BEATING ROMMEL AT EL ALAMEIN: THE ROLE OF AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND IN THE DEFEAT OF THE AXIS IN NORTH AFRICA – TOM GILLING

Tom Gilling is a war historian and most recently author of Start Digging You Bastards! Australian and New Zealand forces’ desperate battle with Rommel and the Axis at El Alamein. On Monday 28 July, Tom Gilling addressed The Sydney Institute and gave a thrilling and blow by blow account of the outstanding action of the British Eighth Army, spearheaded by the battle-hardened troops of the 9th Australian Division and the 2nd New Zealand Division, in turning back the Germans at the Battle of El Alamein. As Churchill would say after the battle: “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.”

BEATING ROMMEL AT EL ALAMEIN: THE ROLE OF AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND IN THE DEFEAT OF THE AXIS IN NORTH AFRICA

TOM GILLING

Private Ken Ward-Harvey was lucky to survive his first encounter with the enemy at the Battle of El Alamein. Ward-Harvey, a sapper with the 2/7th Field Company, had been sent out with orders to destroy three disabled British tanks to prevent their use by the enemy.

The sappers soon found the tanks, which had already been hooked up by the Germans with steel cables, ready for towing away. “We were carrying 20 pounds of explosive on our backs to blow up the tanks,” Ward-Harvey recalled. “One of our fellows got in and dropped his bundle into this tank and it went up.” The blazing tank immediately attracted enemy fire, forcing the platoon to go to ground.

As a “new chum”, the 21-year-old was paired with an experienced soldier, who barked at him to keep his head down and “take that bloody pack [of explosives] off your back”. Ward-Harvey might have been keeping low but the pack was high above the ground and waiting to be hit. If that had happened “not only me but anyone near me would’ve gone up. So, I took it off and … then I said to him, ‘What are those things going ping ping ping?’” He said, “They’re bullets and they’re bloody close.”’

Two weeks earlier the port of Tobruk, held for most of 1941 by the 9th Australian Division, had fallen tamely to German and Italian forces led by the charismatic and brilliant General Erwin Rommel. Since then, German tanks had advanced hundreds of kilometres across the North African desert. The skies above Cairo turned black with smoke from bonfires in the British Embassy, where officials were busy incinerating documents. With Hitler’s forces almost in striking distance of the Suez Canal and the great Persian oilfields vital to the Allied war effort, Britain’s position in the Middle East seemed to be on the verge of collapse.

The Italian dictator Mussolini was so convinced of the Allies’ imminent defeat that he flew to Libya to lead the victory march to Alexandria. He went home disappointed. The British commander, General Sir Claude Auchinleck, decided to make a last-ditch stand at El Alamein, an isolated railway halt 230 kilometres west of Cairo, but demoralised British troops had little confidence in their ability to hold back Rommel’s Panzers.

As German tanks rumbled towards the Alamein Line, Allied soldiers streamed back from the front. Only one division was moving in the opposite direction: the 9th Australian Division, under its rugged commander, Lieutenant-General Leslie Morshead. The diggers had been training in Syria, far from the front line, when news came through that Tobruk, where so much Australian blood had been shed, had fallen. Lieutenant Philip Masel of the 2/28th Battalion remembered “a moment of silence” followed by “an avalanche of sound … thousands of voices united in a cry compounded of disbelief, disgust and dismay”.

To many diggers, it felt as if their sacrifice had been in vain. “[A] cold hand was on the heart of every man who had fought there; every man felt sick, miserable, bewildered,” a soldier of the 2/48th Battalion recalled. “This was a bitter pill to swallow. This place, where a half-trained, poorly equipped division had held out for eight months, and which mates had bled and died to hold, had now fallen to the Germans in a single day.”

As the Eighth Army threatened to disintegrate around him, Auchinleck summoned the Australians back from Syria. Their recall to the front line was so sudden that of the division’s three infantry brigades, only one – the 24th Brigade – would go into battle having practised techniques of mobile desert warfare.

Since 1882, when the British occupied Egypt to protect their financial and strategic interests, the Alamein Line had been recognised as the best position from which to defend the Nile Delta and Suez Canal against attack from the west. Extending from the Mediterranean Sea coast to the northern edge of the Qattara Depression, it straddled the narrowest part of the coastal belt. Digging in was possible in a few areas of sand or sandy soil, but the ground was generally rocky and excavating to any depth was nearly impossible without power tools and explosives.

From the road and railway running along the coast, the desert climbed gently towards a southern escarpment that fell away to the impassable salt marshes of the Qattara Depression, more than 200 metres below. In the past, Rommel’s preference had been to use his tanks to outflank Allied defensive positions on the desert side, but the Qattara Depression made this impossible. At Alamein movement was funnelled into a tight corridor that could not be outflanked.

The fall of Singapore in February 1942 drastically altered Australia’s perspective on the war. No longer just a war to defeat Hitler, it was now a war to defend Australia against the threat of Japanese invasion. The 6th and 7th Australian Divisions were both recalled from the Middle East to meet the Japanese threat in the Pacific, and it seemed inevitable that the 9th Division would follow.

When the Australian convoys turned south at Homs many diggers were still hoping they would go home, but Corporal Tom Derrick, who would later win a Victoria Cross, guessed correctly that they were heading for the desert. “[I]t now looks as though we are bound for an engagement with Mr Rommel,” Derrick wrote in his exercise book. “The boys continue to remain in high spirits and I believe they would welcome a go on with Jerry.”

The road to the front line was clogged with traffic crawling in the opposite direction. One digger recalled passing “vehicles of every description, two and three abreast . . . There were South Africans, Indians and Tommies, every rank from private to general. This was the silent procession of a broken, beaten army . . . they were beyond caring.”

War correspondents seeking information from the haggard and half-asleep soldiers were met with blank stares. Ward-Harvey remembered thinking, “This isn’t looking very nice … it was just absolute nose to tail vehicles coming back and all the English fellows were saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way, chum. Jerry will get you.’”

By the time they reached the front, the Australians had been on the move for five days straight. They had travelled more than 1300 kilometres, with little opportunity to sleep, but their morale, a member of the 2/48th Battalion wrote later, “had never been higher”.

Within hours of their arrival, the diggers were put to work building new fortifications. The 2/48th Battalion worked in relays, some men sleeping while the rest shovelled. A sandstorm blew continuously for four days. “All the boys working like Trojans & making great progress,” Tom Derrick wrote in his diary.

With Rommel holding his ground, the 24th Brigade took up positions on a long east–west rise about halfway between the sea and the Qattara Depression. The brigade was digging and mining its new base when orders came down to organise a raid against enemy positions on a ridge to the south-east. It would be the Australians’ first taste of action since their return to the line.

The job went to D Company of the 2/43rd Battalion. The raiding party, led by four officers and including 20 sappers of the 2/7th Field Company, had orders to destroy enemy anti-tank guns, blow up derelict tanks and vehicles, obtain information and capture prisoners.

It was clear that the Germans were nervous and expecting trouble; before long the sky was lit up with red and green flares. Although the enemy position appeared to be strongly held, the defenders were in no mood to fight. By 3 a.m. the raiding party was back at the assembly area, having killed 15 enemy soldiers and taken nine prisoners. Ward-Harvey and his fellow sappers had destroyed four anti-tank guns and one field gun, along with the three disabled British tanks and six tractors.

The raid was a resounding success, a demonstration of the Australian fighting qualities that would be desperately needed in the grinding battles ahead. The New Zealanders were quick to send their congratulations, the commander of the Armoured Corps signalling, “Well done, a great start for the Australians and a most useful raid.”

Word of the raiders’ exploits soon got around the division. Tom Derrick recorded that the “24th [Brigade] patrol last night met with a fair amount of success” and General Morshead visited the 2/43rd Battalion to congratulate Captain Jeanes and his men.

The Germans were unnerved by the raid, which they misread as a major attack. Fearing deep penetration of their lines, German commanders rushed half the 21st Panzer Division’s tanks into the area to meet the illusory threat. Rommel himself was worried enough to issue orders to his forward officers to stay awake all night to ensure their units were not taken by surprise.

The 7 July raid was the diggers’ introduction to a brutal contest between the Axis and Allied armies that would continue for the rest of the month and then subside before erupting again in October in a titanic battle whose outcome would alter the course of the Second World War.

A series of botched Allied assaults in July led Rommel to conclude that Auchinleck had “lost all taste for future attacks”. He hadn’t. But after a disastrous setback at a place called Ruin Ridge, which ended with the loss of an entire Australian battalion, it was clear that the Eighth Army would need to be stronger, better trained and better led before it attacked again.

Auchinleck resisted repeated demands by Churchill to go back on the offensive, arguing that a lack of resources and the consolidation of enemy positions made a breakthrough impossible. Predicting that conditions conducive to an Allied offensive were “unlikely” to occur before mid-September, Auchinleck told London, “[O]ur policy will be defensive, including thorough preparations and consolidations in [the] whole defensive area. In the meantime we shall seize at once any opportunity of taking the offensive suddenly and surprising the enemy.”

This wasn’t good enough for Churchill, who immediately resolved to fly to Egypt in order to shake up the failing command of the Middle East theatre. The prospect of offensive operations being put on hold until mid-September only confirmed his belief that the Eighth Army needed a new man in charge.

Arriving in Egypt on 3 August 1942 in a converted four-engined Liberator bomber, Churchill wore the uniform of an RAF Air Commodore and was described as looking “cherubic” and being in “great heart”. He wasted no time sacking Auchinleck from his dual roles as commander of the Eighth Army and chief of the Middle East theatre. Churchill wanted to replace him with General William Gott but after Gott’s plane was shot down over the desert – the Luftwaffe intercepted Allied signals traffic and sent six Messerschmitt fighters to kill him – the job of Eighth Army commander went to General Bernard Montgomery.

On 13 August Montgomery summoned staff officers to a meeting to hear how he intended to defeat Rommel. His speech, delivered without notes, was described as “electric” by those who heard it. Montgomery told the assembled officers that he was committed to destroying the Axis army in North Africa. There would be no retreat from Alamein. He fully expected Rommel to attack, and while he would prefer it not to come within the next fortnight, after that he would “welcome” it. In the meantime, he would start planning the offensive that would lead to a final victory in Africa.

Montgomery touted his credentials as the son of an Anglican bishop of Tasmania to obtain an Australian slouch hat, but nobody showed him how to wear it. Members of an Australian artillery regiment were said to have regarded Montgomery as a “prize galah” when they saw him wearing the hat “jammed down on top of his head”, while British tank officers were aghast at the sight of their commander wearing an “Australian bush hat” festooned with regimental badges. It was only after they convinced him of the impracticality of wearing a “bush hat” in a tank that Montgomery was persuaded to wear the Royal Tank Regiment’s black beret that became his signature wartime headgear.

The Australians immediately took to Montgomery. Sergeant Ken Pantlin remembered Montgomery as “a breath of fresh air. He did come and speak to all the troops . . . told them what was going to happen, exactly explained what the tactics were and what the strategy was. Spoke to them all, answered questions and made his presence known … Before El Alamein every soldier was told exactly how that battle was going to be fought . . . every soldier! . . . [and] the principles that he laid down were followed.”

During a visit to the 9th Division Montgomery saw some Australian gunners standing beside one of the army’s new six-pounder anti-tank guns and asked them what they thought of it. The diggers told him they had not fired it; they were not allowed to practise with live ammunition because it was scarce and kept for use in battle. Within a day or two an order arrived from Army Headquarters that every six-pounder gun was to fire off half its ammunition stock in practice. “Unless the men are trained to shoot,” Montgomery’s memorandum said, “we shall do no good on the day of battle however great the number of rounds we have saved ready for that day.”

The two and a half months between the start of August and late October 1942 were a waiting game during which the two sides built up equipment and supplies in preparation for what both commanders knew would be the decisive battle of the desert war.

In mid-September the 51st Highland Division, newly arrived in Egypt, was affiliated with the Australians for a crash course in desert warfare. Scottish infantry, cavalry, artillery and engineer units were partnered with their Australian equivalents. The Scots had a lot to learn. During a night patrol, one Highlander souvenired a wooden box, only to discover when he got back that it contained a fully primed landmine.

The 51st Division officers found that the men in slouch hats “had a very different type of discipline from ours, but in the line our men learned very valuable lessons from those fine troops. The Aussies kept their weapons scrupulously clean and always free from sand. Their slit trenches were prepared with the utmost care, and each trench was completely equipped with such things as grenades. Before a party left on patrol each member of it was searched thoroughly for any identification marks. By night silence was enforced and no lights were allowed. When a patrol returned from its job a complete account of its investigation and acquired information was recorded on a map, and such maps combined with air-pictures gave the most detailed information of the enemy’s minefields and other defences.”

The Highlanders soon learnt to drive their vehicles more slowly to avoid churning up clouds of dust that would give away their movements to the enemy.

The arrival of the 44th and 51st Infantry Divisions, as well as the 8th British Armoured Division, increased the significant advantage in both men and equipment that Montgomery already had over his adversary. Between the start of August and late October Allied ships unloaded more than 1,000 tanks – including more than 300 Shermans – and 9,000 other vehicles. Altogether the combat strength of the Eighth Army numbered around 220,000, while Rommel could call on less than half that many: 54,000 Italians and roughly the same number of Germans, thousands of whom were support rather than fighting troops.

The topographic features that had led Auchinleck to choose El Alamein for his last line of resistance were the same features that Rommel would be able to exploit against an offensive by the Eighth Army. Since the line could not be outflanked to the south, the attacking army had to assault and break through the enemy defences.

The devastating effectiveness of the Desert Air Force and Rommel’s precarious supply of petrol meant that he could not risk a mobile defence and was committed to mounting a static defence behind thousands of metres of interlocking wire and minefields. In addition to roughly half a million mines, Rommel claimed that his engineers had wired up ‘vast numbers’ of captured British bombs and shells for use as booby-traps.

In the event of a concentrated Allied attack on any part of the line, the Panzer and motorised divisions above and below the threatened sector were to converge and drive off the attackers. On the delicate issue of his surrender-prone Italian allies, Rommel noted that Italian troops at Alamein were “interspersed with their German comrades so that an Italian battalion always had a German as its neighbour”.

The depth and complexity of the German defences dictated a night attack, but Montgomery’s tanks needed moonlight. So did the engineers whose task it was to clear a path through the enemy minefields. The September full moon would leave too little time to train an army for such a massive assault, so the decision was made to wait for the next full moon on 24 October. The offensive would begin on the night of 23 October 1942.

Although the Australian contingent at El Alamein made up just eleven of Montgomery’s 94 infantry battalions – some 12,000 troops – the diggers would be crucial in determining the outcome. The 2nd New Zealand Division was recovering from the heavy casualties it had sustained in the weeks and months before the final battle; the 4th Indian Division was considered too flaky and the 51st Highland Division was still finding its feet in the desert. The 9th Australian Division would fight on the right of the line – the place traditionally entrusted by a commander to his fiercest and most capable soldiers.

Montgomery’s plan, code-named “Lightfoot”, was designed to trap and destroy the Axis forces in their own defensive positions. It envisaged simultaneous attacks against the enemy’s northern and southern flanks. In the primary attack infantry divisions in the north, led by the 9th Division, would smash through the enemy lines, destroying all his guns; British armoured divisions would then surge unopposed through the breach and capture the main enemy supply routes, sucking in and destroying Rommel’s Panzer divisions. At the same time, a joint attack in the south by infantry and tanks would draw off Rommel’s armour before moving against his rear areas, capturing supply and maintenance facilities and seizing control of his airfields.

The official history detailed a number of ruses designed to keep the Germans guessing about the coming attack. Vehicles drove up and down the southern road towing chains to simulate the clouds of dust raised by military traffic. Dummy roads and pipelines were constructed (or at least started) under the gaze of German observers on high ground in keeping with an imaginary schedule that would not have seen them finished by the October moon.

Enemy spies in Alexandria and Cairo were fed false information and logistical arrangements indicating that the Eighth Army would not be ready for an October offensive. Forward troops continued to be sent on leave to both cities almost until the day of the attack.

As the sun set on 23 October 1942, thousands of diggers emerged from the narrow slit trenches in which they had been hiding all day. Stiff and hungry, they had been ordered to lie doggo since coming forward the previous night, unable to show themselves lest they alert the enemy to the impending attack. “We dug a hole in the ground, only big enough to lay down in, and pulled a grass mat of some sort . . . over ourselves,” Charlie Cutler recalled, “and we lay in that hole for the whole twelve or fourteen hours of daylight.”

A few seconds before 9.40 p.m. pinpricks of light glittered on the desert horizon far behind Allied lines, followed by the dull rumble of gunfire. Shells from the British long-range guns were timed to hit their targets at the same moment as the main barrage from more than 400 25-pounder and 48 medium guns.

Opening on the stroke of 9.40 p.m. and lasting for exactly fifteen minutes, the barrage against the enemy gun positions was on a scale not seen since the previous war: an Allied gun every 17 metres, each gun firing two rounds a minute. It was said that the din could be heard in Alexandria, more than 100 kilometres away. At the same time bombs tumbled down on the enemy lines from waves of Wellington bombers. Joe Madeley thought there would be “no German left alive” except for a few suffering from shell shock. He expected the Australians to “walk right over the top of them”.

The battle lasted for a week. The success of Montgomery’s attack relied on effective co-operation between Allied infantry and tanks, something rarely achieved in the desert war to date.

During the final spasm the Australians beat off a desperate counter-attack by German forces at a place called The Saucer. The 2/24th Battalion was reduced to fewer than 150 men, fuelled on Benzedrine tablets, who went without sleep for nine days and nights. Twenty-odd trucks arrived to take the survivors away but only four were needed.

Morshead described the German onslaught on The Saucer as “[one] of the most determined attacks ever made against 9 AUS DIV”. In defeating it, the diggers inflicted a crushing blow on the enemy. Captain Masel of the 2/28th considered noon on 1 November 1942 to be the “decisive moment in the Battle of Alamein”.

The 9th Division had done exactly what Montgomery asked of it. By dragging enemy divisions north and holding them, the diggers made it possible for Operation “Supercharge” – the breakthrough by British tanks – to succeed.

At 3.30 p.m. on 4 November, Rommel gave the order for a general withdrawal to Fuka. By the following morning it was clear across the entire front that the enemy was in full withdrawal. The 2/28th Battalion’s war diary reported that the battalion “ceases to be operationally engaged. Nobody is sorry to relax and to taste the sweets of victory. It has been a long and grim battle.”

That day, 5 November 1942, “quietness descended on the [Brigade] sector”. General Oliver Leese visited 24th Brigade HQ, accompanied by General Morshead. Leese made it clear that the 1st of November had been a critical day in the Battle of Alamein and the Australian defence of The Saucer had “provided the . . . opportunity for the breakthrough by British armour”.

The Axis army was beaten. Wire intercepts suggested the Afrika Korps had lost approximately 1,150 men killed, 3,900 wounded and more than 8,000 captured. Fewer Italians were killed or wounded but nearly 15,000 Italian soldiers surrendered. Total Allied losses were around 13,500 killed, wounded and missing.

Within hours of the victory at Alamein, Montgomery had already lost the opportunity to overtake and block the Axis forces retreating along the clogged coast road. Obsessed with breaking through, the Allied commanders were unprepared for the chase.

Fuel shortages, minefields, missed maintenance, confused and exhausted crews, the difficulty of moving over the desert at night and even rain: all were offered as reasons for the failure of Montgomery’s armoured brigades to cut off and destroy Rommel’s army, which scrambled all the way back to Tunisia without ever being seriously threatened with encirclement.

Four days after the victory at El Alamein, the Allies opened a second front in North Africa. On 8 November 1942 a combined force of 107,000 British and US troops under the American General Dwight Eisenhower invaded French North Africa in Operation “Torch”. Six months later the two Allied armies in North Africa linked up in Tunisia. By then Rommel had been recalled by Hitler to Germany. On 13 May 1943 the Italian General Giovanni Messe surrendered to the Allies, marking the end of the desert war. Churchill remarked afterwards that “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.”

Australians made up 10 per cent of the Eighth Army’s strength at El Alamein but suffered more than 20 per cent of its casualties: more than 600 men killed and nearly 2,000 wounded between 23 October and 5 November. The northern sector of the battlefield, where the 9th Division did most of its fighting, was “like a mill,” Rommel wrote later. “Everything that went into it, regardless of quantity, was ground down to dust.”

Unlike the Australians, who sailed home after the Battle of El Alamein and would soon be fighting in New Guinea, the 2nd New Zealand Division stayed on, taking part in the pursuit of Rommel’s army across North Africa. By the time the Axis forces capitulated, nearly 3,000 New Zealand soldiers had died in North Africa and more than 7,000 had been wounded. Another 4,000 had been taken prisoner. Rommel always regretted having allowed the New Zealand Division, which he considered “among the elite of the British Army”, to slip through his fingers in June 1942, when he had it cornered. “I should have been very much happier,” he wrote later, “if it had been safely tucked away in our prison camps instead of still facing us.”

Montgomery never forgot how much he owed the 9th Australian Division for his triumph at El Alamein. Twenty-two years after the war ended, in what would be his final trip abroad, Montgomery visited the Alamein war cemetery in Egypt to mark the 25th anniversary of the battle. According to his biographer, Nigel Hamilton, the visit prompted Montgomery to tell a former staff officer: “The more I think back, the more I realise that winning was only made possible by the bravery of the 9th Australian Division . . . I do not know of any [other] Allied Division who could have done it. I must go to Australia and gather the 9th Division together so that I can thank them properly.”

Montgomery died before he could make the trip.