CHAPTER 15
While many would agree with Lord Mountbatten's judgement that Bill Slim (see Chapter 28) was the finest general the Allies produced during the Second World War, Bernard Montgomery was entrusted with by far the greater part of British resources and consequently received much the most publicity during and after the war. Everybody in Britain followed the fortunes of 'Monty' and the Eighth Army, and church bells were rung when they won the grinding second battle of El Alamein in October–November 1942. Winston Churchill broadcast a cautiously worded welcome: 'This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end – but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning'. The World at War interviewers were interested mainly in Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, conditions in the desert and the allegedly chivalrous nature of the fighting, so I have had to dredge items such as the Allied landings in French North Africa on 8 November from interviews dealing primarily with other matters. Elsewhere, the massive Soviet counter-attack at Stalingrad on 19–20 November was doubtless a more significant turning point, but thanks to Hitler's belated decision to pour men and resources into North Africa, more than 150,000 Axis soldiers became prisoners of war in Tunisia on 13 May 1943 – 60,000 more than the miserable German defenders of Stalingrad who surrendered to near-certain death on or around 30 January, the tenth anniversary of Hitler's rise to power. The North African campaign was free of the atrocities that were a feature of every other theatre, chiefly because it was not fought among the civilian population so there was only a very limited amount of what we now evasively call 'collateral damage'. But it is also thecase that the Italians who made up the bulk of Rommel's army were generally decent folk, and their deadlier allies behaved far better here than elsewhere, probably because there were no SS units in Rommel's army. But as several veterans testify in the following pages, it was not the 'clean' environment many believe it to have been: the essence of war is always brutality.
MAJOR-GENERAL WALTHER WARLIMONT
Deputy Chief of Wehrmacht Operations
I would not say the campaign in North Africa was considered a sideshow by Hitler or anyone else. Hitler had consented to this expedition of German troops only after, and on account of, the Italian collapse in December 1940, In the Western Desert, based on Rommel's unexpected successes and in connection also with the German campaign in Russia, far-reaching plans came aiming at such high goals as cutting off the British lifeline with the Empire and their oil supplies too. An opportunity of this kind always remained far from being realised since Rommel's troops were much too scarce in number and we were not able to reinforce them because of the steadily growing requirements, particularly on the Eastern Front, because of the predominance of the British fleet in the Mediterranean and because of our eventual failure in the east.
MAJOR-GENERAL FRANCIS DE GUINGAND
Chief of Staff to generals Auchinleck and Montgomery
Churchill was in some political difficulties at the time, things were going against Britain and naturally the morale of the British people wasn't all that good. Everyone was wanting some victory or some stimulus and some help, therefore it was essential that on the one front where we were fighting, the desert front, we should produce some concrete results. And he was determined that we should have that and he was going to give us all the resources he had available in human reinforcements and also material. And so we did feel the Prime Minister was a hundred per cent behind us, which he was, and he did the most amazing things, forcing through convoys with tremendous loss to get equipment to us.
GENERAL WALTER NEHRING
Commander Afrika Korps in 1942
I was never convinced that to reach a major success in the Western Desert might have altered the outcome of the war. Our forces were too weak, our supply in the Mediterranean was too dangerous and plentiful in losses and therefore never sufficient for victory. Our military operations in North Africa were only of secondary interest to Hitler, who was concerned mainly with the hard war against Russia. Finally the German forces in North Africa were only a lost lot sacrificed by Hitler.
COLONEL SIEGFRIED WESTPHAL
Operations Officer to Field Marshal Rommel
I think that Hitler had no interest for the situation of the German soldiers in the front line. But the situation of the German soldiers in the Eastern Front was incomparably more bad than the German soldiers in the North Africa desert. We were not a main thing; the eyes of Hitler were directed every day to the Russian Front, the deciding front, and our role was not so important. He was content if we had no difficulties and he couldn't help us if we were in very bad situations. Yet he did send us what we needed in supply, but he was not able to guarantee that this supply came from the continent. He was helpless in this situation like we too.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
British author and wartime press officer in Cairo
Auchinleck was absolutely charming but an extremely sedentary man. He had no real personality, he was handsome and personable and quiet in a Scots way but he hadn't any, you know, for a critical moment you need a bit of rhetoric, a bit of panache and a sort of 'Charge, boys, charge' thing – and he hadn't got that precisely.*34 The people who had it, like General Harding, were not in evidence and were commanding detachments in the desert and being shot up. It's sad about Wavell because he had that. His orders for the day were inspiring and you needed that inspiration.
MAJOR GENERAL DE GUINGAND
I was Director of Military Intelligence at the time but the Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East used to always take me up to the desert with him when he went, and I was there during the tremendous panic that took place when we had to retreat from the Gazala line and to hold Tobruk, which we failed to do. I had never seen such chaos; it looked like you'd never be able to save the situation. I've never seen the desert road crammed with every sort of vehicle, every unit muddled up higgledy-piggledy, no one knew what was going on. Lucidly our Air Force was stronger than the enemy's, otherwise I think we would have been routed. We got back to El Alamein hoping that they had taken precautions beforehand to prepare defensive positions, that there was somewhere for us to go to, but it was touch and go for several days. One wondered whether we'd ever be able to hold the front and prevent Rommel from getting into Egypt and Cairo itself. He was running into supply problems but he found a tremendous lot of supplies like petrol and transport in Tobruk and during that time Auchinleck relieved Ritchie of his command and took over personal command of the Army himself. I saw that take place, and I thought he pulled things together magnificently and eventually the front settled down. We made one or two half-hearted attempts to try counter strokes but there wasn't enough force behind it and Rommel began to run out of supplies. Men were tired and the thing stabilised and then we had to begin to plan for eventual battle in El Alamein.*35
NORMAN CORWIN
American 'Poet Laureate of the radio'
The early grumbles were against involvement in somebody else's war. We felt that this was a war made in Europe for Europeans and that it was none of our business and we had better stay out of it. There was even a sentiment – I remember this being expressed – to the effect that England would fight to the last American. I was actually involved in an effort by radio to countervail, to counteract that sentiment. Much of it was inspired by . . . I do believe there was a fifth column at work, but there has always been blatant anti-British sentiment in certain sectors of the population. It had a chance to flourish and to be developed when Britain met reverses not only in Europe but in Africa. When they lost Tobruk and suffered reverses in the desert, the sentiment was whipped up more than it had been before.
REAR ADMIRAL LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN
Chief of Combined Operations
I remember Roosevelt said, 'It seems to be an awful waste of time that we should be pouring divisions into England and you take out the same number of divisions, say six divisions, to fight in Africa. Would it make more sense if we sent out divisions to fight in Africa?' I said, 'Of course it would. How do you propose to send them?' He said, 'Round the Cape, join up with the Army of the Nile and fight our way back west.' I said, 'Why don't you send them straight there, right from the Atlantic ports and into the western Mediterranean ports?' 'Yes', said Roosevelt, 'I remember Winston reminding me about Operation Gymnast, which is your plan, isn't it, for that operation?' I said, 'May I tell my Prime Minster this? Because you see the important thing from your point of view is that you've got a lot of brave but entirely unblooded, inexperienced soldiers. But having got ashore, in which you're bound to succeed, they won't then try and push you back. This gives you a chance to consolidate and from there you have many options open to you.' He liked that very much and said I could tell the US Chiefs of Staff when I saw them.
COLONEL WESTPHAL
You succeeded in summer 1942 finally to stop the exhausted rest of the German Army that reached Alamein, and that was absolutely the deciding point. I think the German Army in the desert has never fully recovered from this exhausting campaign, which did begin on 26th May and ended in El Alamein. Besides, it was absolutely unknown to us that you had built up a strong position at Alamein.
PRIVATE ROBERT REED
2nd New Zealand Division, Eighth Army
We had been through Greece and Crete, we had been chased out of the desert on several occasions, we'd had several terrific reverses where we'd lost everything, lost many men. But never at any occasion did I realise, or thought, we were going to lose the war. I can't give you any reason why I didn't realise we could have lost the war, but I knew we were going to win.
MAJOR GENERAL JOHN HARDING
Commanding 7th Armoured Division
Rommel was a brilliant tactician, a great opportunist and a very fine leader on the battlefield. He was very quick to see an opportunity and seize it and his forces responded. He had his army trained and poised in such a way that he could almost immediately take advantage of any opportunity that he saw, exploiting a limited success.
GENERAL NEHRING
The biggest advantage of the German forces in the Western Desert prior to Montgomery's arrival in August 1942 was that they had a skilled commander. Rommel and his troops were both tested in war, 1939 to 1940 in Poland and France. On the British side, experience in war was at the time missing, but the British generals and their troops were learning it well and quickly.
PRIVATE RUHI PENE
Maori member of the 2nd New Zealand Division, Eighth Army
All Field Marshal Rommel's men were good, they were real fighters, we admired them just like I think they admired us – why else invite us here today?*36 As a matter of fact at one stage of the fighting Field Marshal Rommel was admired that much and idolised by our troops that they had photos up in their tents. Then word came down from our general to the officers to pass on to all the men to cut this business out of idolising the man.
LIEUTENANT PAOLO COLACICCHI
Italian Tenth Army
Rommel himself became a sort of myth to the Italian soldiers just as much as to the German soldiers. In fact one regiment, the Bersaglieri – they are the ones with a lot of feathers in their hats – fighting out of Tobruk baptised Rommel 'Romolito', which in Italian means little Rommel and also refers to Romulus. This was a Roman regiment and they liked him, and on one occasion he even put some of their feathers in his own colonial helmet and wore it because he was pleased with them.
MAJOR GENERAL HARDING
Rommel became a bit of a hoodoo yes, but personally I don't think I ever felt it. I remember taking special measures to try and destroy this image of infallibility and invulnerability, that in some people's minds sprung up as a result of Rommel's success. What I call psychological and propaganda ones, instructions to commanders, papers issued on the subject, but mainly by word of mouth and by examples from commander to commander, and so down to the troops.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL RONALD BELCHEM
7th Armoured Division
Obviously the Rommel legend had an adverse effect on morale because General Auchinleck issued a most extraordinary directive to his generals saying that by all means possible they had to repress the idea that Rommel was a magician or a bogeyman. I don't think one should overemphasise this – Rommel's name, and it was a good name – was built up by the fact of his own personal mobility on the battlefield. He had a flair for being at the crucial point at the right moment, to give orders on the spot and so forth, and incidentally be got a great write-up from our own press correspondents. But if there was a danger of Rommel's legend causing inferiority complexes among our own people, this was really a reflection on our own leaders. It implied lack of confidence in our own tactical commanders and lack of confidence perhaps in our own equipment. But I don't think one should over-emphasise this because even after the [May–June 1942] defeat at Gazala and the retreat right back to Alamein the fighting formations were not licked – they were bewildered.
MAJOR GENERAL HARDING
I can remember being told by representatives from London that the two-pounder anti-tank gun mounted in the Crusader tank was about the best weapon there was. It wasn't, because it couldn't really destroy a German tank at all. On the other hand, it did take us a long time, longer than perhaps it should have done, to appreciate the fact that in modern war with armour and air power it is a combination of armour, infantry, artillery and engineers, the whole thing supported by air power, and this took us a long time to learn.
COLONEL WESTPHAL
In the first time of the African campaign we had the advantage to have better tanks, but then from month to month the British on the other side became stronger and stronger, and the equipment and ammunition became better. So the only advantage we had at last was perhaps sometimes a tactic more mobile than the other side. The task of the German Africa Army was only to bind a lot of troops of the other side so long as possible and in this manner help the Eastern Front and to cover Italy from a landing operation. I have never the meaning that we would have the possibility to occupy Egypt or to reach or cross the Suez Canal. Younger people than I were quite more optimistic and were influenced by some great success we had in these two years – I was always not pessimistic but of a critical nature, and I think it was quite good.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM
I think the main problem was disparity of tactics. We had been trained to fire on the move, to execute a sort of cavalry charge on tracks, and to handle our men that way. The Germans had studied this problem much more than we between the wars – and also, of course, Rommel had experience from northern France and so had many of his tank crews – and they appreciated that the tank's best action against his enemy is to wait for him to come on, sitting in a hull-down position, and that if they're caught in the open to decoy the enemy on to their anti-tank guns and not to hurl themselves at a brick wall, and that their real objective is to find a weak spot and to pull themselves through it. But above all armoured forces must be ready to concentrate quickly in overwhelming force at the right point. I think in this context one must think of radio – I don't think that the higher commanders in the early part of this campaign really understood that mobile ops cannot function efficiently without first-class radio communications – and over and over again you'll find instances where the command man was not on the air at the crucial moment. As a German report said, 'At no time and at no place did the British High Command feed in concentrations of their available resources at the critical point.'
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.*37 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.
MAJOR HANS HINRICHS
German engineer officer
In Russia the fighting is a war of infantry and of single tanks. In the desert the fighting is characterised by the opposition of tanks in larger quantities and of air support. Air support, for instance, did not play a considerable role in Russia, at least not in the central part where the troops had enough cover. In Africa, air superiority was all-decisive. In Russia you saw the individual enemy soldier, in the desert you hardly saw the British tanks.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
It's a very funny thing, a battlefield, it's extraordinary how inanimate the whole thing seems. There was a little bit of an action going on in the right-hand corner of some sort, for the rest there were people lying about smoking. It's one of the very singular things that films and books don't bring out, although I think Tolstoy perhaps is an exception, of a battlefield where nothing seems to be happening, the action is always somewhere in another corner and it's a decisive thing. And then they ask you if you were there.
LIEUTENANT PULLINI
At the end of the battle of El Alamein we were left there without transport because we were paratroopers and had very little transport of our own. So far as I know the majority of the German troops withdrew before us and not much transport was left for us.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM
When viewers see the pictures of El Alamein battlefield they will see these wide areas as flat as a pancake and therefore let us bear in mind that Eighth Army had to assault, had to cross, this very open desert into defensive positions organised, sited and developed over a period of months under German direction with three belts of interlocking defensive positions. The minefields were up to five and a half miles in depth and behind them stood the 15th and 21st Panzer divisions. While admittedly we had superiority of forces and Air Force by anyone's standards, under these conditions the assaulting force was obliged to be considerably superior to that of the defender.
MAJOR GENERAL DE GUINGAND
Alex showed Montgomery a signal he'd just had from the Prime Minister saying we must attack in September and that it was absolutely essential. Alex said to Monty, 'What shall I answer?' and Monty said, 'I'm not going to attack in September.' So he said to me, 'Freddie, give me your pen.' He wrote in his very clear handwriting and said, 'Send this to the Prime Minister.' The first point he made was that Rommel was attacking on 31st August and it would cause delay in our preparations, secondly that training and getting used to the new tanks and equipment would take longer than September before we were ready and he finished up saying if we are forced to attack in September it will probably fail. If we wait until October then it will be a complete success. And he said, 'Alex, send that off to Winston,' and Alex read it and said, 'Yes, I will,' which he did. Any Prime Minister getting a document like that from the military commanders, he couldn't go against it. If he forced us to attack in September and it failed then there it was on the record that the principal military authority had said it would fail.
MAJOR GENERAL HARDING
The landing in Algeria was a long way off, it took quite a time to reach even within striking distance of Tunis and I doubt if they'd have got there as soon as they did but for the defeat of Rommel at El Alamein and the subsequent advance of the Eighth Army. 1 think the two fronts were too far apart for that to be effective. You can't win a war, much less a campaign, without defeating the enemy. If Rommel had been able to leave small containing forces facing us in the desert and used the whole of his force against the First Army and the Americans who landed with them, then I think it would have ever got to within striking distance of Tunis.
COLONEL WESTPHAL
At Alamein Hitler did not allow the retreat from El Alamein in the direction to west. But we didn't obey, we pursued the retreat and that was the only possibility – to stand about six months in North Africa to cover the southern flank of Europe. If we had obeyed this, to stand at Alamein, defend every piece of soil of the desert, we would be surrounded and captured by Montgomery two days later. But sometime God in heaven did help us, we had heavy rain in Nile Delta and therefore the Air Force couldn't start, that was our luck. Otherwise the Army would have been destroyed before we could reach the Halfaya Pass.
MAJOR GENERAL HARDING
As far as the High Command was concerned there was, just before the breakthrough operation was launched, a question as to whether or not there was sufficient resources left to break the German front and to make a hole big enough to allow pursuing forces to get through. A battle like that was a battle of attrition and it was fought, rightly, in a way in which you had to continue the offensive until you had broken the enemy's power of resistance, and this does take time, especially under those sort of conditions.
COLONEL WESTPHAL
It was very funny: we had only one road from El Alamein through Mersa Matruh, Bardia, Tobruk and Benghazi, and on this one road we marched. At first the German division then following a British armoured division, then again a German division followed by another British division. But they did not attack us and we couldn't make anything because we had no petrol.
MAJOR GENERAL HARDING
I was actually in favour of pressing on all-out, hard as I could go and as fast as I could go. On the other hand I think Montgomery was very conscious of the fact that we had already been twice up and twice back and he was determined not to be pushed back for a third time. A defeat then or a failure to exploit the success of Alamein would have had very far-reaching consequences on morale and confidence and on the general position throughout the war. I think he was right – I thought he was overcautious at the time but looking back at it all, I think he was right to be cautious and maybe there was something between the two views.