Desert War

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Text originally published in 1942 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

DESERT WAR

BY

RUSSELL HILL

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENT 5

ILLUSTRATIONS 6

MAPS 7

INTRODUCTORY 9

CHAPTER I—THE SOUTHERN OASES 13

CHAPTER II—THE FRONTIER AREA 22

CHAPTER III—TOBRUK UNDER FIRE 31

CHAPTER IV—THE MEN IN COMMAND 42

CHAPTER V—BRITISH BLITZ 57

CHAPTER VI—ALL OF OUR OWN AIRCRAFT RETURNED SAFELY 72

CHAPTER VII—STRATEGIC WITHDRAWAL 80

CHAPTER VIII—TOBRUK WINS FREE 91

CHAPTER IX—BATTLE AT GAZALA 102

CHAPTER X—ADVANCE FROM DERNA 112

CHAPTER XI—CHRISTMAS IN BENGASI 123

CHAPTER XII—SECOND WITHDRAWAL 133

CONCLUSION 146

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 148

DEDICATION

TO

E. H. H.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I owe a great debt to all of the men and officers of the British Army and the Royal Air Force who have made this book possible by helping me to see and report the events described.

I should also like to thank those of my friends who have made valuable suggestions while I was writing and revising the book, and particularly Mrs. Feli Paton; Mrs. Lucy Moorehead; Captain Geoffrey Keating; Squadron Leader George W. Houghton; and my father, Frank Ernest Hill.

I am indebted to the British Army Film Unit for the photographs included in the book; and to the New York Herald Tribune for its helpful co-operation while I was reporting the campaign, as well as for permission to quote from the dispatches I wrote.

RUSSELL HILL

Cairo, April 1942

ILLUSTRATIONS

Indian troops in position outside Derna.

Men of the 4th tanks after their last battle.

Lieutenant-General Ritchie and Air Vice-Marshal Coningham.

The Commander-in-Chief, General Auchinleck, reviewing troops in Cairo.

American-made light tanks and bombers maneuvering in the desert.

German tanks ablaze after the battles of Sidi Rezegh.

Australians in Bren carriers moving up in battle formation to the assault.

Late Major-General Jock Campbell, V.C., and another British desert general driving into Bengasi, Christmas morning, 1941.

Major-General Frank Messervy and General’s G-1 (divisional general staff officer).

German prisoners just after the successful British assault upon Bardia.

Sunset at point 204, Gazala.

South African armored cars enter Bengasi, Christmas morning, 1941.

South African armored cars driving into the ancient Greek city of Cyrene.

Sunken Axis shipping in Bengasi.

Photographs from the British War Office and British Press Service

MAPS

Cyrenaica and the Western Desert.

Cyrenaica in relation to the European war.

The fighting between Halfaya and Tobruk (November 1941—January 1942).

Axis positions in sector of Tobruk breakout.

The Battle of Gazala (December 12—17, 1941) and the positions held by the opposing armies in April 1942.

INTRODUCTORY

IN THE autumn of the year 1941 a modern British army, based on the Nile Delta, moved out of the Western Desert of Egypt into the desert of Libya and challenged the German Wehrmacht to a fight. That was at a time when the powerful armies that Adolf Hitler had conceived and given birth to and seen grow to maturity had not lost one single important battle on any land front during over two years of war. The retreat in Russia had not begun. The Germans regarded themselves as invincible. So it was a daring thing to challenge their armies to fight. Yet in the British camp there was nothing but optimism. It probably came from the conviction that, given equally good or superior weapons in at least equal quantities, the British could beat the supposedly invincible Wehrmacht. Winston Churchill expressed this confidence when he said that for the first time the British forces who would meet the enemy were at least as well equipped as he was. And in that spirit the campaign began.

Two weeks later, after the bitterest and bloodiest of battles, this same British army had lost some of that pristine optimism. For the German forces, small though they were in comparison with those which were being held by the Russians on a fifteen-hundred-mile front, had managed to hold their own against everything that could be sent against them. Nothing had been occupied but some miles of wasteland in the southern part of the Libyan Desert, country that had never been held or even patrolled by the enemy. And the offensive weapons of the British Army had been blunted. Hundreds of tanks had been destroyed or disabled. At least one brigade and several whole battalions had been lost, while other units had suffered heavy casualties. It began to look as though the German legend of invincibility were no myth after all.

Another three weeks and the German Afrika Korps was at last on the run. It could not be said that it was the first German defeat, for the Russians had already inflicted that, routing the enemy at Rostov and chasing him back along the northern shore of the Sea of Azov. But the British too, it seemed, had proved they could beat the Germans. Tobruk had been relieved—or relieved itself, as the Tobrukers preferred to put it. Derna had been occupied. Bengasi was being evacuated. The enemy was leaving Cyrenaica and preparing to defend his last African strongholds in Tripolitania. The only question appeared to be whether he would be able to hold on to that province.

Yet six weeks later the Germans were back again. Bengasi had been retaken and Derna had fallen to them. Again Tobruk was threatened and one wondered whether they would once more come as far as the Egyptian frontier. Had everything been in vain? Had nothing been gained by the first British Blitz? How could such a thing have happened? This time there was no excuse of aid to Greece—possibly justified by political though not by military considerations.

There is no easy answer, no single answer to these questions. One cannot take such and such a leader, general or statesman, and say: He was responsible for the mistakes made Nor can one take the easy course and lay the blame for everything on luck, the weather, difficult communications, or the necessity for sending men and materials to other fronts.

It may be that the answer can best be given by telling as factually as possible the story of what happened. As correspondent in the Middle East for the New York Herald Tribune it was my good fortune to be present both behind the front while the offensive was being prepared and at the front while it was being fought. I watched the materials for war as they arrived at Red Sea ports from America and England, from Australia and South Africa and India. I saw the same weapons on the roads leading to the front, and saw them again in the hands of the fighters who were going to use them. I had a chance to speak with most of the men who planned and directed the campaign on the ground and in the air. I also spoke, of course, with hundreds of the men who played less ambitious roles, from brigadiers and colonels and squadron leaders, down to sergeants and corporals and soldiers in the ranks. Nearly always I was treated with frankness. I was told things that were secret and things that were not, I was allowed to go where I pleased and see what I wanted. During the battle I was welcomed by the smaller units in the forward areas as a friend and ally—someone fighting in the same cause. What I have done, therefore, is to report what I saw before and during this battle. Naturally I could not tell everything I saw or say everything I know. Even were I not bound by censorship, I would not want to reveal anything that would give information to the enemy—who is now officially our enemy, as he has been our enemy unofficially for a long time. But by telling what I could of this campaign as I witnessed it, I have tried to give an adequate answer to the questions posed above. I have not confined myself entirely to reporting. I have commented and criticized as much as possible. But above all I have tried to let the facts speak for themselves. I would ask the reader to bear in mind, however, that what I write has been censored. I have not written anything I do not believe, and I take full responsibility for what is set down. I have endeavored honestly to tell nothing but the truth, but could not, perforce, always tell the whole truth, even to the best of my knowledge and belief.

My sources have been almost entirely my own journal, notes, copies of dispatches to the Herald Tribune, and my memories, which are still fresh. In some passages, mostly descriptive, I have not altered much of the wording I used in my stories sent to the newspaper, since the experiences were more vivid in my mind at the time I first wrote of them than they could be several months later.

It may be useful to say a few words here about the setting of the campaign. One of the maps I am including in the book is of the whole war theater of northern Africa, eastern Asia, southern Russia, and the Mediterranean. I wanted to show Cyrenaica in its relation to the other fronts with which it is closely connected. A study of this map might put Cyrenaica into its proper perspective better than any words could. For one thing, we talk of the vast distances in the desert. They are vast. Lines of communication are long and difficult. But compare Cyrenaica with the whole of the area shown on the map and it will be seen to be very small indeed.

One might wonder, then, of what advantage it could be to conquer this relatively small piece of land. Certainly it has no resources of any value. There are no mines, no forests, no sources of electric power, not even any fields beyond some small patches of ground on which a few thousand Italian colonists have managed to eke out a precarious living. It might be asked, to use a slang expression: What was the big idea, anyway, of fighting for Cyrenaica? Well, there were several ideas; here are some of the main ones.

1 Protection of the Nile Delta, the naval base at Alexandria, the Suez Canal, and, indirectly, of the rest of the Middle East.

With the closing of the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal has lost most of its importance. At best it can be used only for ships bound for ports in the Middle East itself. But Alexandria is important. It is the home of the Eastern Mediterranean Fleet. If Alexandria goes, the fleet must go, and if the fleet goes, so must the Middle East. The Nile Delta is important because it grows cotton and wheat. The British don’t need the cotton, but the Germans do, and it is militarily advantageous to prevent them from getting hold of it. The British need the wheat and so do the Germans. Finally, Egypt is the front door to the rest of the Middle East. From a military point of view, the most important thing there is the oil. It comes up in the wells of the Mosul region of northern Iraq and flows in pipe lines from Kirkuk to Tripoli in the Lebanon, and Haifa in Palestine. There is more oil in southwestern Persia. It is pumped up in the Ahwaz region and flows to refineries of which the largest—incidentally the largest in the world—is at Abadan. The biggest outlet for this oil is the Iraqi port of Basra. There are other less important riches in the Middle East. To develop the argument, the German Army in Libya constitutes a constant potential threat to these riches. If that army could be destroyed or thrown out of Libya the threat would no longer exist. So defense was a primary motive in the offensive.

2. Aid to Russia.

The Red Army had been fighting a heroic rearguard action for five months. It was hard pressed at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad It was falling back upon the oil-producing region of the Caucasus, whose occupation by the Germans would eventually paralyze the Russian economic system and give the Nazis themselves large quantities of the oil which they badly needed to continue the successful prosecution of the war. If forced to fight in Libya, the Germans might have to divert important supplies from the Russian front. The moral effect on the Russians might be even more beneficial than the actual physical relief they would get. And in England itself ever louder voices were being heard demanding a diversion to help the Russians. It would be useful to do something to satisfy those who spoke thus.

3. The need for a British victory over the Germans.

British soldiers had shown that they could beat Italians. But they had yet to prove that they could defeat the main enemy. It was necessary to show the English people and the world that Britons were equal to Germans as fighters. It was all very well to say that on previous occasions when it had met the Wehrmacht, the British Army had lost because the country had not prepared for war, and its soldiers were therefore at a disadvantage with respect to equipment and training. That still did not prove that Britons would win in a fair fight. So the matter was to be put to the test.

4. Elimination of the war on two fronts in the Middle East.

All through the summer the British had had to be ready to fight on an eastern front as well as on the desert front in the west. On three occasions—Iraq, Syria, Iran—they had actually fought. With those areas pacified, there was no immediate prospect of the eastern (or northern) front being reopened, but there was every likelihood of its becoming extremely active in the spring of 1942. If Libya could be conquered and the German Army then destroyed or forced to evacuate Tripoli, a relatively small force would suffice to hold it, and the main body of arms and supplies arriving in the Middle East could go to Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, or the Caucasus—wherever they might be needed. This did not entirely dispose of the objection that the Germans might force Vichy to let them retire into French North Africa. But it was hoped to destroy the Afrika Korps in Cyrenaica before it ever had a chance to retire to Tunisia. Then if the Germans wanted to continue fighting in North Africa, they would have to send a new army to the French possessions. Since the Afrika Korps is a body of specialized troops, highly trained for desert warfare, it seemed unlikely that another similar force could be mustered on short notice.

5. A move toward winning the Battle of the Mediterranean.

With bases at Bengasi and Tripoli, the Mediterranean Fleet would enjoy considerably greater freedom of action. It would become less hazardous to send convoys through the Mediterranean. Sicily would be threatened. Italy could be made to suffer far more from air raids than it has so far. Italian morale would be still further depressed by more intensified bombing and by the loss of the last Italian colony in Africa.

These were some of the ideas that may be presumed to have motivated the British higher command when it ordered the big push in Libya to begin.

CHAPTER I—THE SOUTHERN OASES

THERE is no very good reason why that barren waste which stretches from the outskirts of Alexandria to the frontiers of Libya should be called the Western Desert. The same expanse of nothingness reaches on to the west for a score of hundreds of miles beyond Egypt. An American looking at the map of Africa would be likely to call the small portion which lies within the boundaries of Egypt the Eastern Desert. But for those who live in Egypt it is the Western Desert, and the Eastern Desert is the barren Sinai Peninsula and the sands beyond.

This Western Desert, for so we must call it, is three hundred miles in width, and penetrates inland from the southern coast of the Mediterranean more miles than we need consider. It is a military reservation. Although it is a part of Egypt, few of the Egyptians huddled within the narrow but fertile confines of the Nile Delta have ever seen more than the edge of it. In October of last year it was a great army camp. The 8th Army of His Britannic Majesty’s forces had made it a home and covered it with scattered tents and trucks and with a myriad of tracks, crossing one another at crazy angles, going from nowhere to nowhere. There were no towns, no trees, no rivers, no mountains, but only characterless expanses of limestone covered in places by hard, packed sand. There were wadis—gullies cut by torrents, which not more than once in a year, sprung from a sudden thunderstorm and rushing down from the high places, flooded the low ground near the coast. Here it was that a hundred thousand men or more lived and made ready to fight.

Into this desert country I drove one day in October 1941, leaving Cairo behind, passing Alexandria, going westward along the coast. I did not know it at the time, but it happened to be exactly one month before the beginning of the long-planned and long-awaited offensive that was to take these fighters out of the Western Desert into another desert farther west, and then beyond that into the green fields of Cyrenaica, one of the last evidences that the land along the northern coast of Africa had once been so rich that it was necessary to sow a part of it with salt to prevent crops from growing there.

With three other newspaper reporters I drove in an army station wagon to a point in the desert which for reasons of military security must still be nameless. It was the headquarters of this 8th Army. After hours of speeding along a hard, surfaced road within sight of the sea, our car turned off onto a track which took us shortly to our camp. War correspondents attached to the British forces belong to a unit called Public Relations, whose duty it is to act as liaison between the correspondents and the rest of the army. To the Public Relations camp we came. It was a group of some dozen tents and two dozen vehicles, dispersed and camouflaged in such a way as to make them difficult targets from the air. The center of the camp was the officers’ mess. Two pits had been dug, each twenty feet square and three feet deep, connected by a narrow trench. Sandbags had been piled around the edges of the pits, and a tent hung over each one. The result was two good-sized rooms connected by a narrow corridor. One was the combined writing-room and dining-room, accommodating thirty people at three rough tables with wooden benches. The second room was the bar. There the officers and correspondents sat on camp chairs or sofas made of sandbags and offered one another whisky and water, gin and lime, or beer as casually as if they had been at one of the most comfortable bars in Cairo.

After reporting our arrival to Staff Captain Madison, who was in charge of the camp, we were allotted to our tents, each large enough to accommodate two or three. Our kit was taken out of the car, we set up our camp beds, washed in a canvas basin, made our temporary homes as comfortable as possible, and went to the mess. There was time before supper to talk over plans for visiting the forward areas.

It happened that a censorship ban on any mention of the oases of Siwa and Giarabub had recently been lifted. Several of the correspondents were anxious to visit these places, expecting them to provide good color stories. Moreover, it was thought that when the offensive began, Giarabub, which lies across the Libyan frontier, 125 miles from the coast, might be used as a starting-point for some of the operations. For a trip to these two places extensive preparations were necessary. Trucks had to be loaded with at least a week’s supplies of food and water, and with enough gasoline for traveling several hundred miles across the desert.

Captain Madison told us the trip could not be laid on until Monday morning. It was then Saturday evening. We would have to spend Sunday at headquarters. A newspaperman who is used to working against deadlines and jealously counting every hour is impatient at first at such delays. But he soon learns that they are inevitable and becomes reconciled to spending a week on a trip which may yield nothing more than one or two feature stories. Later on, when the campaign had started, we all felt well recompensed because the knowledge we had gained of the nature of the terrain and the composition of the forces gave us an invaluable background.

We planned to devote Sunday to getting provisions and completing our preparations. We had time to go down to a little bay and swim in the salty water. Hundreds of troops were doing the same, diving naked into the surf, and coming out to lie in the sun on the hard, warm sand. Although the