battleground
On October 23 1942, the battle of El Alamein began. James Ambrose Brown, a young soldier, carried into battle a diary in which he recorded the horror of all he saw
This year there will be no old soldiers at the graves of comrades who died at the battle of El Alamein. Like those who died in 1942 in the battle of Egypt, most have joined the warrior dead. A remnant too old or frail to travel will remember their part in the struggle that gave Britain a first taste of victory in World War II.
As they went into battle on the night of October 23, a young South African carried with him a notebook. In it he recorded what an American journal called: “A truly great story. Great because it comes to you from that rarest of observation posts, a gunner who fought a smoking gun in a decisive battle, and from day to day and night to night, wrote down what he felt and saw and heard and smelled.
“Through the medium of flaming human action, opens to the reader the heart and mind of a South African mortar man who killed enemies and saw friends die. It is a unique word picture of war as it is fought, not as it is recorded in the communiqus.”
October 23 1942
In a few hours now it will begin … everything is ready for this battle which we know must be decisive. If we do not break the enemy lines here at El Alamein, the Germans will be in Alexandria and Cairo in a week and Africa – perhaps the world – will be lost. We do not speak of these things as we eat the last hot meal we may have for days … Alexandria has been good to us, fresh meat, fresh vegetables, eggs, but days of lean fare are ahead, cold bully and biscuit, lukewarm water gulped down awkwardly in a cramped position in a shallow hole … beyond, the dead … theirs and ours gaping at the sky amid the litter of burnt-out tanks, trackless Bren gun carriers, coils of barbed wire.
But that is tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow. Now No 1 Section, 15 Platoon, eats warm food, talks about nothing that matters, waits for the dusk to close the last strip of light between what promises to be a night of cloudy moonlight and the silhouetted ridges occupied by the enemy.
We are the crews of two mortars, four English-speaking South Africans, six Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, two Jews and a Scot immigrant. Comrades for three years of war, knowing each other so well that the boredom and frustration of war has made us closer than brothers … and we have given birth to a flock of idealist dreams about the future.
Abruptly the light is gone and it is time. In absolute silence we don equipment, put on the uncomfortable steel helmets … a truck creeps up and stops, the mortars are loaded and we scramble on board. All around us we see long files of soldiers going past with the head-down slogging pace of the heavy-laden infantrymen.
They grin, jerk a rocky thumb and pass on towards the gaps in the minefield. The boys are on the move and we can feel their confidence.
Now we are passing through the gaps made in our barbed wire and moving cautiously into no man’s land where last night we dug positions for the mortars and stored 400 rounds for each. Only a little way beyond is the enemy … waiting in the dusk. He knows we are coming. It has been impossible to conceal our preparations for the attack, but perhaps we have duped him into thinking the main attack will come from somewhere else.
Behind us, six miles of guns are ready for the order to fire. We cannot see them, but we are glad they are to batter the enemy before we rush the ridges ahead. We can see a host of men moving forward to their assault positions, hear the chink of equipment, the sound of a quietly spoken order; incredibly, a laugh.
Both our mortar crews are dug in – close together and connected by telephone, part of a system which links the 12 mortars of our regiment. By lifting the phone I can hear the confused murmur of men in other pits … hear the high-spirited nonsense of South African boys, many of whom are not yet 21, preparing for the deadliest night of their lives.
We of No 1 Detachment, No 1 Section, crouch in the mortar pit and wait for zero hour at 21:40. At that time the heaviest artillery concentration of the war so far will begin to saturate the German defences. Waiting for that sound … that incredible sound of a thousand guns opening fire simultaneously is a mixture of fear and elation.
Around us the infantrymen lie flat on the ground in their battle positions … waiting. The moon has risen and illuminates the flat waste; sand and slabs of pale broken rock. The night has been chosen well … their infantrymen must have light to pick their way through barbed wire and mines.
The watch hands creep round to zero hour … the second hand creeps round to zero second. The needle seems to hover on the fateful mark … there is no sound. One has a feeling of waiting for something which cannot happen, and while a sensation of relief seizes the heart the darkness is torn apart by a white flash that leaps with barely perceptible irregularity of flow from the coast to a point six miles inland. It is daylight in that flash of fire from a thousand guns … eyes are black holes in dead white faces. An ear-splitting crash follows.
Ten minutes later it seems that it has always been like this. The gunfire is like a horrid amplification of the sound of a Transvaal hail-storm striking a city of corrugated iron … it beats until the battered ears hear only a dull continuous rumble.
At 22:00 the mortars go into action, firing in a pre-arranged pattern of fire designed to pulverise machine-gun nests and enemy mortars. There is a flash of grinning teeth as the first bomb is passed to our Number Two: he drops it down the muzzle. With a hiss and a flare of red sparks the first bomb speeds up into the dark.
At the same instant a sudden chatter on our left tells us that a regiment of heavy machine-guns has begun to sweep the ridges.
Two hours pass. The hideous cacophony has not ceased for an instant. Our South African-built mortar is so hot the propellant charges of bombs ignite before the bomb has struck the firing pin … thick gloves used in handling the weapon are burnt through with the heat of the barrels. We are all dazed and deaf.
But now there is another sound … the shriek and crash of counter- fire. Over the parapet we see the red splash and slow spread of sparks from German shells bursting among the mortar positions … something explodes just beyond the parapet and our corporal drops the telephone with which he has been receiving orders to switch target and falls over the Number One’s legs. A shell fragment has penetrated his brain.
There are two explosions nearby, seemingly right on top of the mortar pit manned by Number Two Detachment. I yell into the mortar phone: “Are you all right? For God’s sake answer me, what’s happened?”
I am answered … I hear a sound which will ring in my ears forever: the groaning of dying men. It was a direct hit on the pit. I realise that shock has paralysed me. I can get no reaction from my limbs. The groaning has ceased, but I hear breathing on the phone and a voice I know cries with the energy of desperation: “For God’s sake … Number Two Detachment.”
A young medical orderly and two stretcher-bearers rise and run resolutely through the smoke and dust towards the pit.
A sergeant jumps into our pit, deathly pale and so worked up he can hardly speak. “It is terrible … a direct hit right in the ammunition pit.”
“Are they all dead?”
“Two are half-alive. They haven’t got a chance. The medical orderly was so distraught he broke his phials of morphia trying to inject them.”
“What about tourniquets?”
“There’s nothing to put them on.”
I run over to identify the dead. The war rages outside, but in the pit there is the silence of death. The place is filled with bloody rags, torn sandbags … and empty boots.
Identify them … go on, identify them. I bend down and peer into the face of the Number One. He has been blown back and sits on his heels against the side of the pit … his face is powdered with sand, his lips smile. The others are outside, as if at rest.
At 23:35 the mortar and artillery barrage lifts … for minutes after the barrage ceases there is silence. Then a weird thin cry rises out of the ground ahead of us. It is the scream of charging infantrymen; something hardly human. I feel my hair bristle.
Scores of bright flares begin to rise and fall over the enemy lines, machine- guns rake the minefields and forward slopes of the long ridge. Wounded men, some walking, some on stretchers, begin to drift past.
A dawn of dark grey finds us advancing towards the positions consolidated by the riflemen. As the light grows we see the ridge towards which we are marching erupt constantly in sooty fountains of explosive smoke.
Many of the enemy shells, clearing the ridge, plunge in among us as we march. With our instincts shouting to us to lie down, or run away, we march with outward steadiness towards the new positions.
To our right the battlefield is still shrouded in smoke, but behind us hundreds of trucks are moving forward, creeping through the minefields. Guns which fired last night are being moved up into new positions.
Shells crash on the stony ridge without pause, flinging splinters and stones, but the reaction now is such that we squat indifferently, waiting for orders in a minefield that will presently blow up three trucks in as many minutes. There goes the first… woof!
When the smoke clears I see dazed men staggering from the wreck. Others lie where the blast has flung them. As stretcher-bearers run towards them, two more vehicles blow up.
Here before us are dead Germans, and here are live ones, prisoners, almost as pale as the dead, wincing and cowering at every shell-burst, and no wonder, we think, after what they went through last night.
Day and night we live in a world that never ceases to tremble with gunfire. By day we engage the stubborn enemy from shallow holes and burn without shelter under the Egyptian sun; in our most forward positions, we are so close to the enemy that each man in his little slit trench must live from dawn to dark without moving … men who get up to stretch their cramped limbs lie where they fall and at night are hastily buried in loose sand.
Oh, the relief of nightfall and being able to stand, to eat hot food with ravenous appetite, unaffected by the sweetly sick stench of corruption.
The battle goes on until it seems there has never been anything but this struggle … that it will never end. But on this morning, after a night during which the enemy fires machine- guns and mortars as if in a last frenzy of hate, we wake to something new … something at first incomprehensible. It is silence.
It is November 4 and this is the first time since 21:40 on October 23 that no gun is firing. The battle of El Alamein is over … off there beyond the horizon Rommel the Fox has left his snug hole. The long chase is in full cry.
I walk over the deserted battlefield to satisfy morbid curiosity, and return sated, disgusted, saddened. Such a ruin of men and machines I had never imagined.
Among the German positions, their dead and ours lie in a litter of telephone wire, spent bullets, half-eaten food, abandoned kit.
I read a fragment of a letter I pick up … it is from a girl to a man now dead, lying under a pulverised artillery piece. A pitiful document, it is full of love and hope.