Blood tears and folly, p.30
Blood, Tears and Folly, page 30
With its braced wings and fixed landing gear, it could fly as slowly as 50 mph without risk of stalling. This proved a useful facility that night when negotiating the almost invisible balloon cables. One pilot remembered asking: ‘Where’s that bloody balloon barrage?’, and his observer answering: ‘We’ve been through it once and are just going through it again.’3 The slow speed made it possible to spot the defence booms at sea-level. The underwater anti-torpedo nets went down to 25 feet and the torpedoes ran at 30 feet. To run accurately an aerial torpedo must be put into the water gently and from very low altitude. One Swordfish went so low that its wheels touched the water and sent up a great sheet of spray.
A second strike of five torpedo aircraft, two bombers and two flare carriers flew off about thirty minutes later. They left behind a plane which had been slightly damaged in a collision, but the pilot managed to get his plane airworthy and hurried after the others. He arrived fifteen minutes after the second strike had departed and made a solo bombing attack with every gun in Taranto firing at him.
FIGURE 22: Fairey Swordfish from HMS Illustrious
It will come as no surprise that the only two bombs that hit, failed to explode. The torpedoes, however, struck three battleships, one of which never sailed again. For such a small operation, and the loss of only two aircraft, it was a great victory, and early proof that the aircraft-carrier had become the master weapon of naval warfare. Three men survived from the two lost Swordfish, and the Italian navy magnanimously treated their captives with impeccable courtesy. The carrier Illustrious turned and sped to rejoin the fleet where, by Cunningham’s order, all ships displayed the signal ‘Manoeuvre well executed’.
The well executed manoeuvre was not lost on the US navy. Its chief of operations sent a warning to Pearl Harbor telling Admiral Kimmel that the British operation proved aerial torpedoes could be made to run true in shallow water. But no anti-torpedo devices were installed at the American moorings, on the excuse that they would narrow Pearl Harbor’s ship channel and cause inconvenience. Admiral Kimmel told Washington that he would make no changes until a light and efficient net was developed.4
The Western Desert
The desert is a virtually uninhabited region about the size and shape of India. It stretches from the River Nile to Tunisia about 1,200 miles away to the west, and 1,000 miles south to the place where there is enough light rain to produce scrubland. The western part of Libya was called Tripolitania. Here stands Libya’s largest city, Tripoli, through which most Axis supplies passed. In eastern Libya, which was called Cyrenaica, the port of Tobruk was equally vital for the supply services. The British held Tobruk for most of the war.
Bordering the Mediterranean there is a flat coastal strip from Alexandria in Egypt to Cyrenaica. The seashore, made of limestone sand, is of a memorable whiteness, especially in the summer when the sea is blue. Few and far between, there are towns and villages with miserable palms, bushes and patches of cultivated ground. Many of the names on the map in this region – El Daba, Fuka and Buq Buq – were no more than names: no houses, no people, no drinking water. Here in summer it becomes too hot to fight. In winter there can be a heavy rainfall which turns the dust-like sand into sticky mud. Most of the fighting took place in this northern strip of the desert, which is about 40 miles wide. But the strip was not manned; this was not a war of fixed fronts, rather a war of forts – secured by barbed wire and vast minefields – and moving columns. There were no civilians to get in the way, just rodents and reptiles and dense clouds of flies. ‘The Desert,’ said General Rommel, ‘is a tactician’s paradise and a quartermaster’s hell.’
The coastal region is higher than the desert behind it. Sooner or later anyone travelling southwards encounters the Great Sand Sea. In some places there is an escarpment which drops away steeply, forming an obstacle that makes movement south difficult for wheeled and even tracked vehicles. This is why the El Alamein region became so vital for the defence of Egypt; for here the Qattara Depression and the sea produce a narrow strip where an army can stand and fight without fear of being outflanked.
At El Agheila the Great Sand Sea comes near enough to the coast to provide another place where an army can rest its flank. Except at these two spots, an army can find long-term security only by means of a fortified perimeter around a water supply, and a port through which supplies can come. So it was that the entire North African campaign was fought for possession of three places: El Alamein in Egypt, El Agheila in Cyrenaica, and the port of Tobruk about halfway between them.
Along the Libyan coast there was a good road; the via Balbia. The section of the road the British built in Egypt was a simple layer of asphalt which could not withstand the continuous weight of heavy vehicles.5 Alongside their road the British built a very useful railway, but by the end of 1940 it didn’t go beyond Mersa Matruh (almost 150 miles short of the Libyan frontier).
Other roads in the desert were just tracks leading over broken stone and pebbles or various sorts of sand. Most of the sand is powdered clay that produces clouds of white dust, making even half a dozen walking men visible for miles. It gets in your eyes and your hair and your clothes and your drinking water. It gets through even the finest dust-filters, and nothing you see or eat is without a coating of it.
Despite the discomfort, most of the soldiers soon got used to the desert. They revelled in the informality that prevailed in this inhospitable place, and it became normal in most units for officers and men to dress as they wished. Sun helmets were soon discarded, along with all the myths about the noonday sun that the Empire’s Englishmen had enshrined in dress regulations for a hundred years. It became fashionable for officers to be seen brandishing fly-swatters and dressed in corduroy trousers, coloured scarfs, suede boots or even sandals. In the hot weather many other ranks wore nothing but khaki shorts and boots and, despite the endless tinned food, remained healthy.
Most of the desert could be traversed by motor vehicles, and hard sand made good ‘going’, although there were always horrifying rumours of parked tanks disappearing into quicksand after a shower of rain. But along the western frontier of Egypt and sprawling westward, unmapped and ever-changing, there stretched the ‘Great Sand Sea’. About 600 miles long and 150 miles wide, it is probably the greatest continuous mass of sand dunes in the world, and some of the dunes are 400 feet high. Thus, for all practical purposes, the Libya-Egypt frontier is only about 200 miles long. However the ‘sand sea’ is not impassable for dedicated travellers. ‘To get a heavy truck up 200 or 300 feet of loose sand at a slope of 1 in 3 you have to charge it very fast … But it takes a lot of confidence to charge at full speed into what looks like a vertical wall of dazzling yellow,’ said Brigadier Bagnold while lecturing at the Royal Geographical Society.6 To an expert the colour, curvature and ripple marks in sand reveal good going. Soon after war began, a group of soldiers – many of them given ranks overnight – started modifying and equipping Chevrolet trucks for the purpose of exploring and outflanking the Italians in Libya.
This small band of New Zealanders, led by men who had known the open desert for many years, was named the ‘Long Range Desert Group’ and their strange and dangerous war became something of a legend. They came out of the southern desert at first to observe, and later to attack. By studying the vehicle tracks, they could read the movements of enemy traffic as a Bedouin can estimate the age, breed and condition of every camel that has left a print. In the desert the LRDG found tracks that had been left by Fords of the Light Car Patrols of 1916. And still today the marks of Second World War armies can be seen right across the southern desert.7
Their journeys in the south took men far from medical aid or supplies, and required a special sort of nerve. The climate was more extreme than anything known in the coastal strip. There were winds so hot that they could cause collapse. One matter-of-fact report described dead or dying birds in the shade of every rock.
Distances were vast. One patrol went south far enough to make contact with French outposts in Equatorial Africa and found there Frenchmen who wanted to fight Germans. A wounded soldier was taken 700 miles in a truck for treatment at a French post in Tibesti. After that he went 3,000 miles by air to Cairo. Water and fuel were treasured; a truck was towed more than 1,000 miles to get it repaired. By the same measure, patrols would destroy all Italian transport at an outpost and sever it from the world. Sometimes things went wrong. Sharing only two gallons of water and one tin of jam, two Guardsmen and a New Zealander walked across the desert for 10 days, covering 210 miles.
General Wavell
Britain’s share of this region was ruled by Lieutenant-General Archibald Percival Wavell, one of the more interesting military personalities of the Second World War. More potentate than army commander, his position as commander-in-chief Middle East gave him control over British forces in Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Transjordan and Cyprus. When war came his armies fought in East Africa, Syria, Lebanon, Greece and Crete, and the fighting in Iraq brought the Persian Gulf into his field of responsibility. These countries were not Dominions or Empire countries. Egypt, where he had his headquarters in Cairo, remained neutral until the final few days of the war. His soldiers were usually subject to a treaty with, or invitation from, a local ruler. He was not subordinate to British political representatives – ambassadors, high commissioners, governor-generals and so on – but neither were they subordinate to him. These officials reported back to London, some to the Foreign Office and others to the Colonial Office. These Whitehall departments did not coordinate their policies with the army nor with each other. Neither did they try very hard to understand the problems Wavell had fighting the enemy.
No other man was ever given the equal of Wavell’s immense territorial responsibility.8 With scanty resources he often found himself fighting several battles at once. The political, geographical, climatic and military constraints within which he worked called for a diplomat with sharp political sense, a soldier’s training and the patience of a saint. Above all he had to please Churchill, whose deep distrust of generals was matched only by Wavell’s doubts about politicians. Churchill was ebullient and aggressive, Wavell taciturn and an exponent of mediation. Wavell was by nature hesitant, and his humility encouraged him to think that his enemies would at least be equal to his skills and resource. Churchill’s ego persuaded him that an enemy could often be overcome simply by bold action. Churchill’s sympathies were Zionist; Wavell was always fearful lest he provoked an armed Arab rebellion.
Wavell has been described as the best-educated soldier of his time. Poetry was ‘his strongest and most lasting solace’ his biographer wrote. So outstanding was Wavell’s prose that, when Churchill talked of sacking him, he was warned about the possible effect of Wavell’s postwar memoirs (which in fact were never written). Wavell’s lectures at the Staff College are still quoted, yet he attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, only briefly and his schooling at Winchester, like most British education, took no account of science, engineering or technology in any form.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Wavell was the most cultured soldier of his time. Even so, we must be cautious, for he shared his time with an immense number of soldiers. He attracted loyalty and affection as few men do. A stocky figure in leather gaiters and with a wrinkled face that almost matched them, he was not a publicist who flaunted the eccentricities of dress and manner that other generals so artfully contrived. Perhaps it was his love of poetry that ensured he wasted no words, although this directness of manner could be disconcerting. A very junior officer seated next to Brigadier Wavell at a regimental dinner in 1931 tried to respond to Wavell’s ‘good evening’.
‘Good evening, sir,’ he ventured. ‘I think you know Major X, of the Y regiment?’
‘Yes,’ said Wavell. ‘I don’t like him.’9
His wartime job wore Wavell out. When he left it, on the very day of Hitler’s invasion of Russia, he was replaced not by one man but by several. His reputation as a general is legendary, despite Churchill’s criticisms, but this is partly due to the way in which he has been given credit for every successful campaign fought under his command and seldom blamed for the avoidable failures. Praise for Wavell has over the years become a method of depicting Churchill as an ignorant, uneducated and dictatorial figure whose understanding of war never progressed beyond his precocious experiences in South Africa. It is difficult to believe that such writings would have given Wavell any pleasure.
Archie Wavell, the son of a general, said he went into the army only to please his father. When the Boer War crisis brought a sudden demand for officers his course at Sandhurst was cut from eighteen months to two terms. By September 1901, Wavell, an 18-year-old lieutenant of the Black Watch, was on his way to a war in Africa. In the First World War he served in Egypt and Palestine and returned to Palestine in 1937. Now, back again in Cairo, he was at the height of his career.
General O’Connor almost conquers Libya
The Italian army in Libya had been at war with the British in neighbouring Egypt ever since June 1940, when Mussolini attacked southern France. Here in Africa it was too hot to fight. Cautiously the Italians waited to see if the French forces in Tunisia and Algeria to the west of them were in a mood to fight. They were not. Wavell had already decided that a show of belligerence along the Egyptian frontier wire would be his best form of defence. Three days before Italy declared war Major-General R. N. O’Connor had been called from Palestine, complete with his divisional staff, to command what was called the Western Desert Force. (The misnomer ‘Western Desert’ had started in the First World War to distinguish it from the Sinai, which was called the Eastern Desert.)
O’Connor was a quiet, modest man, remembered at the staff college for his poor performance as a lecturer. In the First World War he’d fought alongside the Italians and they’d awarded him the Silver Medal for Valour. He was usually shabbily dressed in a very ordinary style, and detested publicity or show of any sort. He was seldom known to smile, and one of his subordinates said he had never seen him laugh. Despite this stern demeanour, O’Connor was a popular general of the old school. For students of warfare he is one of the most successful commanders of his time.
Two days after war began, a patrol of the 11th Hussars, equipped with Rolls-Royce armoured cars dating from the 1920s, crossed the frontier into Libya and captured two Italian officers and 59 other ranks. More such raids followed and the army adapted itself to harassment and hit-and-run patrols:
It attacked not as a combined force but in small units, swiftly, irregularly and by night. It pounced on Italian outposts, blew up the captured ammunition, and ran away. It stayed an hour, a day, or a week in a position, and then disappeared … Fort Maddalena fell, and Capuzzo. Sidi Aziz was invested. British vehicles were suddenly astride the road leading back from Bardia, shooting up convoys.10
O’Connor took a personal interest in studying the enemy at close quarters. A patrol of the 11th Hussars, pushing well into enemy-occupied territory, saw a staff car heading from the west but lowered their guns as the car got close enough for them to recognize General O’Connor. ‘I did not like this,’ said one of the Hussars.
Those who encountered the desert for the first time found the climate alone to be a daunting experience. One young officer newly arrived from England described a khamsin or sandstorm:
A darkness would come over the land and a hot wind – as if a gigantic oven door had been suddenly opened – would rush in, bringing with it a hot fog of sand. The khamsin was on us. This howling fury, blowing at a steady pace, might keep us occupied for days, filling our eyes and ears with sand, penetrating everywhere … and filling the mind with melancholy and foreboding. These depressing sandstorms, we were to learn later, were about the only things that could halt the war.11
But for the old soldiers the desert was as familiar as the weapons they used. Little had changed since the First World War. Biplane fighters flew across the barbed-wire, watched by infantrymen equipped with Lee-Enfield rifles. The machine-guns were Vickers and Lewis designs of long ago, and so were the guns: 18-pounders and 6-inch howitzers. When Marshal Italo Balbo – an internationally famous aviator before governing Libya – was killed in an aeroplane crash, the RAF flew over the Italian lines and, in a scene straight out of Hollywood’s The Dawn Patrol, dropped a note of condolence.
The Italian armed forces were even more outmoded, with armoured cars dating back to 1909 and tanks that Rommel described as ‘totally obsolete’. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani (who took over the Italian forces in Libya and the governorship after the death of Balbo) had gained a considerable reputation fighting in Italy’s colonial wars but he had no experience of fighting a modern enemy.
Mussolini ordered Graziani to attack, and in September the Italians advanced about 60 miles, with the British offering only slight resistance. At Sidi Barrani he halted to extend the metalled road and water pipeline, and build a series of fortified camps. The chain of forts, which stretched 50 miles inland, were not built for all-round defence. No two were mutually supporting (with fields of fire that would provide for a neighbour’s defence) and there was a gap of 20 miles in the line.
Rome radio proclaimed a victory. ‘All is now quiet in Sidi Barrani,’ said the announcer. ‘The shops are open and the trams running again.’12 And yet one doesn’t have to be a general to see the possibilities offered by a gap in the defences. A force could be marched through the gap and then attack the Italians from the rear. Artillery fire upon the whole camp area would create confusion and panic, while heavily armoured Matilda tanks, almost impervious to light anti-tank gunfire, moved in along Italian vehicle tracks (mapped by means of aerial photographs), thus avoiding minefields and getting right into the compounds. More infantry would follow the tanks in open trucks.
