by Peter Albano
Tactically, he was in a good position. To the north, a five-hundred-foot escarpment dropped to the sandy strip bordering the sea. Here, the Fourth Australian Division was dug in, backed by batteries of heavy artillery. Rommel would not strike there. A feint, perhaps, but not a full-blown offensive. No. He would seek the high plain of the Western Desert.
Lloyd’s southern flank was formidable, too. The Northumberland Fusiliers were dug in with thirty-eight of the vicious new six-pounder antitank guns. First coming into action at Sollum, a single battery had destroyed four Panzer Ills and two Panzer IVs in six minutes. Supporting the entire front on the plateau were two brigades of Matildas and divisional artillery of eight batteries of’ twenty-five-pounders and four of six-pounders. In the plain fronting the ridge, hundreds of antitank mines had been sown. The defenses were formidable, but all that was needed in the desert war was a crack in the line and the motorized enemy could pour through, making chaos of the best planned defenses. Nothing demoralized a soldier more than knowing the enemy was in his rear. This had happened to both sides numerous times. And there was nothing between Lloyd’s line and Alexandria except partially completed defenses at El Alamein. Both Alexandria and Cairo would fall if the Bir Fuad line broke. But at the moment, the desert was deceptively peaceful.
Lloyd swept his glasses over the terrain. He found nothing but the usual dun-colored expanse strewn with boulders and sharp pebbles with occasional camel’s thorn bushes pushing up through the wasteland. Although it could play havoc with tank treads and truck springs and axles, Lloyd had found crossing it was fairly simple. The biggest problem tankers and truck drivers faced was climbing the escarpment from the sea. Wheeled and tracked vehicles could only find a few passable routes up the cliffs. Lloyd’s guns were “zeroed in” at the head of a wadi (dry streambed) where a trail snaked up the slope at a point where the cliffs made a sharp turn to the south and for a short distance actually ran in a north-south direction.
Lloyd chuckled to himself laconically. This was an excellent place to fight a war. You could hurt nothing except your enemy.
Lloyd had fought here since 1940 and quickly learned a man had to adapt to the desert or it would kill him before the enemy. A man developed a “desert sense” that told him to never try to tamper with this formidable environment but to use it or avoid its traps if he could. The desert set the pace, dictated direction, and planned the pattern. A wasteland devoid of almost all life except a few bedouin nomads, it was infested with poisonous scorpions, snakes, and clouds of flies that forced a man to eat under a net, a closely secured tent, or in a battened-down tank. Vegetation was scarce, only the scrubby, prickly camel’s thorn could grow here. Without distinctive landmarks, traversing it was like sailing on an uncharted ocean. Tank commanders constantly steered by sun, compass, and stars. Days were unbearably hot, nights cold, and the weather unpredictable, wind storms striking without warning.
Sometimes with a velocity of a hundred miles an hour, the hot southerly khamsin shrieked out of the Sahara like a host of ravening furies. Driving impenetrable clouds of dust as fine as chalk, it clogged rifle bolts, artillery breeches, and carburetors. Men gagged on the chalky drift and it inflamed their eyes. It seeped into vehicles and tents, buried stores, and reduced visibility to zero. It could send temperatures soaring by forty degrees, overturn trucks, and whisk telephone poles from the ground. Cyclones of madly whirling dust generated electricity that sent compass needles spinning crazily. Once, an electrical discharge from a storm near the Gazala line ignited an ammunition dump.
The desert was a deceiver. On clear days mirages played magical tricks with a man’s vision and imagination, deluding newcomers into believing they were approaching trees and pools of water. Every item a man needed to survive had to be trucked in. The temperature fluctuations were unbelievable. A man could suffer sunstroke at noon and then shiver with cold at night. Swings in temperature of sixty degrees in a single day were not uncommon. The desert forgave nothing. A mistake in rations, a mechanical breakdown, a misread, compass, could lead to slow, horrible death.
Browns, yellows, and grays were its dominant colors. The Desert Force learned to take these colors for its camouflage. With practically no roads, the army shod its vehicles with giant balloon tires. The desert yielded water reluctantly, and then, when given, it was usually brackish. Generals and privates in forward positions learned to subsist on a gallon of water a day. The hot sands and desolate terrain could not be subdued or made livable. Instead, the troops became primitive and nomadic—truly creatures of the desert—and this is how they fought.
When Lloyd had first arrived, there were only Italians to oppose the British and victories were ridiculously cheap. The Italians had a proclivity for doing the wrong thing. Without adequate armor or transport, armed with cannons and rifles dating to the nineteenth century, the Italian army, at Mussolini’s insistence, invaded Egypt and penetrated sixty miles before stopping. The halt was called at the coastal settlement of Sidi Barrani. Lloyd remembered his disappointment when his brigade was pulled back eighty miles to the miserable fishermen’s village of Mersa Matruh. “When are we going to boff the Eyties?” he heard the troops grumble.
It had been a long wait. The Italians were unwilling to penetrate farther into Egypt. Instead, they fanned out from Sidi Barrani, building a semicircle of seven defensive camps. Here they rested, loafed, doused themselves with exotic colognes, built officers’ clubs, drank Frascati wines from engraved glasses, and quickly tired of their lot. Settled in comfortable boredom and hoping for a static war, the Italians refused to accommodate to the desert. They were prepared for the siege-like warfare of the Great War. They were one war behind.
At the same time Lloyd’s men were fed a spartan diet of corned-beef stew—a brown concoction the men called “Mussolini’s arse”—canned fruits, and strong sweet tea. The new Matilda II tanks, lorries, artillery, and Bren carriers began to arrive in large numbers. Training was rigorous, drills and maneuvers held continuously. The polyglot force of Englishmen, Ulstermen, Highlanders, Sikhs, Pathans, South Africans, and Hindus was welded into a superbly trained desert striking force. By December of 1940, the Western Desert Force was primed and ready.
Carelessly, the Italians had left a fifteen-mile unguarded gap between two of the seven outposts they had set up as a shield for Sidi Barrani. The two camps were Nibeiwa, which was south of Sidi Barrani, and Rabia, sited on the escarpment to the southwest. The fortified sides of all the camps faced Egypt. The British were quick to see that if a force could penetrate the Nibeiwa-Rabia gap, it could push to the rear of the Italian positions, wheel, and attack from the undefended rear. Lloyd’s brigade was given the job of spearheading the penetration.
With his tanks spaced two-hundred-yards apart and on a two-thousand-yard front, Lloyd’s brigade had finally moved out on December seventh. The Fourth Indian Division and the Seventh Armored followed. It took two days to travel the seventy-five miles before engaging the enemy. Not a single Italian aircraft was spotted, not one patrol crossed his track. Finally, on the morning of December 9, well behind the Italian works at Nibeiwa, Lloyd and his men breakfasted on canned bacon and hot tea topped off with a dram of rum—“battle rum,” the men called it. Then, standing in the hatch, the brigadier waved his Matildas forward.
Lloyd would never forget that moment. Closing on the camp, he had actually smelled hot coffee and rolls; the Italians were fixing breakfast. They never ate it. Bren carriers shot their sentries out of their towers. Then Lloyd heard the skirling sound of bagpipes behind him as Cameron Highlander infantry charged behind his tanks. At this moment, he discovered all the Italians were not asleep. Thirty tanks clanked around the southern perimeter of the camp and in a ragged line advanced on the Fourth Armored Brigade.
This had been Lloyd’s first tank-to-tank combat. The enemy armor was a regiment of Ansaldo CA/13 tanks. Slow, poorly armored, and mounting a forty-seven-millimeter gun, the CA/13 w
as no match for Lloyd’s Matilda II with its superior speed, armor, and hitting power. Within minutes, the Italian tanks were shot into smoking scrap iron and the British smashed into the camp. The outpost fell in less than three hours and two thousand prisoners were taken. The rout was on.
Two days later, Lloyd led the Fourth Armored Brigade into Sidi Barrani. The advance had been so swift, the streets were still smoking from the preliminary naval bombardment. The advance continued relentlessly. Sollum and Halfaya Pass fell and the attack swept into Libya where Fort Capuzzo and Sidi Omar were taken. Thousands surrendered, sometimes entire divisions lay down their arms. And sometimes, stubborn men fought bravely.
Near Bardia, Lloyd crossed a battlefield fourteen miles wide, strewn with the debris of war. He would never erase the horror of that scene from his mind. The mix of dead vehicles and men made it seem worse than anything he had ever seen on the Somme. Every rise was littered with shattered, burned-out armor and wrecked field guns. Lying singly and in heaps, the dead were everywhere. Most of those who had died instantaneously had the “thrown rag doll” look to their posture—limp, casual, as if they were sleeping. Others had their arms and legs thrown out stiffly as if they had been staked to the desert floor by savages. Those who had died slowly suffered the usual muscle spasms, drawing up their legs and arms into the fetal position. Pain had clenched their fists and they remained balled even in death. Blankets of flies covered them, crawling into eyes, nostrils, and wounds where thousands of maggots boiled in a feeding frenzy. In the heat of the desert, the ghastly smell of death was overpowering, coating the back of Lloyd’s throat and the roof of his mouth. Lloyd actually learned to prefer smoke and had his driver steer for it until clear of the killing ground. Burial parties wore gas masks.
It was here, outside Bardia in the carnage of that field, that the lesson of a battle’s killing ground had been driven home. In France, Lloyd had found it at the receiving end of a bombardment or when advancing on enemy strong points with well-sighted machine-gun posts. Here, in the desert, it was the armor. Tanks were the most feared weapon, tanks attracted the fire, tanks took the killing ground with them. They killed and were killed in the greatest numbers. He could not fault infantry for shirking operations close to his brigade. “Bloody artillery magnets,” the infantry grumbled.
Tobruk, Mechili, Benghazi fell. By February of 1941, the remnants of the Italian Army had pulled back to Tripoli and the British advance stopped 350 miles to the east at El Agheila. “Greece, Greece,” began to be whispered. “They’re going to ship us to Greece,” raced through the army. The rumor had been accurate. Lloyd’s brigade was pulled back and the Desert Army was stripped of some of its best units. Then came Rommel to fill the vacuum and the nightmare began.
Lloyd dropped his glasses impatiently and fingered the five-channel selector of his radio. He disliked running his radio and his hydraulic systems off of his two batteries. But his six-hundred-watt generator was noisy and gave off its own haze of blue smoke. Nineteen generators would give them away even to an Italian patrol.
The air was still, shimmering here and there with layers of rising heat. Nothing moved. Not a bush. Not a bird. He thumped the armor of the turret with a clenched fist. “Where are the Jerries?” he muttered to himself.
He had learned long ago that boredom was never in short supply in the desert. He had expected to hear the fly like drone of a German Fieseler Storch spotter plane by now. But the desert was silent except for the humming of insects. Then he heard another humming. He cocked his ear to the hatch. His young assistant gunner and radioman. Private Touhy Murphy, a cockney from London’s East End, was humming “Lili Marlene.” No doubt, in his boredom, he had tuned in Radio Belgrade and was listening to the favorite singer of all lighting men in North Africa—the silken, sexy-voiced Lale Anderson. The fact that Anderson was German made no difference to the British. She had a lovely, plaintive voice. She was a woman and they needed women. That was all that mattered.
As tradition dictated, Private Murphy was a true cockney born within the sound of the bells of London’s Saint Mary-le-Bow. His crib and playpen had been a grime-coated tenement in a foul industrial pocket known as “The Isle of Dogs.” Descending from Irish refugees of the potato famine, his father had been a “barrow boy,” vending fruit on the streets. Growing up in the gutters where he fought with other boys for scraps of garbage, young Touhy had grown into a tough, burly young man. The vicious battle for survival had given Murphy a spark of independence Lloyd had never seen before. He was a nonconformist and a maverick who adapted to army discipline reluctantly and sometimes violently. However, with quick intelligence and an unshakable faith in his country, he was the best loader and radioman Lloyd had ever known. In an emergency, Private Touhy Murphy was equally adept as a gunner.
Lloyd’s gunner was Lance Corporal Paul Dempster, a squat, husky, twenty-year-old lad from Teel on the Isle of Man. Paul’s father had been a fisherman. The cold, wind-swept Irish Sea was an inhospitable place for fishermen and those who plied their trade were very hearty souls, indeed. Paul had begun his career in the boat when only eight years old. The hard work, danger, and constant battle with the elements had strengthened his body and toughened his spirit. Dempster’s cold brown eyes were like natural range finders. He was a dead shot with an uncanny knack for calculating range and deflection. He never fired a ranging shot; every round was fired for effect. Glancing down into the turret.
Lloyd could see the brown-headed gunner leaning over the weapon, stroking the breech as if he were preparing a woman for a round of lovemaking.
Ahead of the gunner and below him in the center of the hull sat the driver. Sergeant Colby Powell, He was second-in-command to Lloyd. Tall, slender, and blond, Powell was a former draftsman with an architectural firm in Stoke Fleming, Devon. Taciturn and with a wry sense of humor, he contrasted with the boisterousness of the gunner and radioman. Thirty-five years old, he was referred to as “Daddy” by Murphy and Dempster. Lloyd assumed they referred to him as “Granddaddy” whenever he was out of earshot. A close-knit group, Lloyd felt he had the best crew in the Eighth Army.
Sometimes, he felt they were too close. On infrequent liberties in Cairo, while Lloyd spent his time in “officer country” at the Continental Hotel or at Shepheard’s, Dempster, Murphy, and Powell invariably frequented Cairo’s lowest dives. Their favorite was the Melody Club where the band was protected from brawling patrons by barbed wire. Here the fabled belly dancer Hekmet performed. The acrobatic undulations of her hips frequently started riots among the sex-starved young men. The last time his crew visited the place, they had thrown three Argyles into the barbed wire, smashed the bar with the head of a Northumberland Fusilier, and had to be subdued by a dozen club-wielding military policemen. Only by begging and threatening was Lloyd able to obtain their release from gaol.
The expected buzz came and the humming in the tank ceased. It rose over the escarpment like a big brown wasp. A Storch observation plane flying at the usual low altitude. Anxiously Lloyd fingered his binoculars but dared not bring them to his eyes. A glint of reflected sun was all that was needed to give away the whole show. He glanced down the line of tanks. Netting had been pulled over the rear of their hulls and camel’s thorn woven in. Sprigs were even stuck into the pierced barrel casing of his Besa machine gun. Bloody lessons had taught them to sweep away all tracks behind tanks and vehicles. They were ready, as ready as they would ever be, and beautifully camouflaged.
He held his breath as the little plane flew not a thousand feet directly overhead and then to his rear. The German had guts. He would be target practice for a fighter. But, of course, the Desert Air Force was nowhere to be seen. Lazily, like a dragonfly over the Kentish downs on a hot summer’s day, the Storch turned to the south and then made a wide sweep to the west. In a few minutes it vanished in the distant haze.
Lloyd heard Murphy’s voice on the intercom, “Do you ‘spect them bloody buggers sa
w us, Gen’ral ‘iggins?”
Lloyd answered honestly, “I haven’t the foggiest. But we’ll know straightaway, if the Stukas pay us a visit.”
Dempster’s voice: “Don’t send ‘em an engraved invitation, sir.”
Powell spoke: “I had enough of that lot at Fort Capuzzo.”
Lloyd remembered the horror just outside the old Italian outpost. Eight Matildas and their crews had been blown to pieces by a squadron of JU 87 Stukas, with one-thousand-pound bombs. The attack had taken only three minutes and left nothing but huge craters and bits of smoking metal and flesh. The brigadier shuddered.
Something new on the horizon brought Lloyd’s glasses to his eyes. Dust rising from below the escarpment. Vehicles were crawling up the wadi. He keyed the intercom, forced a jovial timbre in his voice that concealed the anxiety he felt. “Pull up your drawers, lads. The curtain’s about to go up on the first act. You’ll get more action than Hekmet’s navel on Saturday night.”
“I’ll take Hekmet, sir,” Dempster said. Murphy and Powell chuckled.
Lloyd dared not broadcast the sighting. He had imposed strict radio silence until the enemy was engaged. Instead, he looked to both sides, pointed, and pumped a fist two times over his head. The gesture was repeated by every tank commander. Higgins grunted with satisfaction. He said to Murphy, “Loader, load with APC (armor piercing capped).” Lloyd heard the clang of metal on metal as a two-pound projectile was pushed into the breech and locked into the firing chamber. “Driver, stand by to start engines and generator.”
