All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [234]
Keith Douglas, traversing the rear areas of Eighth Army to join an armoured regiment, was fascinated by the spectacle of men and machines massing in the sands for battle: ‘Lorries appeared like ships, plunging their bows into drifts of dust and rearing up suddenly over crests like waves. Their wheels were continually hidden in dust-clouds: the ordinary sand being pulverized by so much traffic into a substance almost liquid, sticky to the touch, into which the feet of men sank almost to the knees. Every man had a white mask of dust in which, if he wore no goggles, his eyes showed like a clown’s eyes.’
On the other side of the hill, Rommel’s army inhabited the same environment, but was prey to increasing gloom about its predicament. It bears emphasis that its most numerous component was Italian, not German, and like most of his countrymen, Vittorio Vallicella was dejected: ‘We are stuck in this desolate plain of El Alamein, tired, hungry, with little water, filthy and full of lice. We know that our Great Leader [Mussolini] is 660 kms from the front, furious because we have been unable to open the gates of Alexandria for him … For 16 months we have led this life: kept going with a canteen of water (if lucky); at the mercy of fleas and lice. Maybe at this point we can only hope that a bomb takes us out and puts an end to our suffering.’ He recorded a comrade’s suicide as the seventeenth in his unit since March 1941. The RAF strafed constantly: during one attack, Vallicella’s companions were rash enough to seek cover under a vehicle which suffered a direct hit, killing them all. The ‘bomb-happy’ Vallicella gained a respite of a few hours’ sleep in a German field hospital before being sent back into the line.
The Italian army’s supply system had collapsed, leaving its men dependent on German largesse. The Afrika Korps was irked by Italian scrounging, to which Vallicella and his comrades responded by resort to ‘arrangiarsi’, loosely translatable as ‘every man for himself’. ‘What will become of us?’ mused the soldier. ‘How can we keep fighting so far from our supply bases and at the mercy of air attack? Not a week goes by when our supply columns are not machine-gunned and destroyed. Lack of water, food, arms, drives our morale to rock bottom.’ Many Italian soldiers were subsisting entirely on canned and dried food. After the first week, Vallicella wrote: ‘We are at the end of our tether; if our logistics have always been inadequate, now they scarcely exist.’ He and his comrades roamed the battlefield, scavenging food and water, draining fuel from the tanks of wrecked vehicles. The Folgore Division suffered shocking casualties: ‘Those young men supported only by mortars and the odd machine-gun wrote a page of history. Hundreds were wiped out for a regime that didn’t even know how to provide them with the equipment they needed to fight.’
Meanwhile, in the British camp, as Alamein began Lt. Norman Craig reflected on the challenge of junior leadership: ‘Before an attack fear is universal. The popular belief that in battle there are two kinds of person – the sensitive, who suffer torment, and the unimaginative few who know no fear and go blithely on – is a fallacy. Everyone was as scared as the next man, for no imagination was needed to foresee the possibility of death or mutilation. It was just that some managed to conceal their fear better than others. Officers could not afford to show their feelings as openly as the men; they had more need to dissemble. In a big battle a subaltern had little or no influence over the fate of his platoon – it was the plaything of the gods. His role was essentially histrionic. He had to feign a casual and cheerful optimism to create an illusion of normality and make it seem as if there was nothing in the least strange about the outrageous things one was asked to do. Only in