The sheer productive power of the United States – awakened and infuriated by Pearl Harbor – was thus already beginning to tell. Between December 1941 and September 1942, the Anglo-American alliance sent 2,370 single-engined fighters to the Middle Eastern theatre, against a total German production of 1,340 in that same period (only 25 per cent of which could be sent there).26 Hitler was very soon to feel the folly of his declaration of war against America. ‘Anyone who has to fight, even with the most modern weapons,’ wrote Rommel, ‘against an enemy in complete control of the air, fights like a savage against modern European troops, under the same handicaps and with the same chances of success… We had to face the likelihood of the RAF shortly gaining absolute air superiority.’ The days of Messerschmitt Me-109s based in Libya dominating the skies, shooting down Tomahawks and Hurricane IIs with impunity, were over. Rommel appreciated that he had, in his own words, to ‘put our defences into such a form that British air superiority would have the least effect… We could no longer rest our defence on the motorised forces used in a mobile role… We had instead to try to resist the enemy in field positions.’27 For all Rommel’s loose nomenclature about the RAF rather than the DAF, and the ‘English’ rather than the Allies, the battle of El Alamein was not a British victory so much as a British Empire one (despite the American planes and Sherman tanks). As well as Major-General Douglas Wimberley’s 51st Highland Division, for example, Leese’s XXX Corps consisted – from the sea southwards – of Major-General Leslie ‘Ming the Merciless’ Morshead’s 9th Australian Division, Major-General Bernard Freyberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division, Major-General Dan Pienaar’s 1st South African Division and Major-General Francis Tuker’s 4th Indian Division. A better roll-call of Empire could hardly be imagined, missing Canadians only because 3,400 of them had been senselessly sacrificed at Dieppe two months earlier.
South of the Ruweisat Ridge, Horrocks commanded a more British line, including the north-countrymen of Major-General John ‘Crasher’ Nicholls’ 50th Division and Major-General Hector Hughes’ 44th (Home Counties) Division, as well as Major-General John Harding’s 7th Armoured Division, whose nickname the Desert Rats – because of the jerboa painted on the sides of their tanks – was gradually to extend in popular parlance to the whole Eighth Army. Yet there were also two important units entirely unconnected to Britain’s Commonwealth or Empire: the Free Greek Brigade held the Ruweisat Ridge itself and Brigadier-General Marie-Pierre Koenig’s Free French Brigade guarded the gap between the 44th Division and the Qattara Depression. With these forces fighting against Germans and Italians, Alamein was thus almost as cosmopolitan a battle as it was possible to have, and to characterize it as merely Britons versus Germans is unwarrantably to caricature what happened. Rommel always said, for example, that the New Zealanders were the finest troops in the Eighth Army.
According to Montgomery’s plan, it was the Commonwealth forces of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa who were, along with the 51st Highlanders, intended to break through the Axis lines in the first two days of fighting and open the gaps in the minefields through which Major-General Raymond Briggs’ 1st and Major-General Alec Gatehouse’s 10th Armoured Divisions of X Corps would flood. Montgomery’s Schwerpunkt was going to be not on the coastal road to the north nor down by the Qattara Depression in the south – as it had been in almost all previous engagements over the past two years – but instead in the centre of the battlefield. In this, as with his insistence on a decisive battle and his return to attritional warfare, Montgomery was to prove both original and far-sighted. As Michael Carver, who served under him in the Western Desert, would later write: ‘It may have been expensive and unromantic, but it made certain of victory, and the certainty of victory at that time was all-important. Eighth Army had the resources to stand such a battle, while the Panzerarmee had not, and Montgomery had the determination, will-power and ruthlessness to see such a battle through.’28
Nor can one belittle Montgomery’s success at Alamein by pointing out his two-to-one superiority over Rommel in terms of artillery and men, and four-to-one superiority in effective tanks. The established view in military thinking was still – as it had been since Napoleon’s day – that the attacker needed a three-to-one preponderance to be sure of victory. Moreover, as one of his officers, the military historian Peter Young, has pointed out: ‘If, for once, a British general managed to get his army across the start line with a numerical superiority over the enemy, this should be a matter for praise rather than complaint!’29
Montgomery, while learning the lessons of the Second World War on which he had been at the receiving end at Dunkirk, had also not forgotten those of the Great War. With what he called ‘100% binge’, Montgomery believed that a huge initial barrage and the attack of Leese’s corps could begin a process of what he called ‘crumbling’, whereby the Axis forces – particularly the Italian infantry – would be demoralized and collapse, especially once Lumsden’s tanks attacked them from the flanks and rear. British anti-tank guns and tanks pouring through the bridgehead would, he hoped, hold off the Panzers’ inevitable counter-attack wherever the breakthroughs occurred.30 (In writing military history – indeed history in general – it is impermissible to use the word ‘inevitable’, except when describing the Germans’ swift and aggressive counter-attacking of Allied successes.) Panzers on the move would prove a far easier target both for the DAF and for the British tanks and anti-tank gunners. Unlike earlier desert commanders, Montgomery was positively looking forward to the Axis response, or claimed to be, for morale’s sake. ‘Having thus beaten the guts out of the enemy,’ Montgomery told his divisional commanders, ‘the eventual fate of the Panzerarmee is certain. It will not be able to avoid destruction.’ Envisaging ‘a dogfight lasting about twelve days’, Montgomery predicted a crushing victory.31
The Eighth Army’s massive artillery bombardment opened up at 21.40 hours on Friday, 23 October 1942, accompanied by aerial attacks from Wellington and Halifax bombers. In all, some 882 guns, manned by around 6,000 artillerymen, took part, with the field guns averaging 102 rounds per gun per day. An estimated 1 million shells were fired by the Allies during the battle.32 In Cairo, Alexander cabled ‘Zip’ to a relieved and initially delighted Prime Minister in London. After twenty minutes of firing against Axis artillery, at 22.00 the target became the Axis front line, to soften it up for the infantry assault under a full moon. ‘The peaceful stars were shaken in their heavens when nearly a thousand guns flashed and roared simultaneously against us that night,’ recalled Second Lieutenant Heinz Werner Schmidt, who was serving in a reserve anti-tank battery. ‘The earth from the Qattara Depression to the Mediterranean quaked. Far back from the front line, men were jarred to their teeth.’33 The barrage could be heard in Alexandria, some 60 miles away. It continued for five hours, and then broke off at 03.00, only to be resumed at 07.00. Meanwhile sappers went forward to clear paths through the minefields for the infantry, marking them with white tape. The pipers played ‘Highland Laddie’ as the Highland and Commonwealth battalions tried to reach objectives along what was codenamed the Oxalic Line. By 08.00 Leese’s corps had succeeded in taking roughly half of them, but at the cost of nearly 2,500 casualties, mostly from mines and booby-traps. (The Axis certainly had no monopoly on ingenious booby-traps: the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Tunisia used to plant exploding mule droppings.)
The ‘creeping barrage’ had managed to keep Axis mortaring, sniping and machine-gunning to a minimum. Yet, potentially disastrously, Lumsden’s X Corps had largely failed to break through, and was generally not in a position to protect the infantry from counter-attack. Only the 8th Armoured Brigade made it to the Miteiriya Ridge, but the rest of the corps got fouled up in gargantuan traffic jams along the narrow pathways through the minefields. ‘Once a lane had been cleared, there was also the problem of congestion,’ records one history. ‘An overlooked mine which blew a track off could block a lane for hours and make a mockery of numerical superiority’ – and a
n inviting target for the Luftwaffe.34 An infuriated Montgomery remonstrated with Lumsden in person ‘in no uncertain voice’, threatening to relieve his divisional commanders, and possibly by implication Lumdsen himself. Feeling the full weight of Montgomery’s ire cannot have been pleasant, and Lumsden ordered fresh attacks to try to relieve the infantry, who by then had to face elements of the Folgore Division and Ramcke Brigade.
Yet Montgomery had not one lucky break but three when it came to the higher direction of the German side of the battle. Not only was Rommel away in Germany when the offensive began, but his efficient chief of staff Fritz Bayerlein was on leave, and the overweight Georg Stumme then died of a heart attack on the first day, whereupon the Panzer general Wilhelm von Thoma took over. It was not until just before midnight on Sunday, 25 October that the signal could be relayed to the Afrika Korps: ‘I have taken command of the army again. Rommel.’ (Many units did not in fact receive this encouraging signal, as the great opening barrage had cut a number of telephone wires.) Rommel nonetheless quickly deduced that the attacks in the south of the battlefield were merely diversionary, so he withdrew the 21st Panzer Division from there and sent it northwards towards Kidney Ridge. Such was the shortage of petrol that he had to be certain, because if Montgomery was bluffing the division might not even have had enough fuel to return. The sinking of two Italian oil-tankers, Proserpina and Louisiana, in Tobruk harbour by the DAF on 26 and 28 October, before they could unload their fuel, was to be a particular blow.
On 25 October Montgomery abandoned attempts to get both the 10th and 7th Armoured Divisions through the Axis lines, and instead ordered the 9th Australian Division to start ‘crumbling’ operations in the north. Meanwhile, the 1st Armoured Division was sent to the area of Kidney Ridge. That night the Australians were mainly successful, but the 1st Armoured made no progress. The next day saw heavy Axis attacks on Kidney Ridge, but without much success. The 7th Motor Brigade (which included the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and the 2nd Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps) fought desperate actions to secure positions north and south of Kidney Ridge, jocularly codenamed Snipe and Woodcock, on 27 October. Heavy German shelling, much friendly fire and strong armoured counter-attacks by the 15th Panzer, 21st Panzer and Littorio Divisions failed to dislodge these units from those key positions during that day and night, and thirty-three Axis tanks, five self-propelled guns and other vehicles were destroyed on Snipe alone. Lieutenant-Colonel Victor Turner, who commanded the Rifle Brigade battalion there, won the Victoria Cross, mirroring his brother’s posthumous achievement at the battle of Loos in the Great War, while others in the battalion received the DSO, DCM, MC and seven Military Medals. One recent history of El Alamein regards the gallantry on Snipe as one of the turning points of the battle, because it convinced Rommel that Kidney Ridge was the true Schwerpunkt, whereas Montgomery had in fact already turned his attentions further north in his desire to find a place for his armour to punch through the Axis lines. The British commander also knew that the coastal road and railway line in the north composed both Rommel’s supply lines and his sole route of retreat.
Up in the north, the 9th Australian Division had already suffered more than a thousand casualties – only half of 51st Highland Division’s losses, but twice those of the entire X Corps – yet it had succeeded in establishing what in military parlance was called a ‘thumb’ across the railway line and towards the sea, and was hoping thereby to trap Theodor Count von Sponeck’s 90th Light Division and the 164th Saxon Division with their backs to the sea.35 It was a success that Montgomery wanted to capitalize upon, and to protect against which Rommel was forced to send badly stretched Panzer reinforcements from the Kidney Ridge area. This move was necessary, but it both used up precious petrol and exposed the German armour – the most vulnerable part of any tank was its roof – to DAF attack once it had been spotted by aerial reconnaissance. ‘No one can conceive the extent of our anxiety during this period,’ Rommel later wrote:
That night I hardly slept and by 03.00 hours [on 29 October] was pacing up and down turning over in my mind the likely course of the battle, and the decisions I might have to take. It seemed doubtful whether we could stand up much longer to attacks of the weight which the British were now making, and which they were in any case still able to increase. It was obvious to me that I dared not await the decisive breakthrough, but would have to pull out to the west before it came.36
Nonetheless, Rommel decided ‘to make one more attempt, by the tenacity and stubbornness of our defence, to persuade the enemy to call off his attack’. If it failed, he would order a general withdrawal to the town of Fuka, but he recognized that that would probably involve the loss of much of his non-motorized infantry, who were fighting at close quarters and had no means of escape. Meanwhile, Leese sent Royal Artillery 6-pounder anti-tank guns over to the Australians to try to help deal with the Panzers. Nothing could be afforded from the reserve, and no fewer than twenty-two of the thirty Valentine tanks that were also sent were destroyed with comparative ease. Sherman tanks, with 75mm guns in their turrets which were able to traverse 360 degrees, and Grant tanks might have made the difference, but they could not be spared.
Instead, Montgomery withdrew some of the heavy tanks from further south and ended the coastal thrust, bringing Operation Lightfoot to an end on 29 October. This caused immense consternation in London, where Anthony Eden persuaded Churchill that Montgomery was giving up the fight only halfway through. Calling Brooke out of a Chiefs of Staff meeting, the Prime Minister berated ‘your’ Montgomery for fighting ‘a half-hearted battle’, asking ‘Had we not got a single general who could even win one single battle?’ Brooke defended his protégé and was supported by the South African premier Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts in protecting the man on the spot against the Whitehall strategists, and a row broke out in which harsh words were said on both sides. Privately, however, Brooke admitted that he had:
my own doubts and my own anxieties as to the course of events, but these had to be kept entirely to myself. On returning to my office I paced up and down, suffering from a desperate feeling of loneliness… there was still just the possibility that I was wrong and that Monty was beat. The loneliness of those moments of anxiety, when there is no one one can turn to, have to be lived through to realize their intense bitterness.37
Far from being ‘beat’, the Eighth Army commander, ending Lightfoot and the coastal approach, on the night of 1 November launched Operation Supercharge, under the command of Freyberg. Montgomery withdrew one brigade from each of the 44th, 50th and 51st Divisions for the assault, to be directed to the south of Kidney Ridge, largely against the Italian infantry. Once they had made the initial breakthrough, it was hoped that the 1st Armoured Division would debouch through the gap with its 39 Grant, 113 Sherman and 119 Crusader tanks, cross the north–south Rahman Track and engage the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions to the west of it. The 15th Panzer Division was down to fifty-one tanks by this time and the 21st had only forty-four. By the time Supercharge took place, the Axis line was almost completely denuded of armoured and motorized reserves, with General Francesco Arena’s armoured Ariete Division and General Francesco La Ferla’s motorized Trieste Division now fully occupied against Leese’s XXX Corps. The breakthrough moment had finally come.
After a short preliminary bombardment from 01.05 on 2 November, Supercharge went into operation. The Durham Brigade of the 50th Infantry Division, the battalions of Seaforth and Cameron Highlanders and a battalion of Maoris from the 2nd New Zealand Division captured all their objectives by 06.15, punching a 4-mile-wide gap in the Axis line beyond Kidney Ridge and almost up to the Rahman Track. The 9th Armoured Brigade, comprising the 3rd Hussars, the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry and the Warwickshire Yeomanry, then poured through the gaps in the Axis line. When the commanding officer of the 3rd Hussars, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Peter Farquhar, had told Montgomery that Supercharge would be ‘suicide’, Montgomery did not disagree, saying, ‘If necessary, I�
�m prepared to accept 100% casualties in both personnel and tanks’ in order to break through. Farquhar, a sixth baronet who was to be wounded thrice in the war and win the DSO and bar, took these kamikaze orders with commendable sangfroid. He later recalled: ‘There was, of course, no more to be said.’38 Overall, however, Montgomery husbanded the lives of his men extremely carefully, indeed to the point that he is often criticized for over-caution. ‘Casualties are inevitable in war,’ he would say, ‘but unnecessary casualties are unforgivable.’39
Rommel’s movement of German motorized and armoured units north to deal with the Australians, while it did limit Morshead’s successes near the coast, also meant that the ‘corset’ system started to break down, leaving Supercharge with a superb opportunity in the Italian sector near Kidney Ridge. Of Rommel’s concern about losing the coastal road, Montgomery wrote in 1958, ‘He concentrated his Germans in the north to meet it, leaving the Italians to hold his southern flank. We then drove in a hard blow between the Germans and the Italians, with a good overlap on the Italian front.’40 Because he had the invaluable advantage of being able to read Rommel’s Enigma communications, Montgomery knew how short the Germans were of men, ammunition, food and above all fuel. When he put Rommel’s picture up in his caravan he wanted to be seen to be almost reading his opponent’s mind. In fact he was reading his mail. Rommel might have tried to ‘persuade the enemy to call off his attack’, but in reality that was never going to happen, whatever he hoped and Churchill and Eden feared. Otherwise Rommel fought the battle of El Alamein without mistakes, except insofar as he fought there at all. By the end of 2 November, despite spirited German counter-attacks and a thoroughgoing reorganization of new defensive positions, Rommel was persuaded by Thoma that air attacks, fuel shortages and the absence of reserves meant that withdrawal to Fuka was now unavoidable, and he prepared to give the order to retreat.
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 36
