would have crashed out the officers stamped their feet as hard as they could. The colonel for all his deafness had the loudest voice and, thought Ringler, it really wasn’t bad. He had never much cared for that song, named after its composer, a Nazi party activist assassinated by a Communist in 1930 and used as an excuse for a massacre.

But he still joined in. It was a symbol of their unity, their determination, their victory. And what was more once you were singing it it did something to the soul. Lifted the spirits from the depths of despair to some higher plane where the Aryan race really was invincible:

Zum letzten Mal wird nun Appell geblasen!

Zum Kampfe steh’n wir alle schon bereit!

Bald flattern Hitlerfahnen über Barrikaden.

Die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit!

For the last time now the call is sounded!

Already we stand all ready to fight!

Soon the Hitler banners will flutter over the barricades.

Our time in bondage won’t last much longer!

Ringler looked at Adler across the tent. He was smiling now. Full of pride and confident with the certainty imbued by the music. Ringler too felt the better for it. He left the tent and found himself in the company of Sergeant-Major Monier who had come out for a smoke. Ringler liked the man. He was honest and simple but utterly loyal. He came from farming stock in the Rhineland and had joined the Wehrmacht shortly after the annexation of the Sudetenland. He seemed older than his thirty years and acted as a sort of uncle to the younger men in the battalion. Somehow he had always seemed to be at Ringler’s side throughout the African campaign, since the early days of 1941. At Mersa, when they had pushed the Allies back for the first time. At Benghazi when they had left it again to be taken by the British. At Tobruk, when they had gone in through the warren of stinking caves that the Allies had held for so long, Monier had been at his side joking about the ‘desert rats’. At Alam Halfa when they had seemed almost at the gates of Alexandria. And now here, near the little village of Alamein where they had attacked and failed so recently. Monier had always been there, offering support and advice.

Yet for all his apparent confidence there had always been, it seemed to Ringler, a curious air of insecurity about the man and as they walked back to their trenches on this chilly night with its bright moon and eerie stillness, Monier spoke: ‘Cigarette, sir?’

As Ringler accepted and lit up Monier continued: ‘Did I ever tell you, sir, about my home in the Palatinate? You know that area, sir?’

Ringler, a northerner himself, from Dresden, remembered a family holiday to the lower Rhineland. ‘I have visited it once. A very long time ago. I seem to recall it being very pleasant.’

‘It’s the most beautiful place in the world, sir. If you don’t mind my saying so. God’s own country really. Have you ever been to Mainz or Koblenz, sir?’

‘No, Monier. I’m afraid not. I’ve never been to Mainz or Koblenz.’

‘Then you’ve missed a real treat, sir. Oh, they’re fine big cities, sir. All modern bustle and fuss. But with some fine old buildings too. You’d like them, sir. I can see you there, you’d be in your element. Of course we don’t live there. We have a little house outside in the country. Little farm really, sir, just a few cows and some land for crops. But it’s enough for us.’

He poked around in his pocket and took out his wallet. Then reaching inside he produced two dog-eared black and white photographs. ‘Here they are, sir. Last Christmas that was, on leave. That’s Monika there and that’s Heidi and the little one is Hans. If I could just see them once more at home, Lieutenant. Once more. That’s all I ask.’

‘Perhaps you will, later, Monier. After our victory I’m sure that you’ll see them and then we’ll have all this behind us, eh?’

Monier nodded and smiled: ‘Oh yes, sir. That would be a nice thought. And then, sir, if I’m not being too forward, perhaps you’d do us the honour of coming to visit us on our farm. We’d make you feel quite at home.’

Ringler smiled at him: ‘The honour would be all mine, Monier. That’s a firm date. I look forward to it.’

It had been, he knew, a futile reply and as he shook Monier’s hand to wish him a pleasant goodnight, he wondered whether he would ever walk through the doorway of the little farmhouse and meet Monier’s smiling children. In truth he did not really believe that any of them had much chance of getting out of this hellhole, let alone getting back to their loved ones. But he thought that at least perhaps with Monier he had behaved creditably. Like a proper officer, the sort of man he aspired to be.

Ringler dropped down into his foxhole and stretched out in its narrow space, placing his head on the bundle of blankets that he reserved for that purpose. The combination of schnapps, Italian wine and two bottles of the hijacked Löwenbräu had addled his mind and induced a welcome sleep. He pressed his head into the soft wool and began to drift off gently into the darkness.

Hardly, it seemed, had he closed his eyes however before his dreams of Germany were cut through with a violence that made him sit up, shaking. An explosion. A huge one and not, it seemed, too far away. Ringler sat, stunned on the floor of the trench. The bang was followed by another equally massive explosion and the world felt as if it was being blown to pieces around him. He looked directly upwards. Above his head and as far as he could see, the sky was lit by the most extraordinary glow. He peered cautiously out of the foxhole towards the Allied lines and saw a flickering line of light. The desert looked as if it was on fire, shuddering with flame along the length of its horizon. Each new explosion now seemed to course right through him.

His limbs began to tremble uncontrollably and then he noticed that the ground itself was shaking. Every bang smashed into his consciousness like a huge battering ram. Thudding, relentless, sudden, awful in its intensity. Looking up again he saw a single huge shell fly above his head, towards the rear of the German lines, whistling as it went, like some terrible iron firebrand. A shiver ran up his spine and it occurred to him that to manage this the British must have countless batteries up there on their position opposite the lines. Countless batteries with which to hurl destruction at him and his comrades.