The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [163]
The lull in fighting after the battle of Alam el Halfa allowed Montgomery – who with his taste for multi-badged service berets and eccentric dress was very consciously transforming himself into the much loved public figure known as Monty – to train his army. Detailed orders went out from his headquarters – a caravan in the desert which featured a postcard photograph of Rommel – concerning every aspect of the army’s logistics, fitness, equipment, morale, organization and discipline. Many of the reinforcements he was being sent had never fought in the desert, and his belief in intensive training was put into full operation in the weeks of relative calm. This led Montgomery to take a firm stance with Churchill, who was pressing for an early attack. The best that Alexander would offer Downing Street was the promise of being sent a codeword – Zip – when the great assault finally began.15 Alexander’s determination to leave Montgomery alone might have frustrated the Prime Minister but it was the right thing to do. Alexander – who tap-danced in regimental talent shows – was a cool commander, who ran his Staff mess in a way that Harold Macmillan, the Minister Resident in North-West Africa, equated to an Oxford high table, where the war was ‘politely ignored’ as they instead discussed ‘the campaigns of Belisarius, the advantages of classical over Gothic architecture, or the best ways to drive pheasants in flat country’.16
In hoping to drive Rommel back over the very flat country, special-forces attacks were made in mid-September against Tobruk (Operation Agreement) and Benghazi (Operation Bigamy). Operation Agreement was badly compromised from the start after a clash at a roadblock, and cost the lives of 750 men, the cruiser HMS Coventry and two destroyers with little to show for it. Bigamy was an attractive idea in theory, but ultimately turned out to be expensive and not worth the effort. Although the Long Range Desert Group did destroy twenty-five enemy aircraft at Barce, that was its only real success, and afterwards the Germans used second-line units to garrison their staging areas, freeing up first-class troops for the coming battle.17 Meanwhile, Rommel fell ill with stomach and liver complaints, high blood pressure, sinusitis and a sore throat, and so on 23 September he flew back to Germany for a long period of leave, passing on his command to an Eastern Front veteran, the obese and unfit General Georg Stumme. He was therefore not even in Africa on 23 October 1942, when Montgomery launched Operation Lightfoot, the first phase of the second battle of El Alamein.
As we have already seen, after his fighting retreat of 400 miles earlier in the year Auchinleck had originally chosen El Alamein for his defensive lines because there was only a 40-mile gap between the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the impassable salt-marshes of the Qattara Depression, an area the size of Ulster, to the south. Yet this same narrowness now worked in Rommel’s favour, when he was forced on to the defensive by sheer weight of numbers. Whoever attacked at El Alamein, it was always going to be a battle of attrition rather than movement, far more reminiscent of the Western Front of the First World War than the sweeping Blitzkrieg manoeuvres of the Second.
Montgomery hoped that the Germans would be distracted by a diversionary attack in the south of the battlefield by Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks’ XIII Corps, while full frontal infantry attacks by Lieutenant-General Oliver Leese’s XXX Corps towards the Miteiriya and Kidney Ridges in the north were exploited by the 1st and 10th Armoured Divisions of Lieutenant-General Herbert Lumsden’s X Corps driving through and rolling up the Axis defences from behind.
The Axis front line was defended by vast minefields of between 5,000 and 9,000 feet in depth, comprising half a million mines and nicknamed