by Tom Carver
“That is because they have thrown them away,” Hitler taunted a few minutes later. The telegrams travelled back and forth, silently monitored by the eavesdroppers of Bletchley. That night, ignoring his Führer’s order to fight to the death, Rommel told his commanders to start pulling back along the road alog which they had advanced so swiftly a few months before.
“I envy the dead,” Rommel wrote in his diary, “for them it is all over.”
On 4th November General von Thoma, commander of the German armoured corps, jumped on top of one of his tanks and drove into the centre of the battle to assess the situation. Von Thoma had survived the bloody Battle of Verdun in the First World War and had led the first Nazi troops into Poland. He was a man known for his icy demeanour, yet he was realistic.
For two days it had been clear to him that they were beaten: his troops were under constant attack from the air and were being attacked by wave after wave of fresh British forces that Monty had held in reserve; there was hardly any petrol and he had lost 500 of his 600 tanks.
At the top of the little hill of Tel el Mampsra his tank took a direct hit. The German general got out and stood calmly beside the wreckage. All around him lay the bodies of his soldiers and a sea of burning vehicles. Sieg oder Tod. Twenty minutes later, a passing British captain in the 10th Hussars arrested him and took him back to Monty’s headquarters.
As Monty emerged from his caravan, von Thoma saluted and offered his surrender. Making sure there was an official photographer on hand to capture the moment, Monty then invited the German general to dinner. Once the meal was cleared away, Monty lay out on the white tablecloth the situation as he saw it using the salt and pepper as his forces. Von Thoma was surprised by how much Monty knew about the positions of the German forces. Monty told him that the British forces had reached the town of Fuka.
Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum London
The surrender of General Wilhelm von Thoma, on 4th November 1942
“Sehr kritisch, wirklich sehr kritisch (That’s critical, very critical),” the German general kept saying. But it wasn’t true. Monty was bluffing.
That evening, Monty gave his generals new orders. Rommel might be retreating but he was still free and most of his forces were intact. Monty knew that this would be no more than a temporary victory if he allowed Rommel to escape and fight on.
His plan was to get 30th Corps to race through the night across the desert to get to Fuka before Rommel and block his exit – thereby making his comment to von Thoma come true. This would trap Rommel’s army on a 40-mile stretch of the coast road.
“We will block the bottle,” Monty declared. Once that had happened, General Lumsden and his Corps de Chasse would be offered the chance to redeem themselves by sweeping in from the desert to crush the German forces against the anvil of the sea.
As his stepfather sketched out his battle plan on the sand, Richard stood in the background among the sand dunes facing the sea with the other liaison officers and the intelligence majors, listening to him. He was excited at the prospect of advancing. Suddenly there was a rattle of a machine gun nearby. Thinking it was a Messerschmitt, the generals and the junior officers dived under their vehicles, but it turned out to be the British tank gunner on sentry duty down the beach. He had opened fire at a flock of teal ducks heading down the coast. Several of the birds fell nearby and Monty’s cook collected them and served them to the generals for dinner.
It had been three years since the Second World War had begun and in Britain, people had grown used to an unending diet of bad news – the fall of Poland, the collapse of Belgium and Holland, the retreat from Dunkirk, the occupation of Paris, the fall of Singapore – but on 5th November they woke to unaccustomed headlines on the radio and in the newspapers.
“AXIS FORCES IN FULL RETREAT: OFFICIAL” proclaimed the Daily Telegraph. Churchill ordered church bells to be rung across the country. For the first time since the start of the war, it was the Germans who were on the run not the Allies, and there was no question that Hitler’s desert army had been defeated. “Before El Alamein, we never had a victory; after El Alamein we never had a defeat,” he later boasted. In America, news of the victory briefly pushed the presidential election off the front page.
That morning, the 5th, after giving von Thoma breakfast and waving him off into captivity, Monty called a press conference on the beach.
“The enemy is completely smashed,” he declared. “But we must not think that the party is over. We have no intention of letting the enemy recover. We must keep up the pressure. We intend to hit this chap for six out of North Africa.”
At first it looked like the Breakout plan might work; the first radio reports suggested the advancing forces could see the lights of the town of Fuka. But the reports turned out to be wrong. In the chaos of the previous night an entire division had stopped for several hours instead of racing forward and elsewhere hundreds of tanks, confused by the maze of minefields and dummy minefields and drained by two weeks of fighting, turned east inside of west.
Lumsden failed to keep in regular contact once more and again, Monty had little idea where he was. By the time his 10th Corps had reached the coastal road, Rommel had already passed. A few hours later, the Ultra intercepts arrived, showing that Rommel had reached Fuka without any serious difficulties. He had slipped through the net.
“It was a wild helter-skelter drive through another pitch black night,” Rommel wrote in his diary.
Over the weeks, the headquarters at Burg-el-Arab had turned into a sprawling Bedouin-like encampment amid the sand dunes between the coastal road and the sea. The site consisted of about 40 vehicles which were spread out over the sand dunes to minimise the casualties in the event of an air attack. Each clump of vehicles was drawn up in a square, providing a protected area in the middle to work in. The maps of the battle were hung on the outsides of the vehicles and a camouflage net was thrown over the top to give protection from the sun and to disguise the vehicles from enemy aircraft. Monty’s two caravans stood off slightly to one side. Footpaths had been worn in the sand from the tactical HQ to the main HQ to the mess tents and down to the latrines which sat on the beach facing out to sea.
Richard was an ops officer in the headquarters. After only three weeks in the desert he was still a greenhorn, very conscious that there were men all around him who had retreated with the Eighth Army all the way from Tunis, enduring defeat after defeat at the hands of Rommel. He could see that for them this battle was personal and that they were determined to get revenge.
Throughout the battle of El Alamein he helped to keep the headquarters operating: organising briefings, updating the maps, fetching commanders, getting intelligence delivered to the forward positions, and helping with the logistics of the “village”. The days of the battle passed in a blur of stress, orders, counter-orders and frayed tempers, all accompanied by the terror of “messing up”.
At the height of the battle, the headquarters was in the middle of the artillery lines. Some of the guns were in front, others were behind firing over their heads. For two days and nights the noise of the barrage from the “25-pounders” had made sleep impossible. Eventually the tide of battle turned in their favour, the guns were moved forward and the sound of the radios and the generators returned once more.
As a captain in the front line Richard would have had no more than 100 men to look after. Yet here he was surrounded by generals responsible for tens of thousands of lives and millions of tons of equipment – Leese, Freyberg, Gatehouse, Lumsden – all coming back and forth to receive their orders.
They would drive their scout cars into the encampment and jump out, accompanied by their ADC and intelligence officer, their faces drained by lack of sleep, their tank goggles and uniforms coated in thick dust and vehicle grease. Richard saw his stepfather almost every day at meetings and briefings, but Monty was careful not to treat Richard any differently from any of the other young officers.
As the advance progr
essed, the tension began to ease slightly at the headquarters. The danger of being overrun or bombed by the Germans diminished and in their spare moments, Richard and the others sat on the beach smoking and reliving what they had just gone through. They felt sure that this was a moment that would be talked about for generations and taught in British history.
Richard was there the day that Monty, frustrated by Lumsden’s unreliable behaviour, pulled him out of the front line and ordered him back to base. When Lumsden arrived, he was told to report immediately to Monty’s caravan. A shouting match ensued, with Lumsden arguing that it was the army commander’s job to visit his commanders in the field not the other way round. The exchange could be heard outside by Richard and the others. Some of the headquarters officers who had worked in the City before the war had created an informal “stock exchange” chart showing the fortunes of each of the field commanders like shares.
“Sell Lumsdens,” someone said.
His stock was marked down to the bottom of the chart. Lumsden walked out of Monty’s caravan and noticed the board in the command post. Lifting the cover from it which read “Most Secret”, Lumsden saw that his stock had plummeted.
4.
IF MONTY COULD not sack Lumsden, he could at least keep a much closer eye on him. So he decided to move his headquarters up as close to the front line as possible. On 5th November, he ordered Richard to take a staff car and drive 60 miles forward to Daba, to reconnoitre a new position for the headquarters. Richard travelled blithely up the coast road in an open car without any armoured protection, accompanied by his driver with a sten gun. Only 48 hours before, thousands of German troops had been dug in all along the road. Richard stared in awe at the detritus of a defeated army that was strewn across the desert – discarded helmets, guns, tents, tanks and artillery guns still smouldering with the occasional charred bodies of the crew. It was his first sight of how ferocious the battle had been.
Most of the Allied forces were ten miles south in the desert, attempting to outflank the Germans. The road was clogged with fuel trucks, mess wagons, tank recovery vehicles, ambulances and ammunition wagons all rumbling slowly forward, trying to keep pace with the advance. Richard waved at each convoy as they overtook – it felt good to be part of a victorious army.
At Daba, he chose a site that looked much like Burg-el-Arab, between the road and the coast. As he walked across the dunes looking for a flat piece of ground, he was startled to discover that the enemy was still there. He wrote in his green leather notebook:
There were still Italians in trenches and dugouts among the sand dunes who came out and gave themselves up quite readily. I sent about 200 back to the road under our own military police. They were a miserable looking lot and I felt contemptuous rather than sorry for them.
As he drove back through the moonless night, passing the convoys going the other way, their lights dimmed, Richard could not have imagined that 36 hours later he himself would be a prisoner. At the headquarters, he gathered together the small collection of vehicles that made up Monty’s tactical or forward HQ, including the General’s two caravans, and led them patiently back down the road to Daba. It was dawn on the morning of the 6th before he had guided them into place.
Monty awoke on the morning of the 6th to discover that once again his forces had failed to trap the Desert Fox. He was told that several of his divisions had halted to rest overnight. A mixture of exhaustion and lethargy was creeping in – by now every soldier in the Eighth Army knew that they had won and that Rommel was in retreat. The incentive to fight was less critical. Monty’s order to “move by night and fight by day” was clearly not being followed.
On top of that, the constant changing of objectives was causing confusion among the units, which were hampered further by the growing distances that made radio communication difficult. They had advanced more than 60 miles since El Alamein. The Sherman tanks donated by the Americans consumed a gallon of fuel every three miles and were starting to run out of petrol. Monty began to fear that his orderly annihilation of Rommel’s forces was turning into a disorderly rout. He was trying to “plug the bath”, as he called it, but each time he ordered his forces to lunge forward, Rommel managed to move quicker.
Lumsden’s new orders had been to secure the ancient Ptolemaic port of Mersa Matruh that was on both the road and the railway line that ran along the coast. If the British could get there before Rommel, they could separate the German army from its supply lines. But according to intelligence sources, Rommel had reached the port and was already hungrily emptying the quay of supplies as well as the couple of ships that had evaded the Allied blockade in the Mediterranean.
Monty arrived at Daba and approved the new position for his headquarters that Richard had found, before driving further on up the coast road to get to the “tip of the spear”. When he eventually reached the forward positions of his army, Monty could see groups of Allied tanks halted in the desert. He asked why they were not advancing and was told that some were waiting for the fuel trucks to come through, while others had been delayed by a German anti-tank battery.
Around midday, the sky suddenly darkened and lightning started to flare over the sea. A cool wind began to whip up the sand and a few moments later the air was filled with the unfamiliar sound of raindrops pounding on the hard desert. The radio officer told Monty that the electricity in the air was playing havoc with the delicate crystal radio sets and that communication was becoming increasingly difficult.
Monty ordered all units to pass on a message to Lumsden to get in touch: COMMANDER 10 CORPS MUST MEET THE ARMY COMMANDER AT 835321 LATE AFTERNOON. Monty drove out in his staff car to the spot in the desert but Lumsden never showed up.
At the headquarters at Daba, Richard felt the first raindrops about the same time as Monty did. He hurried with everyone else to put the maps and radio equipment back into the armoured command vehicles. The meteorologists said that it would be a passing shower, but the rain kept coming down all afternoon. By about five o’clock, the RAF declared that they’d been forced to call off their bombing raids as their desert airstrip had become unusable. All around the battlefield, the desert had started to turn into grey mud.
Sheltering inside the mess tent that evening, Richard wrote in his notebook:
Nov 6th. Monty came back in the evening having been up in his tank to within 20 miles of Mersa Matruh…. Alex [General Harold Alexander, the commander-in-chief of Middle East forces], arrived about 9pm and I took him down to Monty’s caravan on the sea-shore; but Monty had already retired to bed and Alex refused to disturb him; but went off to his own caravan which I had put some distance away.
Monty wanted to keep on the move. Intelligence reports came through suggesting that Rommel was pulling out of Mersa Matruh. They seemed to confirm Monty’s suspicions that Rommel would use the cover of darkness to retreat west towards the Libyan border. Before turning in, he left orders for Richard to find a new location for the HQ another 60 miles further forward, beyond Mersa Matruh. As Richard noted:
He thought the Germans wouldn’t stop short of the Sollum escarpment and he ordered us to go up the following day and establish Army HQ the other side of Matruh.
Exhausted and hungry, Richard sat in the mess tent that evening of the 6th November listening to the rain. The command vehicles were up to their axles in mud. He couldn’t see how they could be moved.
Hugh Mainwaring [the head of the headquarters staff] told me I would have to take the Advance Party again, leaving at 0200am and he would come with me. My car had had a puncture and although my driver was pretty tired I made him repair it that night in the LO’s tent. We set off at 0200 after a little difficulty in contacting the remainder of the Advance Party.
It was raining heavily and in the dark we evidently passed through the two Armoured Divisions bogged down in the mud on either side of the road. Anyhow we saw very little on the road, except for the smouldering vehicles left by the Germans which we thought our Air forces had destroyed.
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br /> If it had been risky for Richard to have gone up to Daba the day before, it was considerably more hazardous for him to be travelling another 60 miles west – the place where Monty wanted Richard to position his new headquarters was further forward than his own divisional commanders. Monty was determined to show his commanders how to lead from the front; but he had only a sketchy idea how far down the road Rommel’s forces were and Richard’s was even vaguer.
The intelligence reports turned out to be wrong; Rommel decided to stay in Mersa Matruh overnight. Two officers, armed only with pistols, one of whom was the stepson of the man who had just shattered the Third Reich’s aura of invincibility, were driving towards 300,000 German soldiers.
About 7am we were held up by a flooded nala [a dry riverbed] but I managed to get my car across with the help of an RAF tender… We inspected a possible site near the Bagush turning and then went on about half a mile until we came to another flooded nala. I was driving and as we dipped down into this nala I saw a truck drawn up on the left of the road with Germans in it. At first I thought they were our prisoners; but they shouted at us to stop and turned their guns on us and then I realised that we were caught.
It was a terrible moment, possibly the worst in my life – that awful sinking feeling as one realised that one had been captured and there was nothing one could do about it. I couldn’t drive on as the nala had water in it and there was another German truck approaching from the other side and of course I couldn’t turn around. In a couple of seconds some Germans had jumped out of their truck and were waving pistols in our faces and shouting at us to get out. There was nothing for it but to comply.
I made an effort to get my coat out of the back of the car but they wouldn’t let me, saying something about the car following. We were pushed into the back of an open eight-seater and at once drove off with a big ugly-looking lieutenant standing facing us, leaning against the windscreen with a pistol in his hand. We drove back at great speed; I had no greatcoat and felt pretty cold though mercifully I was wearing my battledress. All the time I was weighing up in my mind what were the chances of making a successful getaway then as against the possibility of being re-captured or the chances of escaping later on.
