The World at War (39 page)

COLONEL WESTPHAL

Finally what was the deciding point for us, the defeat at El Alamein – but I think we had crossed the Rubicon like Caesar when we went to Egypt. I had made the plan for the conquering of Tobruk, and this plan ended up by having taken Tobruk. We would send some reconnaissance battalion to Sidi Barrani and stay with the mass of the Army via near Bardia and the south of this place. Not to go with the mass of the whole Army to Egypt because we had the opinion that the distance from the ports Benghazi, Tripoli and perhaps Tobruk would become too big to guarantee our supplies. But in the moment of taking Tobruk I was wounded in Germany and Rommel saw the only opportunity to beat the Allied Army for ever and pursued them, and Hitler agreed. If I would have been present at the time I would have fought for stopping at the Egyptian border, but I don't believe I would have succeeded.

LAWRENCE DURRELL

I think everybody, whether they were British or Egyptian, felt that our worlds were floundering and the prospect that Mr Hitler might be in charge for the next fifty years was not something to appeal to anybody.

PRIVATE NOEL GARDINER

2nd New Zealand Division, Eighth Army

We thought that this character Hitler had sort of got loose and the show was getting out of hand and something had to be done about it. We were right out in New Zealand, it seems incredible, twelve thousand miles away, but it doesn't alter the fact that we are of British stock and we'd been involved in the First World War to fight this battle of democracy. We think that's the best way of life – that people, all things being equal, should be able to please themselves provided they don't give offence to anyone else. We think that's what we're fighting for, to be left alone and not to be dominated like Hitler was domineering people, and we thought it was a worthwhile proposition.

PRIVATE TOM FITZPATRICK

9th Australian Division

We thought of El Alamein as very much a united Empire effort. We spoke of Empire in those days and now it's the Commonwealth, but I'm old-fashioned and I still think of it as the Empire. We realised that the battle of El Alamein was going to be far too vast for the 9th Division, we had to think in bigger terms than that, but we didn't regard ourselves as a small cog in the wheel – we thought we were a pretty big cog in the wheel, I think that's an Australian characteristic.

PRIVATE PENE

It was a Commonwealth war, of course, that's why we joined up. I mean the UK was in trouble and the automatic thing was to help them out and also to try to keep the war away from us. That was the thing – keep it away from our children, our families, but mainly to support England at the time. I think it was an all-out effort by the Commonwealth, as it should have been.

PRIVATE JOHN McGEE

Infantry, Eighth Army

It could be possible that I got captured today, or my company got captured, and while we're moving out to a rendezvous with the Germans our people would come up and relieve us and away we'd go, and then they, the Germans, would be the prisoners.

LAWRENCE DURRELL

There's the thing [Sir Arthur] Bryant brings out in his Peninsular War book, the thing that Napoleon noticed, the British fox-hunting man was the thing that astonished the French. Not necessarily the righting man but the
foxhunting attitude, and the Eighth Army had that in class and they also had a war that was mobile, it was like dodgems. I mean it was fifty miles forward, fifty miles back, re-form and attack, and people would do the tally-ho act. So it gave a liveliness to all the rest, which was stagnation – Europe was stagnation and despair, blackness. There was light and you could fall back and if you got a lucky flesh wound or even if you had a desert sore you could get a weekend off and in fifty-five minutes you were back in Cairo, teeming with lights, you rang up people, you went out to dinner and you had a flask of whisky, and on Monday morning you were back in the line.

COLONEL WESTPHAL

I think we have fought this campaign according to rules coming from the tradition of Prussian and German Army in the nineteenth century and the same was the case on the other side. Furthermore we had no difficulties with the Arabian population, there were so few they didn't disturb us, and we had no towns and no cities, or very few so that we could handle the warfare like an open campaign. There were many differences between fighting in the desert or fighting in Europe. The greatest advantage for us in North Africa we had not to fear the cold in the winter-time, and the further one, the population. And a great disadvantage was the great distance from Europe and disadvantages of supply. Supply had to go to Italy by train, from Italy by ship to North Africa and the Allies had superiority in sea and air, therefore we never had reliable supply, fuel, ammunition, food, cars and so on. Another disadvantage was, in the desert we had no possibility to cover before the eyes of the enemy: we had no woods, we had no trees, we had no villages and every man who has been in wars remembers that if the other side shoot with artillery, he always had the feeling he personally is the target of the enemy.

LIEUTENANT COLACICCHI

I would say that we Italians in Africa got better as the war went on. The Italian is very quick to learn, our units improved and of course up to a point the example of the Germans helped. But by the time of Tunisia when the war in Africa was finished, as far as we were concerned, I would say we gave a pretty good account of ourselves.

MAJOR GENERAL HARDING

If you can have a good place to have a war I suppose it was a better place than anywhere, because you were not handicapped by the movement of refugees, or by the problems that arose from demolished towns and buildings obstructing roads and railways. It was wide, open country, you could move about and you were not obstructed in any way and if you had to do that sort of thing, it was as good a place as any to do it. We had a horror after being in the desert of ever getting into buildings again.

MAJOR GENERAL DE GUINGAND

If you've got to fight, got to have these horrible wars, I suppose the desert was one of the
best places to fight because there was ample room for manoeuvre: you could go all over the place, you could use mobile forces comparatively easily and you had no large towns, cities and few civilians and therefore it was a much cleaner type of warfare than when you got into civilised and populated Europe. The civilian population suffered terribly and we had to destroy cities, communications, towns, harbours and the lot. It had its disadvantages because there was no cover for us at all; you were absolutely exposed to enemy air and ground forces. It was jolly hard at times, it was very cold at times and you had these frightful dust storms, which were very unpleasant things to live in.

COLONEL WESTPHAL

On my side I remember well the very good camaraderie, and the
fair treatment of our soldiers by the other side. I remember the storm dust who endured three or four days, because it was for us absolutely shelter against the enemy reaction, enemy bombing and this dust storm in the Italian language
was gibli,
we called it that.
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But I can remember in the same manner the many flies, one fly had in one year nine million children, and I can remember the very salty water and the most things we had not like the other soldiers in Europe.

LIEUTENANT EMILIO PULLINI

Folgore (Lightning) Parachute Division

We arrived to northern Africa in very good condition because we had very tough training in southern Italy for a couple of months, on difficult ground and very hot climate too, and I think that when we arrived we were very fit. Unfortunately in the desert the
conditions were very much not the same as we had in Italy because we arrived in the middle of July and immediately we were taken to the battleground, and that was rather a sudden change, and there were some things we did not like very much, flies mainly and a very hot sun which was above us all day long. It was very uncomfortable to spend all day lying in foxholes from sunrise to sunset just covered in flies and doing very little because we had no chance of doing anything else.

PRIVATE BOB MASH

Engineer, Eighth Army

Flies were terrible but there was one dreaded little animal that I didn't like, and that was the scorpion. A scorpion could be very dangerous because it had poison in its stinger in the tail. A scorpion would never give himself up, would rather kill himself than surrender.

PRIVATE PENE

Flies were a nuisance, a bad one. At Alamein the particular ones we had to deal with fed on the dead – the dead weren't far away from us, a matter of a few hundred yards from our company – and they fed on the dead and then came round trying to feed on our water and food. At one stage we weren't allowed to kill them because the smell from them interfered with our stomachs and caused upsets. They wanted water just like we did and they would dive-bomb our tea and of course would float on top of the tea, and the only way to get rid of them was not to tip it out, it was to sieve the tea with your teeth and just blow it off. They also liked jam: we had plenty of that on our bread and we did this sort of thing [gestures] but of course one or two flies go in there and we had to spit it out – that's how friendly they were.

PRIVATE REED

My father served in the First World War in the desert and I had a fair idea what to expect. I thought the conditions in the desert were quite good. As the summer came along it got very hot in the day but the evenings were cool and I didn't find the conditions at all harmful to me physically. I enjoyed my days in the desert.

LIEUTENANT HUGH DANIEL

Eighth Army dispatch rider

Obviously a lot of people did become lost but the organisation of an army is such that every endeavour is made to ensure that things work on set lines. You have your four defence lines and you have your lines ranged behind, then you have your lines forward for communication. These, in the desert, were marked as clearly as could be with old tins, any bits of discarded material, or cairns of stones were built and placed. Maps had been produced, very accurate maps from some splendid survey work done in the ten years before the war. We therefore had points of reference on the maps, the wells known as 'birs' from the Arabic name. The tracks used by the nomads weren't particularly evident but they were marked on the map, so for a person who could read a map well and was within the confines of the Army area there was no reason to get seriously lost. We had prismatic compasses, we had sun compasses, we had maps which gave us the night sky – Cassiopeia was our favourite constellation, which gave us the pole-star. So I don't think we were particularly worried.

MAJOR GENERAL DE GUINGAND

The Eighth Army at that time were rather disillusioned, didn't know where they were and what they were doing wrong. When
Montgomery arrived he took a grip immediately; you suddenly felt here was leadership. One of his finest hours was when he ordered a conference of the Staff on the very day he arrived; he told me to get everyone together on the Ruweisat Ridge. He talked to us all and he was very spectacular, the effect was simply incredible. He told us that the bad days were over and he was now determined that it was going to be a success. All plans for going back from the position we were in at El Alamein, I had to burn the lot. He said, 'Now the order is that everyone stays where they are and fights where they are and dies where they are.' Then he told us that Churchill was giving him and Alexander instructions to kick Rommel out of
North Africa, we were going to get additional resources of men and material, and he was specific about the sort of discipline in the Army. Before he arrived the Army Commander gave an order of instruction and you found that some of the subordinate commanders used to query it and say they didn't think they were going to do it, they thought of a better way of doing it. He said that's got to stop, what he called no more belly-aching, and if there were any doubters about the plans which he initiated then they'd better leave the Eighth Army.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM

Montgomery immediately, as quickly as possible, started going round all the formations of the Eighth Army and gathering people around him to talk to them and to radiate this confidence, which he was capable of doing. And he also used the press and the radio and gimmicks such as his hats to help stimulate his image and to get himself known to everyone, which he did, and incidentally accepted by everyone. Perhaps the hat gimmick first arose when he was visiting the New Zealand Division and it was very hot. He borrowed a hat with a broad brim and he realised that the New Zealanders appreciated seeing him in one of their hats, so before he went to the Australians he borrowed an Australian hat to go in, and with the tanks he borrowed a beret. I think he decided the beret was the most distinctive headdress and incidentally one of the easiest to handle, and it was by this headdress that he became well known. He introduced an entirely new philosophy, namely that before going into a major new offensive operation everybody, including if you like the nursing orderlies in the hospital, should know broadly what was the commander's intention in the coming battle, so that everybody could feel he had a part to play in achieving that object. Incidentally, in the fighting line their initiative would be developed within the framework of what the boss wanted to accomplish and this paid enormous dividends.

COLONEL WESTPHAL

When I came back to the Army in the beginning of August 1942 the situation at El Alamein was very difficult because the supply became more and more bad. The reason was that Tobruk was not a port for commerce ships, but only a port for warships, therefore the usefulness of Tobruk for the supply was very few. We had a much longer distance for the supplies from Tripoli and even from Benghazi, therefore we reconsidered the possibilities and realised that it was a mistake to go to El Alamein. We realised too, especially in regard of the Italian troops who were not motorised, that we should step back to the Bardia line. But we were absolutely clear that Hitler would never agree with this plan, and we tried to make the best of it: we erected many minefields before the front – which was useless.