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By Root 714 0

Harriman, no ascetic, was shocked by the indolence and luxury he saw around him on his first visit to Cairo. A year later, too many gentlemen still held sway over too few players. The former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, passing through Egypt, perceived a “lackadaisical” attitude to the war, which was “painful.” Auchinleck had repeatedly disappointed Churchill’s hopes. The good soldiers in the Middle East were tired. A staff officer wrote from Egypt in July 1942: “There seem to me to be too many people635 at home who have had no war—through no fault of their own—and too many people out here who have had too much war.”

The desert army continued to suffer grave technical and tactical deficiencies. The cavalry ethos still dominated armoured operations, despite the frequent failures of British tanks’ attempts to destroy German ones. “The Auk’s” formations seemed unable to master the Afrika Korps’ art of using antitank guns to stop British armour before committing its own panzers. The shoddiness of British industrial production was exposed when home-built tanks were off-loaded in Egypt. Their bolts proved to have been only hand-tightened at the factories, and most had been inadequately packed and loaded for ocean passage. Weeks of labour were necessary in the workshops of the Nile Delta before armoured vehicles were fit for action. American Grant tanks, which now equipped some British armoured units, mounted a 75mm sponson gun capable of destroying German panzers, but were otherwise outmatched by them. New Shermans were still in transit from the United States.

Auchinleck’s troops had been outfought again and again. British defeats in 1940–41 had been attributable to circumstances beyond commanders’ control: prewar neglect, lack of air support and German superiority. The failures of late 1941 and 1942, however, reflected culpable weaknesses. The two ablest airmen in Cairo, Arthur Tedder and Arthur “Maori” Coningham, talked frankly to Churchill and Brooke about their perceptions of the army’s shortcomings. Colonel Ian Jacob noted in his diary during the Cairo visit that there had been “far too many cases of units surrendering636 in circumstances in which in the last war they would have fought it out … The discipline of the Army is no longer what it used to be … There is lacking in this war the strong incentive of a national cause. Nothing concentrate has replaced the old motto ‘For King and Country.’ The aims set before the people … are negative, and it still does not seem to have been brought home … that it is a war for their own existence.” War correspondent Alan Moorehead agreed:

In the Middle East there was, in August637, a general and growing feeling [among the troops] that something was being held back from them, that they were being asked to fight for a cause which the leaders did not find vital enough to state clearly. It’s simply no good telling the average soldier that he is fighting for victory, for his country, for the sake of duty. He knows all that. And now he’s asking, “For what sort of victory? For what sort of a post-war country? For my duty to what goal in life?”

If this was indeed true—and Moorehead knew the desert army intimately—then the prime minister himself deserved some of the blame. It was he who, despite the urgings of ministers, refused to address himself to “war aims,” a postwar vision. Instead, he held out to British soldiers the promise of martial glory, writing to Clementine from Cairo: “I intend to see every important unit638 in this army, both back and front, and make them feel the vast consequences which depend upon them and the superb honours which may be theirs.” In supposing such things to represent plausible or adequate incitements for citizen soldiers, Churchill was almost certainly mistaken. But it was not in his nature to understand that most men cared more about their prospects in a future beyond war than about ribbons and laurels to be acquired during the fighting of it.

In Churchill’s eyes the first priority in Egypt was, as usual, to identify new commanders.