Читать книгу The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice - John Bourne - Страница 32

Niall Barr

The numerous campaigns fought in the deserts of the Middle East during both World Wars form only one era in a long history of warfare in the region. The first recorded battle in history took place at Megiddo in Palestine between the Hittites and the Egyptians in 1468BC. During Allenby’s 1917–18 campaign in Palestine, soldiers could not help but be aware that they were fighting in regions that had a long history of warfare. The British troops who marched across the Sinai desert in 1917 came upon dusty villages and towns whose names had been learned by heart at Sunday school and Bible class:

‘And so we got to the end of the sand after a good many weeks and came to the first village in Palestine and that after seeing nothing but sand for weeks and possibly months it was – one saw this green and gold of – of what I suppose to the old Israelites was the promised land and one can well understand the aptness of the description.’¹

The news that the British Army was fighting in Palestine, and that the news reports mentioned familiar, if exotic, names created a sensation in Britain. This gave the capture of Jerusalem in December 1917 a heightened significance, and some British troops even had the unusual distinction of fighting in the holy places. One British sapper was ordered:

‘… to make sure that in the Holy Sepulchre there was no Turks lying about. So, “Go in there with your platoon again, Mathews. And make sure there’s nobody about. If there is boys, you know what to do.” So Mathews went in with his platoon and we advanced. And there was nobody there. They’d all gone.’²

Clearly, for this toughened veteran, there was no real difference where he fought. While Allenby’s men were familiar with many of the place names that they fought over, the commander of the British 60th Division was surprised to find himself connected to a previous English commander during the advance on Jerusalem. When his staff officers complained that they could not find any wells in the area around the town of Qaryet el ’Inab on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, General Sir John Shea went to the local monastery to see if the monks could help him. He related that the abbot:

‘…looked at me, and then he half smiled, and said, “General, you are the second General who found he couldn’t find any water when he came here.” I looked at him rather in surprise, and said, “Oh sir, please forgive me for saying so, but you must be wrong because I know I am leading the army, there is nothing in front of me. The 60th is the leading division.” And again he looked at me, and then he smiled and his whole body shook, and he said, “The General I was referring to was Richard Coeur de Lion.”’³

The British troops of this century who served in the deserts of the Middle East shared their battlegrounds with many previous generations of soldiers. Richard the Lionheart’s Third Crusade was far from Britain’s only previous connection with the Middle East. Thousands of regular British troops had already marched and sweated their way across the Egyptian desert by the time the first soldiers of the Great War disembarked in Egypt for the Gallipoli campaign. Abercrombie’s victory over Napoleon’s army at Alexandria in 1801 had inaugurated Britain’s modern involvement with the Middle East. The construction of the Suez Canal in 1869 meant that Egypt was of great strategic importance to Britain, and the Royal Navy’s bombardment of Alexandria in 1881 and the invasion of Egypt that led to the battle of Tel el Kebir in 1882 began the British occupation and domination of Egypt, which lasted until 1952. The numerous campaigns fought subsequently, including the ill-fated attempt to rescue General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885 and the battle of Omdurman in 1898, were all part of Britain’s experience of Empire.

Thus the troops who fought in the Middle East in 1914–18 and 1940–43 were following in the footsteps of previous generations of British soldiers, and in some respects the experience of soldiers this century was little different from their Victorian counterparts. The campaigns fought in the Middle East against the Turks during the First World War can be seen as an extension and continuation of Imperial interests, and even the desert campaigns fought in the Second World War can be seen as a form of traditional ‘defence of Empire’. Yet in a very real sense, these campaigns represented a break from the past. They were not isolated actions fought against native opponents, but major struggles for dominance in the Middle East fought on an unprecedented scale. As an integral part of much wider World Wars, they brought far-reaching change to the region and sparked a new sense of Arab nationalism among the inhabitants.

The armies that Britain sent to the Middle East during the two World Wars were also very different from their forebears. Not only were the forces sent to the Middle East during the two conflicts far larger than any previous forces, but they were composed of volunteers and conscripts rather than the toughened regular soldiers of Victoria’s army. They were also polyglot forces, which contained men and women drawn from across the British Empire. The 51st Highland Division noted proudly in its war diary on the eve of the Second Battle of Alamein that:

‘It is interesting that in this, the biggest organised offensive yet put in by the British Army in this War, the Highland Division is the only Infantry Division representing Great Britain, alongside the Australians, New Zealanders, and the South Africans.’⁴

Even this list omitted the heavy contribution made by the Indian Army, not to mention the numerous armies in exile, such as the Free French, the Polish Carpathian Brigade and the Greek Brigade, which all served in the desert during the Second World War. Nonetheless, the Highlanders’ pride in being the sole British representative among the Empire infantry was perhaps misplaced; there were many other British units serving alongside the more distinctive Dominion troops. This multi-national pattern was repeated in both wars, and lent a distinctive ‘Imperial’ character to the British armies serving in the desert.

Just as the armies sent by Britain to the Middle East were diverse and polyglot in character, so was there a bewildering variety in the campaigns in which they became involved. There were diverse campaigns fought against a range of enemies and conducted over a vast area of harsh terrain. One of the first took place in the North African desert along the Libyan/Egyptian border when the British suppressed a Senussi-led Arab uprising in 1915–16, while from 1917 onwards T. E. Lawrence, in the Hejaz, helped to support the Arab revolt against Turkish rule. Meanwhile, large-scale conventional campaigns were fought against the Turks in Sinai, Palestine and Mesopotamia. The Second World War saw an even greater variety of campaigns against a wide variety of opponents. There were short but sharp actions against the Vichy French in Syria, an Axis-sponsored revolt in Iraq, and a hard-fought campaign against the Italians in Ethiopia and Eritrea. However, the main campaign took place against the combined German and Italian forces in the Western Desert. This campaign certainly represented a break with the past, as, for the first time, the Western Desert became an enormous battleground for two major conventional opponents utilising high-intensity manoeuvre warfare.

Such a diverse mix of regions, opponents and fighting raises the difficult issue of whether it is possible to make valid comparisons between the experiences of British troops of both World Wars. While the conduct of the campaigns was often different, and the nature of the opponents and terrain often sharply in contrast, nonetheless the British soldiers of both wars who served in the Middle East were connected by their experiences of Egypt and the desert, of soldiering in a harsh environment, and through their experience of the British Army. British soldiers were aware, if only dimly, of the weight of history present in the region, and they were linked by tradition with the previous British soldiers who had served in the desert.

The desert campaigns fought in the First World War certainly influenced the soldiers of the Second World War. T. E. Lawrence, the British hero of the Arab revolt during Allenby’s campaign in Palestine, influenced an entire generation with his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom5. Many officers of the Eighth Army quite self-consciously modelled themselves on the independent spirit of Lawrence of Arabia. This was reflected in the rejection of army-issue clothing in favour of sheepskin coats, corduroy trousers and desert boots, or ‘brothel creepers’ as they were better known. The glamorous idea of the British officer as guerrilla leader also found its way into Eighth Army tactics. This was most noticeable in the formation of ‘Jock columns’, which were small independent forces of motorised infantry and artillery, designed for raiding and scouting rather than heavy fighting. Lawrence’s influence also encouraged the growth of many raiding groups such as the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), Special Air Service (SAS) and ‘Popski’s private army’, which were used for deep raids and observation of the Axis positions.

All the British troops who served in the Middle East were linked by their experience of travel. While troops serving in Flanders or France travelled to a reasonably familiar corner of Europe, the men who served in the desert had to endure a long sea voyage to a very different part of the world. After the relative inactivity on board ship and the tedium of routine days, the first experience of the Middle East could come as a shock. One Second World War veteran, whose first landfall in the Middle East was on the barren, rocky shores of Aden, remembered that, ‘I think one’s first impressions when you go ashore at a place like Aden are so mixed, you’re bewildered with the difference. It’s all so utterly different from anything one’s ever seen in one’s life.’⁶ This sense of entering a very different, alien world was common to all British soldiers who served in the Middle East.

Once the long journey was over, there was one experience that linked almost every British soldier sent to the Middle East. The sights and sounds of Cairo and Alexandria were familiar to thousands of British soldiers who first arrived in Egypt and who spent their precious hours of leave taking in the sights and indulging in the bazaars and fleshpots of these two cities. A visit to the surviving Ancient Wonder of the World was obligatory. E. A. Woolley, a First World War veteran, remembered that, ‘I visited the Great Pyramids and went on top and also inside the Great Pyramid… I also went to the Sphinx… seeing them as I did, one could not but be impressed by these fantastic constructions.’⁷

The pyramids remain a potent symbol of ancient Egypt, and thousands of British soldiers had their photographs taken next to these monuments as a reminder of their visit.⁸ However, the soldiers’ experience of Egypt went far beyond the ancient world. One veteran remembered being fascinated by:

‘Cairo, the Nile, the souks [markets], the mingling of so many nationalities, the pleasant smells of spices and cooking borne on the warm evening air (but not the ghastly daytime smells of which there were plenty). I suppose it summed up for me what I’d always imagined the Orient should be like.’⁹

Many troops enjoyed the exotic and foreign experience that Egypt offered, while many others simply enjoyed Cairo’s and Alexandria’s bars and nightlife. These innocent pleasures were sometimes mixed with more base concerns, as a naval rating related:

‘… three of us went ashore in Alex to the Fleet Club for a game of tombola and our ration of beer. We still had plenty of time, so we said to ourselves, “Let’s go to Sister Street.” We were young and curious to visit the most renowned of the Eastern Fleet brothels, and wondered what effect it might have on three randy young men.’¹⁰

Egypt’s reputation as a part of the exotic Orient was certainly enhanced by encounters such as these, but these experiences, although welcome, tended to be short-lived and most soldiers found themselves serving far away from the Delta and its temptations.

It was the experience of the desert itself that united all the soldiers who fought there. The desert in popular imagination has long been a place of romance and mystery, but British soldiers soon found that the reality was very different. The intense heat, sand, dust and flies soon removed the mystery, and the most widely held belief among British soldiers in the Eighth Army was that, ‘“The blue” was… a right bastard.’¹¹ Living in the desert brought a series of discomforts and irritants that were quite new to British soldiers more used to a green and temperate climate. The first unpleasant shock to be experienced by any soldier was the intense heat of the day and the chill that descended as soon as the sun went down. One veteran remembered that:

‘In early July 1917 we found ourselves in the desert of Sinai about eleven miles south-east of Gaza, and there we found that the all-pervading heat… almost struck us physically, so intense was it. There was no avoiding it [and] no shade whatever.’¹²

In the Eighth Army, during the Second World War, the mark of a desert veteran was to ‘get your knees brown’, which proved that you had been burned by the sun and served in the desert long enough to adapt to its conditions.

Another feature of the desert conditions was the sheer physical effort needed to march through sand. Marching through the night for the surprise attack on Beersheba on 29 October 1917, one soldier found it:

‘…particularly tiring to march through sand… the desert may be romantic but we didn’t see much romance about it that night. We marched and marched and marched through that desert the whole night long.

The worst feature of all to me I think was the dust. There was choking dust flowing over us from the other columns on our sides. We were perspiring madly [and] the dust settles on your face. I remember seeing my own face next morning when I went to shave – it was nothing but rivulets of dirt or rather clean rivulets amongst the dirt on my face – I wouldn’t have recognised myself.’¹³

The huge clouds of dust thrown up by the movement of thousands of soldiers were an unavoidable discomfort. Clouds of dust were ever-present, but they probably reached a peak at Alamein in October 1942, when the passage of thousands of tanks and vehicles along a set number of tracks ground the sand into a powdery dust:

‘…as much as two feet deep in places. Like fluffy snow upon the ground, it rises into the air and hangs like a thick fog in the darkness. Eyes, ears and noses are filled with it and it nearly chokes a man whenever he opens his mouth to speak.’¹⁴

These man-made dust clouds were uncomfortable, but could not be compared to the natural khamsin or sandstorm. A member of the first armoured car squadron in Egypt remembered his first sandstorm in 1915 vividly:

‘I noticed what appeared to be a great bank of fog, moving towards us from the southward. The Egyptian interpreter who rode in my car cried out that it was a sandstorm, and we ran the cars quickly to the lee side of the fort, while a violent wind arose and swept the swirling sand about us, until nothing could be seen at the distance of a yard. Breathing was almost impossible, and the darkness was eerie, while the grains of sand which were continually whipped against our hands and faces by the hot wind stung like the points of needles.’¹⁵

Sandstorms could sometimes last for days, making life in the desert a real misery. This unwelcome natural phenomenon reinforced the soldiers’ perceptions of the desert as a harsh, sterile and alien environment.

However, the main reason for this perception lay in the nature of the desert terrain itself. The character of the desert could change dramatically from soft sand to a rocky limestone bed within a few miles, and each desert, from the Western Desert of Egypt to the Sinai or Sudan, was very different. One veteran of the Western Desert and Eritrean campaigns in the Second World War noted that, ‘The Western Desert was sandy, scrubby and from time to time stony, but there was very little vegetation of any sort… [while] the Nubian desert is just an endless plain of golden sand.’ Even though desert veterans soon learned to recognise the differences between areas of desert, the main impression was still one of a barren landscape filled with sand. One Eighth Army veteran noted his first sight of the desert with disgust:

‘By late afternoon we’ve reached our destination, Jerawla, a few miles short of Mersa Matruh. Why anyone troubled to confer a name on the place or what anyone could have found to stick a label on, heaven alone knows – there’s just miles of blank sand in every direction.’¹⁶

Soldiers found that places marked on the map were often just that – names on a map. The featureless nature of the terrain meant that good navigation was essential; as one staff officer commented, ‘You can’t wander around the desert, it’s a dangerous thing to do.’¹⁷ One veteran remembered that his training in Egypt during 1915 placed a premium on navigation, and that the troops:

‘…had to learn to cross the desert from one place to another without any maps – there were no maps of the district, the only maps I ever saw out there were signed H. H. Kitchener Lieutenant, presumably made in the 1880s. There were no roads, no charts, no signposts.’¹⁸

Navigation in the desert with outdated maps, even if they had been produced by the famous Kitchener, was no easy matter. However, one solution adopted in 1917 was the use of wire-mesh ‘roads’, which assisted in both navigation and marching. One veteran remembered that the Battle of Gaza in 1917 was:

‘…to me the climax of a walk of about 130 miles across the Sinai Desert – we left the Suez Canal knowing that eventually we were going to meet our friend the Turk again after the Romani scrap – but we didn’t know where it was to be and that crossing was… made possible only because somebody had the simple and brilliant idea of laying wire netting across the loose sand and that helped us considerably.’¹⁹

While such methods could be useful on an approach march, they were of no help in the Western Desert, where the majority of Middle Eastern battles were fought during the Second World War. By 1940 soldiers did have access to good-quality maps and the sun compass²⁰, which made the task of navigation much easier, but one feature of all the desert fighting was the frequent confusion caused by map errors and the inability to pinpoint a position in the middle of the desert.

Another reality of desert life was the scarcity of water and the discipline that had to be enforced to cope with a meagre water ration. Ensuring that there was sufficient water for the troops was a major task in both wars. One quartermaster sergeant remembered the effort required to sustain Allenby’s advance through the Sinai in 1917:

‘…now there were troops moving for that advance from all directions and they all had to be watered. There were twenty miles of waterless desert to cross and that water was carried by camels. On that particular occasion there were over 20,000 camels carrying water alone.’²¹

Even with the best efforts of the engineers and the Army Service Corps to bring up water and store it for use, water remained a constant preoccupation for most soldiers. One Australian Light Horse trooper remembered that, ‘Hunger never worried us at any stage of the game but water did.’²² Yet most soldiers found that, with practice, they could survive on very little water. One veteran of Allenby’s campaigns related that:

‘Then too there was the question of water and thirst. We had to discipline ourselves to use only two pints of water a day… the troops had to learn to do without it and they did. They can do it and they did do it.’²³

Water supply for the Eighth Army was not based on camels but on trucks, which eased the problem considerably. Nonetheless, the transport of water up to the front remained a major task and water was still the most precious commodity consumed by the army. Soldiers in the LRDG and SAS patrols who served in the deep desert received the same ration as soldiers in the First World War – just 2 pints of water a day. Ironically, the situation in Tobruk during its famous six-month siege in 1941 was slightly better, but still meagre:

‘In Tobruk water was a scarce commodity at half a gallon per man per day, and that was for drinking straight, as tea, for all ablutions and for washing clothes, etc. One got used to it, but when someone came up from Alexandria with a bottle of real water and a bottle of whisky the recipients drank the water neat and left the whisky!’²⁴

This Second World War anecdote was an echo of a truth discovered by a First World War veteran, who wrote that, ‘Water is the staff of life in the desert, and its quality varies so much that half a pint of good water there is a gift of more value than a half dozen quarts of the best champagne in Europe.’²⁵

Of course, these harsh climatic conditions had been present for centuries and the Bedouin tribespeople who inhabited the desert were inured to these difficulties. British troops also managed to adapt to the conditions. In fact, most soldiers adapted well to the desert conditions so that they could stand the heat of the day and the chill of the night, navigate themselves through the featureless terrain and cope with the strict rationing of water.

However, there were still some discomforts that most soldiers never really learned to live with effectively. The armies fighting in the desert found that no matter how carefully they disposed of the rubbish, detritus and waste that they inevitably produced, their rubbish dumps and latrines formed perfect breeding grounds for hordes of flies that followed the army wherever it went. This meant that the men could never be free from the attentions of these persistent insects. A First World War veteran explained that:

‘… there were millions of flies, literally millions. They were in everything and on everything. They were in our food, they were in our clothing, they were in our ears, wherever we turned there were millions of flies. If you put a piece of paper down it would be black with flies in a few moments. We were living in bivouacs at the time and I had a little pet chameleon who seemed to appreciate the unlimited rations, but he made no difference whatsoever to the population of flies. They were simply intolerable.’²⁶

Soldiers in the Second World War also kept chameleons as pets, but also realised the futility of trying to kill the flies:

‘We did everything we could to reduce their population by trying to swat them, which was ridiculous, because it was hopeless. One thing we used to do was to burn up the guy ropes of the tents. They would congregate there after sundown and you could literally burn them, but it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to the irritation of them next day. For every one you killed there seemed to be ten to take its place.’²⁷

Flies, then, were a constant, ever-present and maddening discomfort. One common desert complaint that was exacerbated by the flies was the ‘desert sore’, which could develop from even a small scratch. The wound would not heal and could spread across the skin:

‘Some people just developed these wretched sores and in the heat of the day they would be little rings of flies feeding, it was perfectly revolting, if you continually have to brush them away from the sore because it was difficult to cover, difficult to cover the sore itself.’²⁸

While desert sores were an unpleasant, if relatively minor, complaint, one constant problem was dysentery, which could decimate an army faster than enemy action. The flies, feeding on refuse and the latrines, carried disease and dysentery to the men. One man remembered that, ‘The heat, coupled with the flies, coupled with the effect of the flies on the health and the problems of dysentery and general sort of stomach upsets… they pole-axed you, there was nothing you could do about it.’²⁹ Life in the desert, let alone combat, brought its own series of hazards.

Just as the terrain and climate conditions exerted their grip on the conduct of all of the campaigns, so did the iron laws of logistics. The desert could supply nothing of value to support an army, which meant that all of the armies sent to the Middle East experienced great difficulties in bringing up sufficient quantities of supplies for their needs. Ammunition came second only to the need for water, and this meant that the soldiers’ rations took a fairly poor third. In the First World War fresh food was virtually unobtainable and soldiers had to subsist on biscuit and bully beef for days on end:

At times we frequently had to go without decent food at all, the only thing we relied on were biscuits, and occasionally bully beef. We ate bully beef cold, we ate it stewed. The army biscuits were almost like chewing dog biscuits. After some weeks we heard that bread was coming up the line… when the bread came up it looked just like gorgonzola cheese. To me it was uneatable.’³⁰

Soldiers in the Second World War fared much better due to the motorisation of the logistic chain, although bully beef and biscuit still formed the bulk of their diet. Some troops even found themselves linked physically with the previous conflict – soldiers eating bully beef in 1942 found the date 1918 stamped on the tins! Soldiers still suffered from the unremitting diet, but their German opponents, subsisting on black bread and Italian tinned meat, known as ‘Alter Man’, fared worse. Even Rommel suffered badly from jaundice caused by the poor diet.³¹

While the relative scarcity of petrol – or any other flammable substance – meant that tea-drinking before or after action was rare during Allenby’s campaign, the troops in the Second World War had the relative luxury of the regular desert ‘brew-up’. A crew or section could boil water for tea with the aid of half a petrol tin filled with sand and petrol, and this became one of the rituals of the Eighth Army in the desert.

Another experience integral to soldiering in the desert was the sense of the unending monotony of life. An Australian Light Horseman who served in Sinai and Palestine remembered that, ‘Life on the desert consisted of riding maybe on a patrol; you’d go out all day [and] come back at night to camp.’ This same routine day after day led to monotony: ‘It wasn’t the fighting in the desert that worried the soldier, it was the monotony.’³² Given this endless routine it was easy to lose track of time in the desert. One soldier recalled that:

‘It was not until one of our platoon asked what day it was, that we realised no mention, record or check of days or dates had been kept by any ORs [Other Ranks]. It was yesterday, today and tomorrow, and that was sufficient when in uninhabited regions.’³³

Losing track of the passage of time, and the seemingly unending time spent in the desert, could lead to psychological disorders, quite separate from reactions to battle. One man felt that:

‘There’s a sort of psychological complaint some chaps get after long exposure on the Blue called “desert weariness”… for months now we’ve been cut off from nearly every aspect of civilised life, and every day has been cast in the same monotonous mould. The desert, omnipresent, so saturates consciousness that it makes the mind as sterile as itself… For weeks more, probably months, we shall have to go on bearing an unbroken succession of empty, ugly, insipid days.’³⁴

The psychological roots of ‘desert weariness’ were not unique to the desert. Doctors had first diagnosed soldiers with the complaint of ‘nostalgia’ in 1678³⁵, as a reaction to the boredom of garrison duty and separation from home. This separation anxiety could affect men in every theatre of war, but soldiers do seem to have been more prone to the condition in the desert due to the barren and bleak nature of the terrain, and the complete isolation from civilisation.³⁶

Yet soldiers this century could occasionally feel that they were in touch with home in a way impossible for soldiers in previous centuries. One signaller serving in Palestine in 1917 remembered that, by squeezing the best performance out of his wireless set:

‘It was possible to get news even from England. One of the reasons why we were so welcome to the other personnel, particularly in the artillery, was that we could pick up news even from our station at Poldue in Cornwall and that was something that was appreciated very much by all those who were able to know how things were going at home and in other war areas.’³⁷

While such broadcasts were informal and occasional in the First World War, by the Second World War there were radio stations in Cairo broadcasting to the troops in the desert, which helped to alleviate this sense of isolation. These radio stations also helped to develop a distinctive culture in the Eighth Army. The most famous song of the Desert War was ‘Lili Marlene’, a German song, which was picked up and enjoyed by the Eighth Army as well. ‘Lili Marlene’ was unique in that it was the theme song of both the German and British armies in the desert.

Desert warfare has always been very different from the nature of combat in Europe, and the campaigns fought in both World Wars were no exception. While desert terrain poses enormous problems in terms of distance, climate, water, supplies and navigation, it also provides opportunities in terms of space and freedom of mobility. The close, attritional nature of the struggle in Gallipoli, Salonika and on the Western Front during the Great War was not replicated in the Sinai or Palestine. Instead, the fighting was much more open and mobile and generally against lighter opposition. General Sir John Shea pointed out that:

‘…there was a tremendous difference between fighting in France, and the fighting in Palestine. Because in France it was purely trench warfare. Hard work and frustration. You really could not see what you were doing. Whereas the great part of it was that you were in open warfare. It was a war of movement. You were keeping going. You could see what your troops were doing and you could use your reserves as you wished, when it was necessary. It was entirely different and it was a great happiness to fight there compared to the frustration of trench warfare in France.’³⁸

Units that had become accustomed to the open, mobile fighting in Palestine found the Western Front an unpleasant change of environment. The 74th Yeomanry Division was transferred to France during the crisis of April-June 1918 and found its first taste of combat in France on 2 September 1918 altogether different from the conditions in Palestine.³⁹

British troops in the Second World War also experienced the tactical opportunities offered by the wide open space of the desert:

‘…the thing about desert warfare is the mobility, the fact that you could just go anywhere within your limits. You couldn’t go too far south or you’d set off into the soft sands and you couldn’t do that. You’d come to a dead halt. I suppose the mobility is the thing, the capacity to be able to continually outflank each other.’⁴⁰

However, there was an important distinction in the nature of mobility between the First and Second World Wars. While tanks were used during the Battle of Gaza in 1917, and the Duke of Westminster’s armoured car squadron was the first experiment with motorised warfare in the Western Desert, most soldiers in the First World War were restricted to the mobility offered by horses and their own legs. The Australian Light Horse gained fame for their ability to ride around the Turks – quite literally – but one British infantryman remembered that all his travels in the desert had been, All on foot. Never had a ride on a horse or anything… But I think I walked every inch of the way from the Suez Canal, Kantara, right up to Jerusalem. Every inch was covered on foot. Not in one day – not in two days either!’⁴¹

While the soldiers of the First World War were restricted to age-old forms of transport, the British Army that fought in the desert in the Second World War was almost wholly motorised. The mechanisation of the Army, and the opportunity for mobility that this conferred in an area devoid of natural barriers, meant that the fighting in the Western Desert in the Second World War was more fluid, chaotic and confusing than any before. During the ‘Crusader’ battle in November 1941, one soldier’s battalion met with German tanks:

‘The tanks fire a few shots after, but we’re soon out of range, and keep moving at fair speed for ten miles, with hundreds of other vehicles streaming in concourse. It looks like a stampede, but everything’s under control. Apparently these “scarpers” are accepted desert technique; when there’s no cover at all and no particular bit of ground is tactically worth much sacrifice, getting thrown up against heavily superior enemy forces leaves no option but to clear out, the quicker the better – discretion proving the better part of valour every time.’⁴²

This unparalleled mobility also had some unforeseen effects. With few features or places worth fighting for (with the exception of Tobruk), the armies could seize and relinquish vast areas of ground in a matter of days. As each army advanced, its supply lines became stretched, and its spearheads consequently weaker, while the enemy, retreating on to his supply lines became correspondingly stronger. This see-saw effect led to the famous ‘Benghazi stakes’ in which the armies found themselves advancing and retreating over the same desert five times in the space of two years.

The mechanisation of the armies in the Second World War was only one area of contrast. During the Palestine campaign of 1917–18, the Australian Light Horse had thought nothing of mounted charges against Turkish trenches, as one veteran related:

‘The Turks, on the whole, right through the whole campaign, didn’t seem to like the steel – you were safer with them at 100 yards than you were at 600 yards. At 600 yards they were wonderfully good shots and they’d shoot you right up to the trenches, but the minute you got amongst them with the steel it was always a surrender.’⁴³

While the Australian Light Horse gained a fine reputation for the speed and daring of its mounted actions in Palestine, such exploits were a thing of the past by the Second World War. An episode during the Eritrean campaign demonstrated just how much had changed after the 20-year interval. During the advance to Keren, the headquarters of Gazelle Force, a reconnaissance unit commanded by Colonel Messervy, was charged from the rear by a squadron of Eritrean cavalry:

‘Out of the scrub they burst, galloping furiously and throwing those little Italian hand grenades at anyone they could get. The guns were rapidly turned round and opened fire at point blank range. Gazelle headquarters dived into their slit trenches and started to fire with everything available. But the charge was stopped less than thirty yards from the guns and the few surviving cavalrymen fled, pursued by an armoured car. Out of the sixty men who made the charge, twenty-five dead and sixteen wounded were left on the ground. It was a most gallant affair. It demonstrated beyond all doubt that this obsolete arm could not be used to attack troops armed with modern weapons.’⁴⁴

Horsed cavalry had had its day by 1939, but a mounted Yeomanry cavalry brigade was sent to Palestine in 1939. However, by the time these troops saw action at Alamein, their horses had been replaced by armoured steeds.⁴⁵

While Allenby’s men were familiar with the names of the settlements they fought over in Palestine, the featureless nature of the Western Desert meant that the few landmarks and towns in the area took on heightened significance during the campaign fought in the Second World War. Benghazi, Tobruk and Mersa Matruh became household names in Britain, but there was little to remind soldiers of past military history. Bir Hacheim, identified only by two hummocks in the middle of the desert, had been the site of the rescue of the prisoners from HMS Tara in 1915 during the Senussi campaign, but gained greater fame during the Battle of Gazala in May 1942 for the tenacious defence of the French Foreign Legion.⁴⁶ Just as their forebears had named trenches on the Western Front after familiar domestic landmarks, so soldiers in the desert identified positions with familiar names to bring some element of home to the barren landscape. The Guards defensive position or ‘box’ during the Battle of Gazala, known as ‘Knightsbridge’, is one of the most famous. But although one of the fiercest tank battles of the Desert War raged there, there was nothing to distinguish this piece of desert from another apart from the name.

One unique feature of the Desert War in the Second World War was the development of the ‘Krieg ohne Hass’ (War without Hate). With the battle areas largely devoid of population (with the exception of the townspeople of Benghazi, Bardia and Tobruk), the armies could concentrate simply on fighting one another. Although the fighting was certainly intense and bloody, a mutual respect developed between the armies to the extent that Rommel became an almost mythical figure amongst the British troops. This spirit also manifested itself in the generally correct and proper treatment given to prisoners and wounded. While this was obviously a clearer distinction for the Germans, who enacted such brutality on the Eastern Front, it also provided a contrast with the desert campaigns of the First World War. British soldiers respected the fighting qualities of the Turkish soldier in much the same way that they admired the skill of the German soldiers 20 years later. General Sir John Shea emphasised that he ‘respected the Turk as a soldier, and was always careful to make my plans as best I could… I thought he was a good stout-hearted soldier, and he fought well.’⁴⁷ While there was a mutual respect between foes in the First World War, there was no development of a similar spirit of a ‘War without Hate’. Turkish treatment of British prisoners could be appalling and this seems to have been reflected in the harsher style of war between the two armies. One British soldier tasked with the capture of some Turkish machine-guns led by German officers related that:

‘When I gave the word, we all dashed forward… There wasn’t one left alive after we’d finished with them. We captured the guns and finished them off. And the German officers, they had the first packet, believe me.’⁴⁸

Although such an attitude to fighting was also common on the Western Front in the First World War, this kind of incident does not accord with the idea of a spirit of ‘chivalry’ engendered by desert fighting.

Yet even though there are numerous contrasts between the two wars in the desert, the similarities remain more important. Both armies experienced the hardships of the desert and the sense of isolation, intensified by distance and enhanced by the harsh climate. Both developed a distinctive identity as desert warriors, quite separate from the wider identities found on the Western Front in the First World War, or of Slim’s Fourteenth Army in Burma in the Second World War. Both armies shared the experience of defeat and eventual victory, and this veteran’s account of taking Turkish prisoners in Palestine in 1918 could easily have been an Eighth Army veteran speaking of O’Connor’s offensive of 1940–41 or the final pursuit in 1942:

‘And the troops went forward then and of course captured prisoners on the way, just like that. Thousands and thousands of them being captured. They were all fed up with the war and everything else. We were just enjoying ourselves then. They were on the run.’⁴⁹

Perhaps the final experience of victory after hardship was the most important common bond running through the two wars in the desert. Yet some men could feel bitter about their personal experience in the Desert War. Peter Bates stated that, ‘My own involvement was a 12-hour engagement with the enemy that ended in capture, and like many who served at Alamein, for all I accomplished I might as well have stayed at home.’⁵⁰ Perhaps the words of a veteran of the Eritrean campaign, written in 1941, sum up the experience of many in the numerous campaigns of the Desert War:

‘I have seen the most ghastly sights and heard noises which I shall remember to the end of my days. I’ve seen unparalleled bravery and self-sacrifice and have seen all the horrors of modern warfare magnified a hundredfold by the intense heat, flies and filth. There’s nothing glorious about it at all, only stark reality.’⁵¹