Having taken Deir el Shein, it seemed evident that Rommel would swing at the South African Division blocking the Alamein railway station and coastal road to Alexandria. Axis radio addressed a message to the ‘Ladies of Alexandria’, asking them to make appropriate arrangements for the reception of the victors. Auchinleck was not amused. That night he decided on a diversionary counter-attack. The 13th Corps was ordered to wheel north and hit the flank and rear of the Germans, while the 30th Corps checked their advance towards the north and east.10 On the afternoon of 2 July, the 13th Corps began its attack with the New Zealand and the 5th Indian Divisions. The Indian division was, in fact, under the command of the 30th Corps – its allotment to the 13th Corps for the offensive was characteristic of the game of Chinese checkers played in the Eighth Army. Amply supported from the air, the advance initially made good headway. By 5 July, the 13th Corps stood at touching distance from Deir el Shein. There they came up against a series of strongpoints prepared and held by the enemy and soon the corps’ advance juddered to a halt.
Auchinleck was unwilling to hand the initiative to Rommel. So he ordered the 30th Corps to open a new offensive in the coastal area. This was the first of a series of jabs at the Axis forces that he attempted in the weeks ahead, but to little avail. The 5th Indian Division played its part in some significant operations. On the night of 14 July, the division’s 5th Indian Infantry Brigade, along with the New Zealanders, attacked in the centre – in front of the Ruweisat ridge. The Indian brigade captured Point 64, a tactically important feature overlooking Deir el Shein and areas to its north; the New Zealanders took a position to the west of Point 64, but were overrun by Axis tanks on the afternoon of 16 July, leaving the 5th Indian Brigade dangerously exposed. Throughout the day, Stukas dived in to bomb the defences and artillery fire poured in. Even as the brigade was reinforced by armour, artillery and anti-tank guns, the Panzers counter-attacked. However, this time the Panzers were stopped in their tracks and forced to report that they could go no further. When the tanks returned after dusk, they ran into an ambush laid by the 4/6th Rajputana Rifles. The brigade netted a haul of twenty-four tanks, six armoured cars, eighteen anti-tank guns, six 88mm guns and one self-propelled gun.11
Be that as it may, tactical defensive victories could not compensate for the Eighth Army’s overall operational weaknesses: the reliance on a line of boxes to hold territory; the farming out of divisions as brigade groups; the inability to conceive systematically of all-arms doctrine and tactics; the sheer fatigue and weariness of the troops; above all, Auchinleck’s inability to articulate his thinking to his senior commanders and to ensure that it percolated down the chain. By the end of July 1942, Auchinleck placed on hold his plans for destroying the Afrika Korps in front of Alamein and decided to stay on the defensive, awaiting reinforcements that were on their way.
Political leaders on both sides were fed up of the stalemate. Having waited in vain for three weeks, Mussolini flew back from Libya in a foul mood. On 3 August, Churchill arrived in Cairo. Auchinleck’s insipid briefing did not inspire much confidence in the prime minister. Convinced that the Eighth Army was a ‘baffled and somewhat unhinged organization’, Churchill decided that it needed new leadership.12 Auchinleck was divested of his duties – both as commander of the Eighth Army and the Middle East. However, he declined to accept Churchill’s offer of commanding the newly created Persia and Iraq Force (Paiforce). So, for the second time in as many years, a sacked commander-in-chief was sent from the Middle East to India.
After toying with a few options, Churchill appointed General Harold Alexander as the commander-in-chief of Middle East Command. Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery – not Churchill’s first choice – took over as commander of the Eighth Army. Montgomery was – and remains – a polarizing figure, evoking devotion and detestation in about equal measure. Critics point to his prima donna style and his resolute refusal to give any credit to Auchinleck. They underline the enormous material advantage enjoyed by the Eighth Army under his command. They also rightly identify his strength at the set-piece battle and his weakness at the pursuit. All said, however, Montgomery had qualities that set him apart from his predecessors. For one thing, he was completely self-confident and self-contained – impervious to the views of others but also preternaturally calm during crises. For another, he realized that the Eighth Army was much less than the sum of its parts and that his main task was infusing a sense of identity and purpose that it had hitherto lacked. Finally, Montgomery was acutely alert to the character of the troops he commanded: their limited training, the vagaries of morale and their unwillingness to be led by their noses into battle.13 Having spent three years in India between the wars, including a stint as instructor in the Staff College in Quetta, Montgomery – very like Wavell – understood the Indian army and its officer corps. At the same time, he shared at least some of the prejudices of senior British officers towards the ‘sepoy’ generals and their troops.
When Montgomery took command the Eighth Army was in the grip of a crisis of morale following the long retreat to Alamein. His approach and style came as a tonic to the demoralized force. He welded the Eighth Army together by banishing the invidious system of hiving off brigades from divisions. He communicated his aims clearly and forthrightly. He ensured that ‘formations and units were not given tasks which were likely to end in failure’ owing to the ‘low standard of training’. And he trained his divisions hard, focusing on toughening the troops with battle inoculation exercises, developing combined-arms battle drills and training under conditions as close as possible to actual combat. The effect of all this was perceptible. As the military censor noted:
the fact that the G.O.C-in-C., 8 Army, took the whole army into his confidence right down to the last man and stated exactly what he hoped to do and how he was going to do it, the belief that the plan was good, and the knowledge that the tools at their disposal were more numerous and effective than they have ever been, brought the spirit of the troops to a new high level and intensified their assurance and grim determination.14
Montgomery’s role in the resuscitation of the Eighth Army is well established; less clear, however, is his impact on the Indian troops under his command. Unfortunately, few letters from Indian soldiers of the Eighth Army have survived. Nor do the surviving fragments of military censor reports from this period throw much light on the state of their morale. Then again, the Indian units could not have been immune to the Eighth Army’s malaise. The fall of Tobruk had shaken the confidence of the Indian troops. Writing of the subsequent withdrawal, the official historian of the 5th Indian Division noted that its troops were among those ‘who had struggled in the bewilderment and butchery … who had fought a rear-guard action day after day … who had seen battalions decimated, brigades over-run, headquarters captured, armoured forces destroyed, transport hurrying towards Egypt’.15
Statistical evidence also suggests that the Indian soldiers’ morale – like that of British and Dominion troops – plummeted steeply during the withdrawal from Gazala to Alamein. There is a sharp rise in the percentage of those counted as ‘missing’ during this period. Barring a small fraction of those who might have been genuinely lost, the overwhelming number of those classified as missing were soldiers taken as prisoners of war. Put differently, the numbers ‘missing’ are a good proxy for the numbers surrendering to the enemy. To be sure, rates of surrender cannot automatically be read as an indicator of morale. Under the mobile conditions of desert warfare, infantry forces with limited anti-tank weaponry or armoured support could not hold their own for long when surrounded by enemy tanks. This was particularly true of the Indian units in the Eighth Army, which were plagued by deep deficiencies in their equipment.
Even so, the rates of missing/surrendered are astonishingly high during the long withdrawal from Gazala to Alamein: 95 per cent of the total casualties counted among Indian units in this period were those that had gone missing or who had surrendered. (The figures for British and Domini
on troops were 86 and 81 per cent resepectively.) By contrast, during the advance to Cyrenaica from November 1941 to February 1942, missing/surrendered accounted for only 23 per cent of the total casualties in Indian units. (The figures for British and Dominion units were 35 and 53 per cent.) Equally telling are the numbers of dead and wounded. Although two-and-a-half times more Indian troops fought during the withdrawal than in the advance, the numbers of killed or wounded in the former were only 20 per cent of those in the latter. Clearly, the problem of plunging morale in the Eighth Army afflicted the Indian forces as well.
Casualty Figures of Indian Troops in North Africa
Nov 1941 to Jan 1942 27 May 1942 to 24 Jul 1942
Strength engaged 19,000 48,000
Killed and wounded 1,000 600
Missing 300 13,000
Total casualties 1,300 13,600
% Killed and wounded 5% 1%
% Missing to total casualties 23% 95%
Source: Jonathan Fennell, Combat and Morale in the North African Campaign: The Eighth Army and the Path to EI Alamein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 42.
What about the restoration of morale after Montgomery took over? The 5th Indian Division’s historian wrote: ‘A new spirit went abroad through the Eighth Army. Hope sprang high. Fresh divisions and American tanks began to arrive. Morale rose all round.’ Yet the advent of Montgomery did not have an altogether salutary impact on the Indian troops. The lacklustre record of Auchinleck – the senior-most Indian army officer – as well as the Indian formations that had been plucked out of the Middle East cast a long shadow on Indian forces in North Africa. Francis Tuker felt that their performance had been ‘so disastrous and had so shattered the prestige of the I.A. [Indian Army] that it can never recover in this war … The name of Indian tps [troops] and Indian Divs stank in the nostrils of GHQ M.E.C. and they showed it too.’ General Alexander was not alone in looking askance at the Indian forces. Montgomery held them in no higher esteem. As Tuker wrote to General Alan Hartley, the deputy commander-in-chief of India, ‘Monty has not much use for the I.A. and used to say so: only thinks it now.’16 This could not have done much for the morale and self-esteem of the Indian units in the Eighth Army.
As Rommel squared up for another offensive, Montgomery made his moves deliberately. The 5th Indian Division’s historian noted that ‘there had been no hurry, no lack of co-ordination, no want of proper co-operation, such as had characterized many of the recent engagements’.17 The anticipated attack came late on the night of 30 August. Rommel threw the whole of the Afrika Korps as well as the Italian armoured divisions in a southerly swing on the Alam Halfa ridge. By contrast, the attacks on the northern and central sections of the Alamein Line were no more than mild jabs. On the Ruweisat ridge, held by the 5th Indian Division, a German parachute battalion overran a forward company, but were soon dislodged by a counter-attack with infantry and tanks. By the evening of 5 September, Rommel’s main offensive ran into the sand. For a heavy price of men, armour and vehicles, Rommel had gained little more than 5 miles in the desert. More importantly, he had lost the opportunity to destroy the Eighth Army before it was swelled by fresh reinforcements of troops and tanks. Montgomery forbore from further counter-attacks, choosing to bide his time before launching a major offensive.
Among the troops rotated out from the battle front was the worn-down 5th Indian Division, replaced by the 4th Indian Division. This division had been the most experienced infantry formation in North Africa and its dismantling in March 1942 was a sad commentary on the state of the Eighth Army under Auchinleck. The divisional commander, General Tuker, had requested that the division be reinforced by 4,000 troops from India and pulled out to ‘train on certain new lines as a result of its experience of last winter’s fighting’. Tuker had wanted the division to train as a whole and return to the front line in May 1942.18 In the teeth of his protests, however, the division was parcelled out in brigade groups.
The 7th Brigade had been sent to Cyprus in March. The rest of the division prepared to move in April to the Nile Delta for re-equipping and retraining. Tuker prepared detailed training instructions for the division to operate as a mobile formation alongside armoured forces. In the meantime, the 5th Brigade with the field artillery regiment was sent to Palestine. The 11th Brigade with the divisional headquarters landed in the combined training area without a single 2-pounder anti-tank gun. In May, this brigade was sent to Sollum and thence to Tobruk; half the divisional headquarters deployed near Cairo, and the other half – with the divisional commander – was despatched to conduct reconnaissance of defences in Cyprus. So frustrated was Tuker with the state of his division that he contemplated resigning in August. The Middle East Command, however, assured him that the division would be re-formed. As the battle of Alam Halfa raged on, the 4th Division waited in the wings.19
On 6 September, Tuker was asked to stand ready to replace the 5th Division. The 5th Brigade of his division had for some weeks been operating under the command of the 5th Division. Thus, when the 4th Division reached the Ruweisat ridge it was almost complete. Apart from the 5th and 7th Brigades, the division was allotted another vagrant, free-floating Indian formation: the 161st Indian Infantry Brigade. The division’s highly trained field artillery regiment, however, failed to fetch up for several months. Tuker expected Rommel’s next attack to be concentrated on the Ruweisat ridge. ‘It’s great news’, he wrote to General Hartley.20
Tuker believed that the newly positioned 4th Division ‘must be the pivot on which our [counter]attack revolves’. After taking over Ruweisat on 9 September, he ‘worked the men like niggers to get the defence built up’. Apart from a few forays, though, the division was mostly battling the weather:
a terrific sandstorm. Quite foul. My caravan is full of dust. The enemy has been getting pretty touchy lately on our front. I think he expects us to attack him. We’ve been fairly offensive. The Sussex got into a Hun post and killed the whole issue on night 5/6 Oct. I was v. glad … A bit of ferocity is good for all of us and I hope the rest of the Div will be equally ferocious and savage.21
Montgomery’s offensive was set for 23 October. Contrary to Tuker’s expectations, however, the Allied attack did not turn on Ruweisat. Montgomery’s main thrusts were aimed along the northern and southern ends of the Alamein Line. The 4th Division was tasked with launching only a diversionary raid in front of Ruweisat.
From the outset, Tuker was clear that ‘we’ve got to restore the name of the Ind Divs out here’. The army commander’s low opinion of Indian troops was not lost on them. ‘I’ve told my chaps’, he wrote to Hartley the night before the battle, ‘they’re to fight as if 4 div had no name at all and was starting now to make it. I’ve absolute faith in them.’22 The raid led by the 1/2nd Gurkhas went well: ‘30 casualties out of the Coy [Company] but damaged the Boche pretty considerably in some very close fighting … our wounded are in tremendous form. Morale v. high.’23
Tuker restively followed the fight to his north and south, longing for a piece of the action. ‘There are tanks on my front to-night,’ he observed on 25 October, ‘I hope they attack. They don’t know what I’ve got waiting for them.’ As the Axis forces seemed to stymie the offensive, he felt that Montgomery ‘must give me the means to jump in. This is the strongest part of his [Rommel’s] front but I know we can break it and so prick out most of his army.’ The ‘scrappy fighting’ the following day left Tuker depressed: ‘I think I shall resign if I don’t get a crack at the Boche this time. The Div is feeling as savage as tigers. It is really hard to restrain units from going in and “crowning him” as they put it.’24
In the event, the 4th Division did nothing more onerous than supporting the offensive elsewhere by putting on ‘a complete dummy attack with MT [Mechanical Transport] movement, barrage and so on, and various local frills (some rather funny)’ and bringing down ‘a tornado of enemy defensive fire’. Worse, the 5th Indian Brigade was torn off from the division and incorporated into the E
ighth Army reserve. The Corps headquarters unctuously claimed that the brigade was recognized as the best in the Middle East. ‘Damned hard on us to do this’, wrote Tuker, ‘I’ve only just got the Div going.’25
The 5th Indian Brigade did however participate in a significant action against the Axis anti-tank screen in the north, which opened the way for British armour to break out. Although proud of the brigade’s performance, Tuker was distressed at being stripped of other assets like light artillery. ‘I do not think Monty intends to use us’, he wrote on 4 November. ‘He doesn’t like the I.A.’ That night Rommel began his retreat. As the curtain fell on the battle of Alamein, the 4th Division was divested of its motor vehicles and tasked, with the Greek and Free French forces, to clear the battlefield of debris.26
Tuker felt that ‘without doubt 8 Army treated us shockingly’. Months after the battle of Alamein, he wrote that ‘though we knew what Monty thought of us, we never lost hope. We trained like hell and got on with the job.’27 This seems an accurate description of the 4th Indian Division’s feelings. As an Indian lieutenant wrote home after Alamein:
I’d love to tell you that we played a great and gallant part in the recent offensive but the truth is that Indian troops have played a very minor part in the campaign. The laurels go to the Tommy, I’m afraid. However Indians will before this war is over have an opportunity for action. And then we will once again prove to an admiring world that on God’s earth there is no fighter in courage, perseverance and endurance who can be even remotely compared with us.28
The division got its chance a couple of months later. But not before Tuker had complained to his corps commander. The latter took up the matter with Montgomery. ‘[T]his is an experienced Division’, he wrote, ‘imbued with a fine fighting spirit and in my opinion it would be a tragedy if this fine Division was not given a further opportunity of representing India.’29 In March 1943, the 4th Indian Division was ordered to Medenine in Tunisia, near the Mareth Line where the retreating Axis forces had decided to stand and fight. Tuker was stunned to find that the two remaining brigades of his division – the 7th and 11th – were to be parcelled out between two of the Eighth Army’s corps. Only a vigorous protest with the corps commander and a meeting with Montgomery himself prevented the division from being dismantled.
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