THE BATTLE OF EL ALAMEIN
FORTRESS IN THE SAND
FRED MAJDALANY
FRED MAJDALANY 2013
Fred Majdalany has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published by J. B.LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1965
This edition published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
CONTENTS
Extract: THE WAR WALK by NIGEL JONES
PREFACE
I am indebted to Captain B. H. Liddell Hart for documentary material which he kindly placed at my disposal; to Dr. Brian Bond, Lecturer in History at Liverpool University, who read the manuscript and was able to draw my attention to some factual slips; to Mr. Hanson W. Baldwin, Military Editor of the New York Times , for a number of valuable editorial suggestions; and to the ever-helpful Mr. D. W. King, O.B.E., of the War Department Library.
F.M.
Little Saling, Essex.
September 1964
1. A PRIVATE WAR
The strategy of the Second World War gave rise, in its diffuse worldwide implication to a number of campaigns so distinctive in character and locality that they seemed to aspire to an existence of their own outside the mainstream of the war. Of these private wars, as one may think of them, none was more self-contained and even esoteric than the campaign which the nations of the British Commonwealth fought against the German-Italian alliance in the Western Desert of Egypt and Libya between the autumns of 1940 and 1942.
In time it spanned the critical period of Britain's fighting recovery from near-defeat and seemingly forlorn resistance without allies to the unmistakable turning point that placed the feasibility of ultimate victory beyond doubt. It was this timing that above all gave the desert campaign its special significance in the British war context of 1939-45. It is indicative of the interlocking vagaries of modern global strategy that this battle of a nation for survival should have been fought, by her main land force at that time in the field, three thousand miles from the mother country, in the empty desert of North Africa.
But if its timing gave the campaign in the desert its historic significance, what gave to it its special nature and its mystique for it was no less than that was the ground over which it was fought; ground, the raw material of the soldier, always in the end gives a battle or a campaign its persona and its uniqueness.
Some account of this battleground and the campaign as a whole must be given if we are to re-create, in its moral and psychological as well as its historical and purely military perspective, the battle which brought the campaign to its grand climax, the second battle of El Alamein.
When, in the summer of 1940, the fall of France completed Hitler's conquest of Europe and the British people prepared in pugnacious impotence to fight the invasion of their shores that then seemed inevitable, the defence of the United Kingdom itself was scarcely more important to Britain than the defence of Egypt. Not only because of the Suez Canal, the vital Egyptian link in the imperial lifeline to India and Australasia, but also because of oil. Egypt was militarily the key to the vast Middle East on which Britain was almost entirely dependent for oil, and the mechanization of armies between the two world wars had made oil as important as ammunition. An army no longer marched on its stomach but on its gasoline tanks. Quite simply, defeat in the Middle East could knock Britain out of the war in a matter of weeks. With this bleak consideration in the forefront of her strategic thinking, Britain had long-standing agreements with Egypt under which British naval, military and air forces were permanently stationed in that country. These bases included the great port of Alexandria, which with Gibraltar and Malta completed a trio of naval bastions that gave the Royal Navy command of the Mediterranean. Although a subsequent generation of Egyptian rulers would repudiate these arrangements as disguised imperialism, Egypt's rulers at the time were grateful for the money as well as for the military protection that went with the deal. They were not unmindful that Mussolini's addition of Abyssinia to an Italian African empire already established in Libya was something that affected Egypt too.
When Hitler's victory in the west emboldened his weaker partner Mussolini to bring Italy into the war, Britain had two divisions in Egypt to pit against an Italian army of 215,000 in Cyrenaica and another 200,000 in Abyssinia, Eritrea and Somaliland to the south.
That was in June, as Winston Churchill issued his rallying calls to resistance, and the tired soldiers from Dunkirk, along with the fresh soldiers who were daily being added to their number, stood to arms around the British coastline watching for the German invasion fleets. In August and September Hitler's invasion was frustrated by the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force who, in the Battle of Britain, prevented the Luftwaffe from gaining the vital air superiority that was the essential preliminary. When it became clear that the invasion was off, at least until the following spring, it began to look as though the British Army's next battles would be fought, a little incredibly as far as the ordinary Briton was concerned, at the threshold of Egypt. For this was where the threat to Britain's Middle East oil would come. Britain's latest generation of young fighting men would fight not in the Maginot Line, as they had expected to do; not in Flanders, like their fathers; not in the pillboxes and bunkers that had hurriedly been thrown up on the coast of their native land-but in the hot, waterless western approach to, of all places, Egypt and against Italians. This was not the picture of war on which they had been brought up by their fathers. Nor was it the picture painted by books and films of the 1914-18 war.
The Western Desert is a torrid wasteland extending from the Mediterranean to the Sahara and taking in most of Egypt and Libya. But for practical purposes that part of it in which the campaign of 1940-42 was fought may be defined as a stretch of 500 miles embracing the western two-thirds of Egypt and the eastern half of Libya, the then Italian colony of Cyrenaica.
This was not so much an area as a field of play, 700 miles long, with Alexandria and Benghazi as the goals between which the tide of war commuted in rapid advance and retreat, favouring first one side, then the other. The width of the field was whatever the opposing tank generals chose or had the supply capability to make it.
The Western Desert is a desolate scorching emptiness; not the golden sand dunes of romantic imagination, but ranging in colour from dun to grit gray, and near the coast, because of a limestone base, a dazzling white that in the heat of midday is almost incandescent. There is no vegetation except for patches and tufts of stringy camel scrub; no living creatures other than scorpions, little horned vipers, and a few other reptiles and rodents including the desert rat. There are myriads of tiny snails and even more myriads of flies, one of the two great scourges of the desert soldiers. Occasionally a gazelle might be glimpsed, or a few Bedouin proceeding, as is their mysterious way, from nowhere to nowhere.
On the coast it rains a few times a year, but in land there may be no rain for years. Water, therefore, can be found only by boring, and every drop the fighting man needs must be carried to him an additional strain on the supply services which, in this kind of warfare, are already overburdened.
The first impression of the desert is that it is featureless and quite flat except for some low ridges and conspicuous high points of rock which stand out starkly in isolation in certain areas. Offsetting these ridges are a number of depressions of corresponding depth and an escarpment which is a feature of the whole area, extending along the coast of Cyrenaica and then, inside the Egyptian border, turning southeast.
