Adrian Stewart - Victory in the Desert: Montgomery and the Eighth Army 1942-1943

To the officers and men of the Eighth Army who shared their experiences with me.

So now to these campaigns to these golden pages of the history of British arms.

Major General Sir Francis de Guingand, Chief of Staff, Eighth Army in Operation Victory, referring to Eighth Armys victories in North Africa.

By mid-April 1943, the Second World War had raged for over three-and-a-half years and although even the most pessimistic could feel that the tide of Axis conquest had at last begun to ebb, the prospects for the future still appeared bleak in the extreme. The Allied powers had now to liberate the occupied territories, then strike at the heart of the enemy homelands. It was a task that many feared would prove endless.

There was ample excuse for this belief. In North Africa, an Anglo-American army had for four months been striving in vain to break through the Axis defences on the western border of Tunisia. In Russia, the Germans, recovering with remarkable resilience from the disasters of the previous winter, had begun a new offensive. In North-West Europe, France, the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway were still in enemy hands; in South-East Asia, so were Burma and Malaya. In the Pacific, the Americans had captured the strategically vital island of Guadalcanal in February 1943, but this had taken them six months and even then the Japanese had successfully evacuated the remains of their garrison.

There had, however, been one Allied triumph, which provided a dramatic contrast to the slow progress made elsewhere an achievement to delight and justify the resolute, to astonish and hearten the gloomy. In fewer than six months, the British Eighth Army had conquered the enemy-occupied part of Egypt, the whole of Cyrenaica, eastern province of Italys North African colony of Libya, the whole of its western province, Tripolitania, and a good three-quarters of Tunisia. It had also, as would shortly transpire, ensured that the remains of the two Axis armies in North Africa could not be evacuated.

No wonder then that de Guingand refers to these campaigns as golden pages. No wonder that General Sir David Fraser in his history of the British Army in the Second World War, And We Shall Shock Them, declares that Eighth Armys succession of victories, its triumphant march from one end of North Africa to the other had already become renowned and will remain immortal. Yet in practice most later accounts of the fighting in North Africa, let alone those of the Second World War in general, have tended to dismiss Eighth Armys conquests after the great Battle of El Alamein with only the briefest of descriptions.

El Alamein admittedly is normally described in some detail and rightly so but even here justice is rarely done to Eighth Army as a whole. De Guingand, for instance, reviews the battle by reference to what he calls the stepping stones to victory. All of these are High Command decisions. Vital though these undeniably were, the emphasis placed upon them tends to hide the ultimate reason why victory was achieved. As Brigadier C.E. Lucas Phillips, an artillery officer in Eighth Army at the time, points out in his Alamein:Under the direction of a commander of the first order, it was very much a soldiers battle.

Moreover, it has frequently been overlooked that the mutual trust between the commander and his soldiers, which, Field Marshal Montgomery tells us in his Memoirs, was to make Alamein possible, had been forged in the earlier battle of Alam Haifa. And Alam Haifa also, as de Guingand sadly remarks, is hardly ever spoken of nowadays and comparatively few knew it took place. It deserves study and a prominent position in our military history.

This is doubly the case because prior to Alam Haifa there had been a long period during which the Allied forces in North Africa had endured continuous disappointments. It was not that they had known only defeat. There had been advances, but these had always seemed to be followed by retreats. There had been successes, but these had never seemed to bring any lasting benefits. Hopes had been raised, but they had been dashed again so often that there were few indeed who had not begun to wonder whether final victory would ever be achieved.

Perhaps because they left such lasting scars, these ordeals have by contrast received much subsequent attention. Nonetheless it seems right to relate them in outline once more, for they provide the sombre background against which the forgotten victories of Eighth Army shine all the more brightly.

The war in North Africa had begun as long ago as 10 June 1940, when the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had declared war on a Britain he believed was doomed, though it was only on 13 September that his troops, under Marshal Rudolfo Graziani, finally invaded Egypt. Four days later they had captured a few white mud-brick buildings, a mosque and a landing ground, which the Italian communiques elevated to the status of the town of Sidi Barrani.