Alamein

by Iain Gale

  He is released from captivity in 1947 and starts to write about military subjects. He is technical advisor to the film The Guns of Navarone in 1961. He dies in his hometown of Würzburg in 1970 aged seventy-one.

  Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, despite entreaties from Hitler and Mussolini, does not turn and fight, but withdraws to Tunisia. Here he attacks US II Corps defeating it at the Kasserine Pass in February in 1943.

  He then turns against the British forces, occupying the Mareth Line.

  In March, he attacks Eighth Army at the Battle of Medenine but after losing fifty-two tanks, calls off the assault. On 9 March he hands over command of Armeegruppe Afrika to General von Arnim and leaves Africa on sick leave. He will never return. On 13 May 1943, General Messe surrenders the remnants of Armeegruppe Afrika to the Allies.

  In August 1943 Rommel moves to Lake Garda as commander of a new Army Group B created to defend northern Italy but after Hitler gives Kesselring sole Italian command, Rommel moves Army Group B to Normandy to defend the French coast against the promised Allied invasion. He speeds up the fortification of the Atlantic coast. He orders millions of mines to be laid and thousands of tank traps and obstacles set up on beaches and throughout the countryside.

  On the morning of D Day he is on leave but later he personally oversees the fighting around Caen. On 17 July 1944 Rommel’s staff car is strafed and he is hospitalized with major head injuries.

  In February he lends his support to the conspiracy to oust Hitler but is against assassination. On 20 July the bomb attack on Hitler fails and many conspirators are arrested. Rommel is implicated after confessions by other officers under torture.

  Hitler, realizing that it will cause a scandal if it comes out that Rommel is involved in the plot, offers Rommel the choice of committing suicide or being sent to a People’s Court and execution.

  He is visited at his home by Wilhelm Burgdorf and Ernst Maisel, two generals from Hitler’s headquarters. Burgdorf offers him cyanide. For the sake of his family Rommel chooses suicide and is driven out of the village. Fifteen minutes later he is dead. He is forty-nine. The official story of Rommel’s death, is that he has died of wounds from the earlier strafing of his staff car. Hitler orders an official day of mourning and Rommel is buried with full military honours. His coffin, against his wishes, is covered with swastikas. His body lies at Herrlingen, west of Ulm.

  Long after his death Rommel’s reputation as a general survives undamaged and historians suggest that he might have won the battle or at least ground Montgomery to a stalemate had he not been starved of supplies and the promised new tanks.

  Colonel Marescotti Ruspoli is buried in the Italian war memorial at El Alamein, alongside his brother Costantino. He was survived by his wife, a son and a daughter. The third brother to fight in the desert, Carlo, dies in Buenos Aires in 1947. The family villa at Vignanello near Viterbo in the Romagna is now open to the public.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Alamein. The name of a tiny railway siding in the Egyptian desert which for a generation of Britons became somehow magical one autumn day in 1942 as the Second World War was entering its second year and the dark cloud of Nazi tyranny hung low over Europe. Overnight Alamein became a talisman. A beacon of light that showed at last that Hitler could be beaten.

  Those born since that time though are less likely to know that once great word and cannot know its significance. To many present day readers it may mean little or nothing. It is part of the purpose of this book to change that.

  The task of the historical novelist is to bring the past to life, to allow his readers to see historic events as if they were happening again. We offer a means of experiencing the past. That is our task and it is also, when it comes to an event so momentous as the battle of El Alamein, our duty. For it is appalling to think that such bravery, suffering and depth of spirit should ever be forgotten.

  The Battle of El Alamein was a major turning point in the struggle to defeat Hitler. Of that there can be no doubt. It is almost impossible to gauge the magnitude of its effect upon British morale and even more difficult to assess its impact upon that of the Nazis. Both however were huge and without it or its equivalent the war might well have gone a very different way or lasted for very much longer.

  Certainly the entry of the Americans into the war with all their industrial might and manpower must have ensured, as Rommel realized only too well, that eventually Hitler would be defeated. But Montgomery and Churchill knew that that would be a waiting game and the already war-weary British people, unaware of such probabilities, desperately needed some sign that the Allies were able to deal a major knock-out blow to their adversaries. That was the real value of El Alamein and that was the reason that Montgomery felt justified in expending so many men and so much material in achieving his victory.

  Of course there are those who would argue that it was not entirely his victory and it is certainly clear that, just as he did later, after D-Day, Montgomery attempted to persuade his staff and the higher command that all the decisions he took in the course of the fight had been carefully considered from the start. This was not the case and it is disappointing that he should not have been sufficiently self confident to have admitted that he was in fact a talented opportunist. For that is where I believe his strength as a general lay. He was able to grasp the changing situation, in particular his own mistakes and to adjust accordingly.

  It is also true that Montgomery outnumbered the Axis forces two to one in artillery and manpower, and four to one in tanks. But as any general will tell you, it is generally considered that an attacking force should outnumber the defenders by at least three to one to have a fighting chance.

  What is certain is that victory at Alamein was never a certainty. It was a result not only of masterly generalship but at the final reckoning of sheer blood, guts and bavery. Without those the Allies could not have won.

  The desert war has been called a war without hate and in truth the dreadful conditions endured in North Africa were partly responsible for producing a code of gentlemanliness which recalls the conflicts of the eighteenth century. The ultimate demonstration of this was surely Montgomery’s invitation to the captured General von Thoma to dine with him as the Germans began to retreat. But like the wars of the past it was not without its moments of atrocity, particularly in the use of booby traps and the extensive employment of mines, some of them designed not to kill but merely to demobilize and mutilate and to err too much on the side of a chivalrous ideal would be a mistake.

  Also the sheer scale of casualties was dreadful. It was greater than any single battle yet witnessed in the Second World War. The Allies lost almost 14,000 men, the Axis some 20,000. Of the Allied troops it was the Commonwealth soldiers who suffered most. One fifth of all casualties were Australians. The New Zealanders, as my account endeavours to emphasise, lost even more: some 8,000 killed and wounded. The question remains though what was it that made this war fought in such terrible physical hardship so very different in character from the Russo-German conflict of the same era?

  There is no easy answer, but I suspect that it might have something to do with the nature of the combatants. As I hope I have made clear in the text, many of the officers in the British tank squadrons were from the yeomanry, made up of the aristocracy and gentry and went into battle using for their call signs phrases normally heard on the hunting field. Their men for the most part treated them with the respect that they would have accorded any gentleman. It was a very different army to that which would fight on the beaches of Normandy two years later and different too to the Australians and New Zealanders with their more relaxed attitude to rank, which produced its own kind of fighting spirit. On the German part, while it is always foolish to make blanket generalizations, Rommel’s Afrika Corps was composed of men of the more established units of the Wehrmacht with officers who had perhaps a more traditional frame of mind than many of their SS comrades fighting on the Russian front. While they might have had no less faith in thei
r Führer, they did not believe in the final solution which by this stage had been a year in execution, nor that they were fighting an underclass. They had developed a genuine respect for their desert enemies, more in fact than that they had for their Allies the Italians. The latter, again led by scions of landed families as much as by Mussolini’s fascisti, who in fact were often one and the same, were at a low ebb in their morale. They distrusted the Germans and many had begun to wonder what they were doing in Africa. Such a diversity of men and nations had not been seen on a single battlefield for generations and when they came together the result could only be the tumultuous and extraordinary conflict whose spirit I have attempted to capture in these pages.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It would be true to say that this book began its gestation some forty years ago when as a young boy I would visit the house of my best friend and don the peaked officer’s cap and webbing belt that had belonged to his father, Philip Harris, when a captain in the Royal Sussex regiment serving in the desert under Monty. Gradually tales of that campaign entered my mind and my friend’s father, now sadly deceased, became a hero in my imagination, leading his men somewhat like the running officer of my Airfix Eighth Army soldiers, pistol in hand across the sand dunes against the devilishly cunning Afrika Korps of the Desert Fox.

  Subsequently, I was fortunate enough to become a pupil at Montgomery’s old school in London, and not surprisingly reminders of his achievements were a constant presence, embellishing my friend’s father’s accounts with the bigger picture of his commander.

  Two years ago, while researching this book, I visited the battlefield of Alamein and took some time to search out Captain Harris’s fallen comrades. There are many of them here, laid out in the British cemetery in long straight lines as if present on parade. The Royal Sussex’s men lie together, their Colonel at their head, followed by his officers and finally the men. It was a poignant moment, made all the more so a few minutes later by visiting the towering Italian memorial and finding inside the final resting places of the two Ruspoli brothers, relatives of my late wife, Sarah. Somehow I felt that my presence had united the two sides and that a circle, begun as a boy back in Surrey in the late 1960s, had become complete.

  Writing such a work, part fact, part fiction, on a battle of such a recent vintage as El Alamein has been very different to the treatment of the battle of Waterloo which I attempted in Four Days in June. Some of the combatants remain alive or are only recently deceased and I am hugely indebted to them and their families for their assistance, and in particular to Dorothy Highland for her help and to Ben Tindall for a memoir of his late father.

  A special thanks must go of course to Tom Bird, who I hope will not be offended by my attempt to make his conspicuous gallantry that day live anew on the page.

  The principal acknowledgements apart from these are due to the relatives of those men whose memoirs furnished my primary source material, notably Hugh Samwell and Ralf Ringler. The diary of Hugh Samwell was published as An Infantry Officer with the Eighth Army (Blackwood, 1945) just a few months after Samwell was himself killed in action on 12 January 1945 in the Ardennes.

  The Diary of Ralf Ringler was published in 1970 as Endstation El Alamein (Berger, 1970)

  The American driver, Josh Miller is of course an invented character. But he stands as a symbol of the bravery of his real comrades of the American Field Service who served and died with such courage at Alamein and throughout the war. Miller’s roots lie somewhere in the pages of three books: Andrew Geer’s Mercy in Hell (McGraw-Hill, 1943), George Rock’s History of the American Field Service 1920–55 (Platen Press, 1956) and most inspiringly Charles Edwards’ memoir An AFS Driver Remembers, published on the internet.

  The best general histories of the battle are Major-General John Strawson’s Desert Victory (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1981), Niall Barr’s Pendulum of War (Cape, 2004), Ken Ford’s Turning of the Tide (Osprey 2005), Philip Warner’s Alamein Recollections of the Heroes (Kimber, 1979) and John Bierman and Colin Smith’s masterly Alamein, War Without Hate (Viking, 2002), particularly for its account of ‘Snipe’. For more detail on the armies George Forty’s works on the Afrika Korps are invaluable (The Armies of Rommel, Cassell, 1997).

  The memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery (Collins, 1958) were naturally a key resource as were those of his Chief of Staff, Freddie de Guingand, published separately as Operation Victory (Hodder & Stoughton 1947) and From Brass Hat to Bowler Hat (Hamish Hamilton, 1979) along with the biography of de Guingand by General Sir Charles Richardson (Kimber, 1987).

  For Rommel, his own book Infantry Attacks (Greenhill, 1995), along with The Rommel Papers edited by Liddel Hart (Collins, 1953), was very useful. In addition there are personal papers in the Imperial War Museum, London. I also benefited from accounts in Heinz Werner Schmidt’s With Rommel in the Desert (Harrap, 1951) and Kenneth Macksey’s well-known seminal work on the Field Marshal, Rommel: battles and campaigns (Arms and Armour 1979).

  I am indebted to Peter Dornan’s book on Herb Ashby’s part in the battle, The Last Man Standing (Allen and Unwin, 2006) for its account of Ashby’s friend Bill Kibby and there is no better Italian account of the battle than Paolo Caccia-Dominioni’s moving book Alamein, an Italian Story (Allen and Unwin, 1962).

  My thanks too must go to Faber and Faber, the publishers of Keith Douglas’s memoirs, Alamein to Zem Zem and of his The Complete Poems (1978). The lines quoted are from ‘Do Not Look Up’.

  Lastly, I should thank Caitlin Nutten for her invaluable research into the personal histories of those who served, and David Macdowell at Fettes College for a chance to see the relevant passages of his forthcoming work on the college’s illustrious military history. And of course I must thank my long-suffering wife, Susie, especially for her invaluable medical expertise with all the ‘gory bits’.

  By the same author

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  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

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  Copyright © Iain Gale 2009

  Iain Gale asserts the moral right to

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  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

  the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

  entirely coincidental.

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  EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-36597-5

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