The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [164]
On 23 October, Stumme commanded some 50,000 German and 54,000 Italian troops, compared to Montgomery’s 195,000 mainly Commonwealth soldiers. The Eighth Army had eighty-five infantry battalions compared to the Africa Korps’ seventy-one (of which thirty-one were German), as well as 1,451 anti-tank guns to Rommel’s 800, and 908 first-class field and medium artillery pieces to about 500 Axis, of which 370 Italian guns were temperamental Great War pieces, and not up to the coming task.19 If one strips out the British light tanks, German Panzer Mark IIs and the Italian tanks, which Rommel called ‘decrepit and barely fit for action’, the figures for effective medium tanks at El Alamein were 910 Allied to 234 Axis, a ratio of four to one.20 The disparity is striking, and a testament to Allied interdiction of Axis reinforcement attempts, as well as to the massive reinforcement of the Allied forces via the Gulf of Aden.
Although the morale of the Italians’ air force, armour, artillery and, especially, paratroopers was generally high, this was not true of their regular infantry, who made up the great majority of the 1.2 million Italians stationed on foreign soil in 1942. As had been seen earlier in the war, the Italians could fight bravely if properly officered, equipped, trained and fed, but this was rarely the case in the latter stages of the Desert War. Some Italians units, such as the small but all-volunteer Folgore (Lightning) paratrooper and Ariete armoured divisions, were as solid as any on the battlefield. Rommel said of the Ariete that ‘We always asked them to do more than they practically could, and they always did.’ Nonetheless, some Italian infantry formations could not stand prolonged bombardment before they began to consider surrendering. Lack of food was also a major problem for the Italians, and as a history of El Alamein records: ‘The only fresh meat was provided by the occasional camel that strayed into one of the Devil’s Gardens and either set off a mine or came close enough to be shot.’21 Moreover, Italian tanks were generally too light and mechanically unreliable, much of their artillery was wildly inaccurate at over 5 miles’ range and their tanks’ wireless sets barely functioned when in motion.22
‘We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us,’ Churchill controversially told the House of Commons of Rommel on 27 January 1942, ‘and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.’23 (Churchill had used his maiden speech in 1900 to praise the Boers as fighting men too.) The way that Rommel attempted to stiffen the morale of the Italian infantry was to ‘corset’ them close to crack German units, so for example the Italian Bologna Division would be stationed near to the elite German Ramcke paratroops, while the Italian Trento Division would be interspersed with the 164th (Saxon) Light Division. Much the same thing had been done by the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo, when he had placed British regiments among Belgian and Dutch units of more doubtful quality.
A vital aspect of the coming struggle was to be the air superiority that the Allies had by the time of Alam el Halfa established over the Luftwaffe, but which by the second battle of Alamein had almost turned into air supremacy. Montgomery attached Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham’s DAF headquarters to his own, and, although he gave him little credit