Word of the battle raging over three hundred miles away was filtering through the bars, clubs, and cafés of Cairo. ‘The news we hear at the moment,’ Cecil Beaton scrawled in his diary, ‘is that the two armies are locked in combat – a mêlée of tanks producing, in the heat, an Armageddon.’ The staff at GHQ were making ‘tremendous guesses as to the outcome’. One of the men there thought it would simply fizzle out, but most felt it was likely to be decisive ‘one way or the other’.1 Another said he wouldn’t be surprised if Rommel soon appeared parading down Solomon Pasha Street.
Beaton had only been back in Cairo a week and had already settled into a daily routine at GHQ. It was often said that there were six thousand too many staff officers in Cairo, but Cecil, for one, was impressed by their long hours – hours spent without the help of clerks, which tripled their paperwork. Like everyone else, he, too, was left to fend for himself, so the task of sorting out all the photographs he’d taken took four times as long. His mood had not been improved by a severe bout of ‘Egyptian stomach’, accompanied by constant headaches and an aversion to the terrible heat, heat that was, for the most part, far more uncomfortable in the fetid confines of the city than it was in the open desert.
By Saturday the 30th, though, he was feeling better and went to photograph Lady Lampson, wife of the British Ambassador in Cairo, Sir Miles Lampson. Sitting in the loggia in the embassy gardens, the ambassador’s wife fanned herself with a papyrus leaf and told him about the never-ending stream of letters she received from mothers trying to find news of their wounded, missing, or dead sons. Some wrote continuously, although usually there was little she could offer other than soothing letters in return. Cecil found her rather impressive. ‘She has a great vitality and quickness,’ he noted, ‘that makes her very useful in her job.’2
The following day he was given an even more interesting assignment. An ‘important person’ was being flown into Heliopolis and Cecil was to head over there with Dudley Barker from GHQ right away. It was a bit of rush to reach the airfield in time, but as they raced through the streets of Cairo as fast as their car could take them, they wondered who it might be – Rommel perhaps? Cecil hoped so. It wasn’t – that proved too much to hope for – but it was his second-in-command, General Crüwell. ‘A good name for a German general,’ Cecil noted. He made an impression at any rate. ‘Sitting in a car, smoking a cigarette,’ Cecil observed, with his usual waspish eye for detail, and ‘wearing dark glasses and a florid uniform like a Tyrolean beater covered with red tabs and buttons, he looked like something stuffed and put in a cage.’3
The fighting may have been taking place in the desert, but the spiritual home of the British Army in the Middle East was Cairo. ‘The fly-blown Mecca of artifice and noise’,4 it pullulated with people of all nationalities, jostling their way through the dust-filled streets, past cars, trams and bicycles, mules and oxen. The place hummed with constant noise: car horns, bells, the muezzin from a thousand mosques, and at night the drunken singing of troops making the most of a few precious days’ leave; for Cairo was a city still teeming with light, food, and alcohol. For those newly arrived from a Britain of blackouts and rationing, it was a place of shining brightness indeed.
Egypt was, in fact, an entirely independent country, with its own place among the League of Nations – officially, at any rate. The reality was somewhat different. Britain had held it as a ‘veiled’ protectorate from 1882 to 1914, then as a formal protectorate until 1922, when it was given ‘qualified’ independence. This meant that there were some caveats to independence – principally the British right to defend Egypt, which included the Suez Canal and the route to India. So British troops remained stationed there throughout the inter-war period, and Sir Miles Lampson, the only ambassador in the country, maintained an influence and pre-eminence more akin to a governor than a mere diplomat. In other words, Egypt was a vassal state in all but name.
Cairo may have been humming with Egyptians and servicemen, but since the war it had also become a haven for foreign nationals and asylum seekers. Sophie Tarnowska had made her way there from Poland and had lost her heart to the city. She loved hearing the muezzin calling the people to prayer, she loved the architecture, the bizarre mixture of French town houses, Coptic churches and Islamic minarets; and she loved the fact that she felt so welcome there – at last, after so long on the run.
Sophie had led a peripatetic existence since hostilities began. The war had broken out – without being declared – on 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. From the country estate of Gora Ropczycka, where she lived with her husband Andrew, Sophie had heard planes roaring overhead. Like many people, she had rushed out to wave at them, assuming they must be British or French showing solidarity with their Polish allies. Only when they turned on the radio did they learn to their horror that town after town was being bombed by the Germans.
Over the ensuing days, as more and more refugees began streaming eastwards, they began to realize they would have to leave. They moved first to their shooting lodge further east, then set off again – Andrew and Sophie’s brother, Stanislaw, wanted to join the Russians, whom they assumed would help the Poles. On the night of 8 September, they all piled into a car – Sophie, Andrew, their baby, Stanislaw and his girlfriend, Chouquette, Chouquette’s sister, the midwife and the chauffeur, and set off under the cover of darkness for Rudnik, where Sophie’s father lived. He refused to come with them – it was the last time Sophie would ever see him – and so on they went. ‘Going east, one could only travel by night with very dimmed lights,’ says Sophie, who was far from well at the time. ‘It was horrific. There were huge potholes, dead horses, burned-out vehicles. Sometimes Andrew or Stas would have to walk ahead to guide us.’
By the time the Russians invaded in turn, Sophie and her small party had reached Chouqette’s family home in the east. The roads were flooded with refugees, there was no hope of turning back, and so they headed south towards Romania. Sophie had told herself she would never leave Poland and had burned her passport. When she explained this to the border official, he looked at her and said, ‘You can pass.’ He gave her a piece of paper and added, ‘Wherever you go, you’ll find love and friendship.’ ‘My eyes filled with tears,’ admits Sophie.
So began the long journey to the Middle East. Both Andrew and Stanislaw applied to join the Polish forces now forming in Britain and France. Stanislaw was accepted and, having married Chouquette, headed to France, while Sophie and Andrew made for Belgrade. After France fell, Stanislaw and Chouquette were lucky enough to make their escape and join Sophie and Andrew once more. By this time, Sophie had received word that Polish forces were being formed in Palestine, but she was not keen to move again. ‘We had already left one country – I didn’t want leave again’; but both Andrew and Stanislaw were anxious to join and so, once again, they moved on. With both Andrew and Stanislaw now with the Polish forces, Sophie settled in Tel Aviv and Chouquette in Jerusalem.
During their time in Palestine, Sophie’s marriage ended. Andrew had been her first cousin – her parents had been against the match for this reason, and indeed their child had died soon after birth as a result of genetic complications. But they had been young and, for Sophie, Andrew had offered a means of escape and independence. In Palestine, however, her husband began having an affair with Chouquette. Matters came to a head one night in a club in Jerusalem. Andrew arrived brandishing a revolver and announced to Stanislaw, ‘I’m in love with your wife! Shoot me!’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Stanislaw told him. ‘The war will sort this out.’ Even so, the break-up put a strain on her relationship with her brother, the only close family she had left. ‘There were things we could no longer talk about,’ she says. Soon after, both Andrew and Stanislaw were posted to Egypt and from there to Tobruk, then at the height of the siege.
Before the war, the vast majority of Europeans had rarely had cause to leave the town or village of their birth. The war changed this, displacing millions. Sophie Tarnowska was just one of these, but solace of sorts was at hand. Shortly after the break-up of her marriage, she and Chouquette received a letter from Prince Youssouf Khamal. A relation of King Farouk and a member of the Egyptian royal family, he had once, before the war, been invited to shoot on her father-in-law’s estate. Somehow, he had heard of their plight and so invited both to Cairo, where, he assured them, he would set them up in a villa of their own. Initially, Sophie was reluctant – the thought of living with her husband’s lover hardly appealed – and she did not particularly want to move yet again. But she was not happy in Jerusalem and a fresh start did have some appeal, and so, eventually, she was persuaded to accept the offer.
As soon as she reached Cairo, she knew she had made the right decision. Prince Youssouf had given them a villa in Quba Gardens, a leafy suburb, complete with furnishings and their own servant, known as a sufragi. The vibrancy of the city and the friendliness of the people made her feel immediately welcome, even though there were hardly any other Poles in Cairo at this time. Both soon found jobs: Chouquette as a secretary, while Sophie began working for the International Red Cross.
In October 1941, the leader of the Polish Government in Exile, General Sikorski, visited Cairo and because both Sophie and Chouquette were two of only three Polish ladies in Cairo at the time, they were invited to meet the general at the Polish Legation. ‘And what are you doing?’ he asked Sophie as she was introduced to him. When she told him, he said, ‘Why not the Polish Red Cross?’
‘Because there isn’t one here,’ she replied.
‘Then perhaps you should set one up.’ Sophie agreed, but only under certain conditions. In Britain the Red Cross wore blue uniforms and stockings, but if she was to start the Polish Red Cross in Cairo there must be no stockings and they should wear khaki. ‘We want to be able to work,’ she explained, ‘not stifle in hot clothes.’ Sikorski agreed. ‘And there must be no ranks,’ she continued.
‘Why? Are you a communist?’ he asked her.
‘Good God, no,’ she replied. But she knew more Poles would arrive, possibly wives of high-ranking officers, and so for her to be in charge of them might make life awkward.
‘You know, you’re right,’ the general told her.
But having no formal papers – which had to come from London – to identify her as a Polish Red Cross worker, Sophie turned to Sir Duncan Mackenzie, head of the British Red Cross in Egypt, and placed herself under his wing. ‘To him I owe the beginning of the Polish Red Cross,’ she says. Within days he rang her and told her that an anonymous benefactor was giving her the use of a spacious flat in town in which to set up an office. Further benefactors offered to pay the electricity and telephone. The only problem was Sophie’s lack of papers, which had still failed to arrive. In desperation, she turned to Lady Lampson, who promised to vouch for her.
By June 1942, Sophie had a number of people helping her – not just Poles, but all kinds of people who could spare a little time. ‘It was all done by word of mouth,’ says Sophie. ‘Cairo was full of parties and this was the perfect way to spread the word.’ They prepared food parcels to send to prisoners of war across Europe and also sent bundles of clothes to Tehran, where Poles were congregating after being released from the Russian gulags – with the German invasion in June 1941, the Russians and Poles had become allies of sorts. By May, even the Polish HQ was also helping with funding. And in the evening there were always parties going on somewhere. In Cairo, Sophie had no need to ever be alone.
Also in Cairo at this time was the war reporter Alan Moorehead. An Australian, he had left his native Melbourne and arrived in England in 1936, hoping to find more to write about than ‘magistrates’ courts, bush fires and sport’.5 He had not been disappointed. By 1942, with reporting on the Spanish Civil War and three years of this latest war behind him, he had become one of the best-known journalists in Britain, writing for one of its most popular newspapers, Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express.
Short, but with dark good looks and clear blue eyes, he had a natural talent for reportage, even though he had shown little academic promise as a schoolboy. An adventurous spirit and natural charm, combined with an eye for detail and a talent for writing evocative descriptive prose, had proved a winning formula – especially with his reports from the desert war, which he had vividly brought to life for readers unfamiliar with such a barren and far-off land. With the Battles of France and Britain long since over, it was to the Middle East that much of the population turned, and Alan Moorehead, along with his great friends Alexander Clifford of the Daily Mail and Christopher Buckley of the Daily Telegraph, had become the most celebrated correspondents of the war to date.
Moorehead’s reputation was beginning to reach across the Atlantic as well, with an increasing number of articles for US magazines, most notably Life. He had also recently published his first book, Mediterranean Front, about the opening year in the desert war, which had been well received back in Britain. He was lucky in other respects too: unlike most people during the war, he was able to live with his wife, Lucy, and baby son in their own flat in Cairo. Moreover, Lucy, a former Express journalist herself, had been working as the Auk’s personal private secretary. Although Alan had had misgivings, believing the job might cause a conflict of interests, her closeness to the C-in-C and others in authority had opened doors that might otherwise have remained firmly shut.
Even so, by the beginning of 1942, the catastrophic situation in the Far East meant that Alan, like Joe Madeley of the 9th Australian Division, had been itching to get back home to Australia. His editor had had other ideas, however, although with the lull in the desert fighting he had been posted to India to report on the threat from the Japanese and to cover Sir Stafford Cripps’s mission to present the Indians with the British proposals for granting independence.
By the time battle resumed in the desert, Alan had only just returned from his trip to India. His first piece for the Express had been a feature entitled simply ‘The Auk’, which had run on 28 May; but he, like other correspondents, had been caught off guard by Rommel’s attack. Hurrying out to the desert, he only reached the front on Monday 1 June. ‘As I drove out from Sollum into Libya,’ he wrote, ‘a stream of lorries passed me going to the rear. They were carrying Axis guns and German and Italian prisoners.’ He had also seen General Crüwell being brought into British headquarters, and had then gone to see ‘Strafer’ Gott, commander of XII Corps in the north of the line, whom he had befriended the previous year. ‘There are only two places where I want to fight the Nazis,’ Gott had told him defiantly. ‘Either on our minefields or here.’ ‘ “Here”,’ wrote Alan, ‘was that undulating patch of desert sown thickly with salt-bush that sweeps up from the sea not far from the old Italian fort at Acroma. In this area is Knightsbridge.’6
Initially heartened by Gott’s confidence, Alan then saw Colonel Desmond Young, the Indian Army Public Relations Officer, loitering at the XII Corps Intelligence unit. ‘From him,’ wrote Alan, ‘I got my first indication that something was wrong.’ Like everyone else, Colonel Young felt the Germans were on the run. ‘But,’ he told Alan, ‘I don’t understand why we aren’t following up. Why don’t we push in and mop them up? It’s a job for the infantry now. We will have to move quick or you can bet your life they will reform a line.’ He told Alan he was worried it might already be too late.7
That conversation had occurred on 1 June. Two days later Moorehead visited Army HQ and noted ‘the astonishing absence of news’. Everyone appeared tense. ‘It felt as though we were on the edge of a considerable victory,’ he wrote, ‘yet there was no real news.’8 Only two days after this visit did the British finally launch their attack.
The Battle of the Cauldron began in the early hours of Friday, 5 June. The infantry of the 10th Indian Brigade easily achieved all their objectives, but intelligence had been tragically inaccurate: the night-time efforts of the Indians and artillery had taken merely a few Axis outposts; they had certainly not driven a wedge through the Axis anti-tank screens as they’d thought. So when 22nd Armoured Brigade and the infantry of the 9th Indian Brigade set off at dawn, they were unwittingly advancing into a valley of death every bit as lethal as that at Balaclava ninety years before.
The previous night, Sergeant Ray Ellis of the South Notts Hussars had known that at dawn they would be going into battle. He was tired, physically and psychologically: tired of fighting, and battles, and the desert, and killing. His gun crew were new and he could see they were all frightened. ‘I’d got past that stage,’ he says. ‘I was only twenty-two, but as far as warfare went, I was an old man. I felt sorry for these men who were homesick, frightened and cold.’9 He sat on a pile of sandbags, exhausted but wide awake. Taking out his watch, he began counting the minutes. Bad thoughts filled his head. ‘Someone was going to die very soon,’ he wrote, ‘maybe it would be me … I could feel the old familiar stiffening of my body as I thought of hot steel tearing through my flesh.’10
Just before 3.30 a.m., Ray ordered his men to ‘take post’. The night was still and quiet until, through a megaphone, he heard, ‘Zero, minus five, four, three, two, one … fire!’ The air ripped apart as each of the guns opened fire with a deafening roar. Working to a pre-arranged plan, Ray and his crew kept pounding away until the barrage was halted and they began preparing to move forward. The gun was hooked on to its carrier – a truck known as the ‘gun tower’ – and with the tanks and other vehicles of the brigade they headed the advance to join battle.
Ray was up front in the cab of the lorry, his head poking through the hatch in the roof and peering into the early dawn mist covering the desert. There was no return fire at all from the enemy as they drove up towards the edge of the wide circular depression of the Cauldron. Then, as they cleared the rise, the desert erupted. The anti-tank guns and artillery of the Afrika Korps had been waiting for them. ‘He must have had it all ranged and ready,’ says Ray, ‘because the very first shells landed right among us. It was appalling. The horizon was a sea of flames.’11
As the sun rose, the sky was filled with arcs of fire. The gun crews of the South Notts Hussars hurriedly unhooked their 25-pounders and desperately tried to bring them to bear – but clearly there could be no further advance. A number of vehicles either side of him were hit and burst into flames, but all Ray could think of was that he should keep firing and firing. Much to his relief, British tanks soon appeared, clanking through between their guns and towards the enemy over a mile away in front of them. Digging in as best they could, the gunners kept firing shell after shell. Soon the gun barrel was glowing red with the heat.
To the north-west of the Cauldron, around a shallow high-point named Eluet el Tamar, the 32nd Army Tank Brigade had also launched an attack aimed at pinning down the 21st Panzer Division along the Sidra Ridge at the northern side of the Cauldron. The 32nd was made up of slow, largely obsolete ‘I’ tanks, which had been pooled off from the northern sector where they had been supporting the various infantry brigades.
This was, frankly, suicide. The ‘I’ tanks would have been hard pushed to so much as scratch the paintwork of the Panzers, but to make matters worse they ran into an unexpected minefield. While they were struggling through this, they neatly came into the aim of 21st Panzer’s anti-tank guns. In a horribly short period of time, fifty of the seventy tanks that had set off that morning were now out of action, and the attack was called off. Job done, the Panzers turned and headed south-east to join the battle developing in the Cauldron.
By early afternoon, the rim of the Cauldron was still being held by the South Notts Hussars and the rest of 22nd Armoured and 9th Indian Brigades, but any advance was now out of the question. Disaster loomed, however. Unbeknown to Eighth Army, the previous day Rommel had cleared a hole in the minefields south of the Cauldron. Through this gap, he had been able surreptitiously to retrieve a number of disabled tanks knocked out in the earlier fighting. With the British attack going nowhere, he was now able to spare 15th Panzer, which had been lining the southern edge of the Cauldron, and send them through this gap and out by Bir el Harmat, with a clear line of attack on the left flank of the British position (see map).
It was a classic example of outmanoeuvring, and surging through the minefield gap later that evening 15th Panzer completely overran 5th Indian and 7th Armoured Division headquarters: for the second time in ten days, General Messervy had lost his HQ. Mayhem ensued. Ritchie, and in turn Norrie and Gott, had not only left the planning, but also the command of the battle to Briggs and Messervy, the divisional commanders. Once they were overrun, there was no one commanding the battle until new headquarters could be established some time later. As Messervy noted afterwards, ‘Everything went wrong on this day.’12 Eighth Army HQ was now completely in the dark and could rely only on guesswork. Ritchie knew that some of the Indians had been driven back but hoped 22nd Armoured Brigade would rally. ‘This done, we should have superiority,’ he signalled to Auchinleck. ‘But it takes time and the danger lies in surrendering the initiative.’13 In fact, this had already long since been lost. In contrast, Rommel had been personally commanding the Panzer Army himself since early afternoon – and from the front.
When night fell, the battle within the Cauldron finally quietened down. The guns stopped so that the only noise was that of the still-burning vehicles scattered all around. Then Ray Ellis heard the rumble and squeaking of tanks – their own tanks, coming back towards them. But instead of stopping and leaguering nearby, the remaining British armour passed through them and slid away like spectres into the night. A further shock was in store: rumours began to spread that the army was in retreat, but that they were to stay behind and fight a rearguard action. They and three Indian battalions, one reconnaissance battalion, and three other artillery regiments. At first Ray could not believe it, but more tanks and then even infantry continued to pass through their positions. Some of the gunners began shouting out into the darkness, asking the tanks to stay. ‘Gradually it began to dawn on us,’ wrote Ray, ‘that there was now nothing but the open desert between the 21st Panzer Division and ourselves.’14
To the north, the infantry brigades along the Gazala Line had had another quiet day. ‘A perfect day, though warm,’ wrote South African Bill Eadie, unaware of the carnage unfolding ten miles to the south. ‘Hardly a shot until sunset’, at which time a German plane zoomed over very low. It was clearly in trouble and the South Africans opened fire. The plane crashed a short distance behind them, ‘causing a hell of an uproar as may be imagined’.
In the Cauldron, one of the South Notts Hussars’ officers ordered the men to remain fully dressed and alert. Ray Ellis ignored the pointless order – they were all dead beat – and got out his blanket and went to sleep. One of the junior officers woke him shortly afterwards. He was a ‘silly little upstart’, so Ray told him where to go and went back to sleep again. ‘I had long since learned the importance of snatching sleep whenever possible,’ wrote Ray later.15
He was up again before dawn and waiting by his gun when Captain Slinn and Lieutenant Timms approached him. During the night, the rumours had been confirmed: General Ritchie had indeed decided that the artillery and infantry still in the Cauldron should remain there, hoping they could hold the line until the armour had yet again regrouped and reorganized itself. This wasn’t quite how it was seen by Captain Slinn, however, who told Ray that they had been ordered to fight to the last man and last round of ammunition. ‘He warned me that it was going to be absolute carnage,’ recorded Ray, ‘and he voiced the opinion that few of us would live to see the end of the day.’16
As dawn broke, the Panzer Army approached, as the defenders had known they would. Ray watched as they appeared over the lip of the far side of the depression then rumbled and clattered down the slope. Sensing no opposition they began to move forward less cautiously. Ray and the other crews loaded their guns with armour-piercing shells and waited for them to get within good effective range. ‘No one in my gun crew spoke,’ he noted, ‘as the tanks came bouncing towards us, each one leaving a huge cloud of dust in its wake.’17
Having selected a target and estimated the range, Ray gave the order to fire. By chance, nearly every gun-sergeant along their line seemed to have chosen the same moment to reopen the battle, and from their first salvo a number of German tanks were hit, belching flames and smoke into the air. In fact, after a few more rounds, the Panzers began to retreat. Another attack was launched soon after, but yet again the gunners managed to send them back.
There was another lull, but as Ray saw puffs of purple smoke rising into the sky he realized they were calling for support from the Luftwaffe. They were also bringing forward their own artillery for counter-battery fire and as the enemy guns began pounding the British positions, Ray watched the Stukas wheeling above. Already the situation was desperate. Even so, the crews kept frantically loading and firing, empty shell cases rapidly mounting around them.
At around 10 o’clock, Ray’s crew had just hit a German tank when their position erupted. The explosion flung Ray into the air, and he landed heavily. Badly shaken and with his ears ringing, he was trying to get to his feet when another shell crashed down on their position, hurling him into the air once more, only for him to fall again amidst a thick cloud of smoke and dust. He was not sure how long he stayed there, but eventually he came to, ‘coughing and retching and at last I got onto my knees. Everything was covered in black smoke and shells were falling in every direction.’18 Looking around, he saw his gun was upside down, his crew draped over it. He thought he must be wounded but couldn’t feel a thing. The blast had ripped off his shirt and his body was black and bleeding. For a while he just knelt where he was, shaking his head, until his brain began to clear. It appeared that another attack had been beaten off, so he crawled over to see if any of his gun crew was alive. He soon discovered the worst: he was the only survivor.
Having crawled into a small depression he then took a hold of himself. There were still two workable guns left – albeit without crews – so he dragged himself back out of his hole determined to have another go at the enemy. Tanks, guns, vehicles and bodies littered the landscape. Smoke from the wrecks spiralled into the sky. The stench of cordite and burning rubber and flesh hung heavy in the air. There were now almost none of the original gun crews remaining, but a number of the regiment’s support troops – drivers, signallers and orderlies – began appearing and, by the time of the next attack later that afternoon, Ray and the other remnants of the regiment had managed to get three of their guns firing again. Still the enemy kept attacking – tanks, guns, machine-gun fire and more dive-bombers. By late afternoon, Ray was still blasting away madly, although now alongside complete strangers. One man beside him was not from the regiment at all, but from the Royal Signals. A spray of machine-gun fire hit him in the lower body and flung him back on the trail of the gun. ‘I went over to pull his body clear and as I did so he looked up at me with such frightened eyes,’ wrote Ray. He tried to comfort the signalman with the normal platitudes, telling him he wasn’t badly hurt, that soon he’d be in hospital with nice clean sheets; that he’d be home before he knew it. But the man was dying among the constant scream of explosions and bullets ricocheting around them. ‘It was like being in some corner of hell and talking about heaven,’ noted Ray.19 He also watched other friends die: Jim Hardy was sliced in half by a shell; Jim Martin – an old pal from Tobruk days – was burned alive as the petrol from a truck poured over him then caught fire. The regiment’s second-in-command then loaded his truck with food and water and fled – the only man to desert his post all day. By now it was late afternoon and they were almost surrounded. Of the three surviving guns, only Ray’s was still firing. Machine-gun fire suddenly drummed from behind them and the man beside him was ‘hurled spinning into the gun shield’. Ray turned round to see a German tank only yards away. He waited for the inevitable, but it never came. ‘Whether he was distracted, or whether it was an act of compassion, I shall never know. I prefer to think it was the latter,’ he wrote later.20
The regiment was finished – utterly destroyed. Tanks began sweeping through the position, while Ray, dazed and numb, wandered aimlessly, not quite aware he was now a prisoner of war. He stumbled over to where Jim Hardy lay and saw his friend’s water bottle was still attached to his webbing. Taking out his knife, Ray cut it free. ‘I drank the tepid water and then as I looked down at my old friend’s lifeless face, the tears ran down my face.’ Then he saw his gun, with his crew still sprawled over and beside it. And there, on the shield, now upside down, was the painting of ‘The Saint’. It had fired its last.
It was now six o’clock, and although the British forces that remained in the Cauldron had, like 150th Brigade before them, fought against impossible odds to keep the mass of the Panzer Army at bay, the day had been a disaster. A German tank drew up beside Ray and the commander beckoned him to climb up. He did as he was bidden, and for a moment, they looked each other in the eye then turned their gaze skywards, in a mutual expression of empathy. ‘We drove away from the battlefield together, two enemies who felt no hatred for each other, only a shared sense of loss and bitterness.’21
As the field regiments and other units trapped within the Cauldron were slowly being destroyed on 6 June, confusion continued to reign at Eighth Army Headquarters. Throughout the day, the British armour had made only a few half-hearted attempts to relieve the Cauldron; even so, they had taken a pasting and by the morning of 7 June had only 132 tanks left from the 300 with which they had begun the attack.
Only one British general seemed to have some grasp of what was actually happening and that was Major-General Francis Tuker of the 4th Indian Division. After his command on the southern flank at Gazala had so abruptly evaporated on the opening morning of the battle, Tuker had spent the rest of 26 May at XXX Corps HQ observing Rommel’s progress. In the evening he had gone up to Eighth Army HQ to see if there was anything he could do. The following morning he was told he was needed not at the front but at Sollum, to make sure that reinforcements heading from Egypt and Iraq came through without a hitch. It was hardly a taxing task, but fortunately it meant regular visits to army HQ and even occasional opportunities to drive out to one or other of the divisional, brigade, or corps HQs close to the fighting. He was therefore reasonably in touch with what was going on and, as a spectator, ‘saw as much as or more of the game than the players’.22 He didn’t like what he’d seen. Ritchie, he believed, ‘had shown the same complete lack of ability to make a plan or to accept a risk. For days Rommel lay at his mercy, badly mauled’, but nothing had been done.
When the attack had finally come, Tuker had been at the HQ he had established in a cavern near Sollum. The spot had already been much used – its floor was thick with fleas – but it did save Tuker and his divisional staff from the sandstorms that raged across the desert on 2 June. But on the 5th, having been told about the formations going in and the basic concept of the plan of attack, Tuker realized they were heading for disaster. He immediately rang Eighth Army HQ and pointed out that they had now forwarded the last reinforcing troops through Sollum and could he now rejoin the core of his division in the Delta? Yes, he was told, as soon as he’d handed over to another officer. This occurred the following day, after which he headed as fast as he could to Cairo and GHQ.
On his arrival, he ran upstairs to the Chief of the General Staff (CGS), Tom Corbett, whom he knew well. In no uncertain terms, Tuker told him that unless the Auk went out to the desert at once, to take control and concentrate all he could lay his hands on for a single heavy blow in the northern sector to wrench the initiative back from Rommel, they were heading for the most unnecessary disaster of the war. It was clear to Tuker that neither Corbett nor Auchinleck appreciated the seriousness of the situation in the desert. Pointing to the map, he showed Corbett how dispersed the troops were and how these small formations were being left all over the battlefield in an attempt to cover every threat that might come from the Axis forces. ‘Soon Eighth Army will be sprinkled about with a man to every grain of sand,’ he told him. It was of paramount importance that a concentrated striking force should strike a blow within forty-eight hours. There was, Tuker told Corbett, yet time to save Eighth Army, even turn the tables, but this chance would soon pass.
Corbett immediately went in to see the Auk, but returned a short while later saying the C-in-C would not go. ‘He [Corbett] couldn’t have put it strongly enough,’ was Tuker’s verdict. ‘He should have said “Either Ritchie goes or I go.”’23 Having pushed the matter as far as he was able, Tuker then made his way to his division near Cairo.24 The following day, around noon, Ritchie signalled the Auk, ‘Yesterday was a day of hard fighting in which we suffered considerably, but I am confident that enemy suffered no less.’ Was Ritchie genuinely in the dark, or was this disingenuous understatement? It is hard to say, but with every day that Ritchie remained in command, the more parlous the British situation became.25
Eleven Hurricanes took part in 73 Squadron’s morning sweep over Gazala and Acroma. It was John Fairbairn’s first combat sortie since joining the squadron and he was ‘shit-scared’. He had had no training whatsoever for daytime operations. After being called up in September 1940, aged just nineteen, he’d gone through initial and elementary flying training, had gained his wings – in Canada – then been posted to Scotland to train as a night-fighter pilot, and had only spent four months with an operational night-fighter squadron in South Wales when he’d been posted to North Africa. As 73 Squadron had been due to be converted to night-fighter duties, John had been sent out to them in anticipation of this, but with Rommel’s attack such plans had, for the time being, been put on the back burner.
The squadron had taken off in two flights, line abreast, but John had been behind his section leader and so had been engulfed in a miniature sandstorm. He’d left the ground completely blind and praying he wasn’t about to collide with anyone. Quickly emerging into clear sky he soon found himself lagging behind. ‘Try pulling your wheels up, Red Three,’ said the Flight Leader. John felt himself smarting with embarrassment.
The patrol levelled out at around 18,000 feet. Below, the desert and the Mediterranean appeared as little more than smudges of brown and blue. Through his headset, he suddenly heard the ground controller’s voice, clear and calm. ‘Fifteen plus bandits approaching angels twenty, ten o’clock high.’ This meant there were at least fifteen enemy fighters two thousand feet above them, approaching from ahead and slightly to the left of their current position.
‘There they are!’ shouted the CO suddenly. ‘About twenty of the bastards! Watch them carefully.’ John craned his neck, scanning the sky for all he was worth, but couldn’t see a thing, although from the excited yells of his colleagues it was clear they were having no such problem identifying the foe. As John was discovering, it took a while to attune one’s eyesight to aerial combat; it was one of the many reasons new pilots, particularly, were so vulnerable. Then someone shouted, ‘Here they come!’ and the CO ordered them to break. Before he had had time to think, John discovered the others had disappeared and that he was flying completely alone. ‘For the first time in my life I experienced sheer terror,’ he noted. ‘My mouth went Bône dry and my tongue attached itself to the roof of my mouth and stayed there. My breath inside my mask smelled of vomit and my body went ice cold.’
His fear caused him momentary paralysis and he began flying straight and level – the biggest single sin in aerial combat. A loud bang brought him to his senses as the control column was nearly knocked out of his hand. A large chunk had been blasted out of his right aileron, the device on his wing that enabled him to rotate his aircraft. Without waiting to see who was attacking him, John flicked the Hurricane over on its back, pulled the stick hard into his stomach and dived for his life. With the airspeed indicator needle off the clock and the aircraft hurtling towards the ground, he then struggled to pull out of the dive; straining and groaning, the Hurricane gradually did so. Despite flying somewhat lopsidedly, John managed to nurse his plane back to base. ‘On shaky legs,’ he wrote, ‘I walked back to the mess feeling that I had not exactly covered myself with glory.’26
With his overwhelming victory in the Cauldron, and with no sign of any further attack by the remains of the British armour, Rommel turned once more to Hacheim. Ritchie began by sending forces to the aid of the French then began to wonder whether perhaps they should evacuate the position. He was once again in two minds, but from Cairo the Auk advised him to keep the French where they were; with the Germans turning their attention there and away from the Cauldron, it would give Eighth Army’s armour time to regroup once more.
The Free French had been under near-constant attack since 1 June, but despite being completely isolated many miles from the rest of Eighth Army, they had defiantly held their ground in their hellish corner of the desert. The French – or Fighting French as they had been renamed – were proving to be a bothersome thorn in the side for the Axis commander. Twice more Rommel had appealed to them to surrender. At dawn on the 5th, a German officer had driven up to the French lines and demanded a parley. The legionnaire sentry happened to be a German and told him he could not possibly wake Koenig to ask him such a question. Infuriated, the officer drove away again, only to hit a mine. Leaping out, he was forced to continue on foot, German insults ringing in his ears.
Although surrounded, the French gunners had rarely let up. At night, however, the defenders were given some respite. Pierre Messmer could not understand why the Germans never attacked during the hours of darkness – after all, the desert nights were always clear and cool, ideal fighting conditions. Still, he was not complaining. Night-time gave the beleaguered outpost a chance for a few much-needed supplies to be sneaked in. The 2nd Rifle Brigade had been operating to the west of the Gazala Line, attacking enemy supply columns feeding both the attacks on Bir Hacheim and the Cauldron, and also making forays into the French positions at night. On 7 June, Albert Martin had been told that ‘S’ Company would be escorting a supply column into Bir Hacheim. ‘They are desperately in need of these supplies, poor devils,’ he noted in his diary. ‘I’m willing to risk it.’ And quite a risk it was too. They had to rely on complete darkness to avoid detection by the Axis troops leaguered around Bir Hacheim, but this also made it harder to navigate; it was all too easy to wander into mined areas, or even lose one another. Knowing that at any moment the next step might be their last or that they might be discovered made such operations particularly tense affairs. That night the resupply was only partially successful. Although they managed to avoid the mines, they did become dispersed and Albert’s company commander, along with a few others, found themselves trapped within the French box. As it was, they only managed to get a small amount of food and water through. ‘We’re all dead beat,’ wrote Albert the following day.
The French were also being supported by the RAF. On 3 June, seven Stukas from a flight of twelve were shot down by fighters of the Desert Air Force – amid gleeful cheering from the defenders below. The next day, Billy Drake did well, too. In a letter to his Commander-in-Chief, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Mary Coningham wrote: ‘highlight of the day, however, was Drake of 112, spotting either a German or Italian party formed up in a square and obviously being addressed. His bomb landed right in the middle, and he claims well over 100 knocked out. His description was that he found one of the enemy colonels giving a pep-talk.’27 Isolated though they were, the defenders took heart from the efforts of the RAF. On the 4th, General Koenig signalled to Mary Coningham, ‘Bravo! Merci pour la RAF!’ Mary replied, ‘Merci pour la sport!’28 Two days later, Billy Drake was leading a flight of 112 Squadron over Bir Hacheim yet again when he spotted four Messerschmitt 109s below them. Making the most of this unusual advantage, Billy led his flight down to attack. In the brief exchange that followed, the four 109s were shot down, including one by Billy. Not content with their aerial victories, they then bombed Axis vehicles, leaving one in flames and six others badly shot up. Later on in the day, the squadron destroyed a further five enemy vehicles and damaged another twelve. In all, thirty-eight sorties were flown that day by 112 Squadron, most of the pilots flying at least three sorties each, including an attack over the Cauldron in the afternoon. This was the kind of intensity of flying experienced at the height of the Battle of Britain. ‘Not a bad result, we felt,’ Billy Drake noted.29
But it wasn’t enough. Mary Coningham was struggling to keep abreast of demands. It had been impossible to provide non-stop standing patrols over the Cauldron, for example, because there were simply too few aircraft available, although fighter-bombers had destroyed around seventy enemy vehicles there. Coningham’s difficulties were also compounded by insufficient radar – he could not afford to lose the one radar unit he had at the front – while the telephone links to his forward fighter wings were frequently cut by enemy air attacks. This meant that all too often his pilots were unable to intercept the enemy in the air; even on the day Koenig had signalled his thanks to Mary, the RAF had only managed to intercept six out of the twenty-four enemy air attacks.
For those on the ground at Bir Hacheim, twenty-four Stuka raids in one day meant one every half hour. No sooner had one attack passed than another batch of thirty or forty would scream down on them, releasing their deadly loads into a mass of dust and smoke, whilst from the desert the Axis guns continued to fire round after round into the shattered encampment. The ferocity of these repeated attacks was already taking its toll when, on 8 June, Rommel himself arrived to take personal command along with more units of the Afrika Korps, sent south to support the Italians and German 90th Light Division already striving to break the French will.
Although the morning had begun with a mist, Susan Travers had sat alone in her dugout and heard the Stukas screaming overhead as usual. ‘Sadly, they were just as effective,’ she noted.30 As the mists cleared, the barrage began. Then more aerial attacks. Then infantry and tanks, and yet more dive-bombers. By evening, with vehicles still burning amidst the French positions and with the number of dead and wounded mounting, Susan listened with mounting anxiety to the Axis troops clearing mines only a few hundred yards away.
Pierre Messmer and his men had spent the day taking cover from the attacks, but that night Koenig had ordered him to relieve some of the artillerymen who had faced the brunt of the Axis attacks that day and were by now demoralized, tired, and, thirsty. Before he moved into position, Pierre saw Colonel Amilakvari, who told him, ‘If it’s necessary, you will have to die there.’31 Everyone in Bir Hacheim realized how hopeless their situation was becoming.
At around midnight, Messmer’s unit took over his allotted section of the line. The outgoing officer had been wounded earlier that day when the roof of his command post had collapsed on him, and was now in a considerable state of shock. For the past few days they had spent every waking hour under near-constant bombardment. The strain had been enormous.
The cover of darkness offered some respite, however, and Pierre and his men made the most of it, taking the chance to settle into their new positions. His unit had been reinforced by some African troops, but this had been something of a part exchange: in return for the extra troops, he had been forced to relinquish his Bren carriers, their only source of mobility. As they stowed their pitiful kit and cleaned their weapons, they could hear scraping a few hundred yards away: the Germans were clearing the mines that protected Bir Hacheim.
Pierre noticed one of his men, Mamuric – nicknamed ‘Mammoth’ – sitting apart from the rest of his men and lovingly polishing his heavy machine gun. This worried him somewhat, especially when he heard the big man muttering, ‘You must be beautiful for tomorrow, my lovely. You’re all cleaned up now … have a rest.’ From Croatia, Mammoth had saved Pierre’s life in Eritrea and since then they had, from time to time, talked openly to one another. Mammoth had told him about his childhood in Croatia: he had been abandoned as a child and had survived by working most of his life as a farm labourer until being sent packing for getting the farmer’s daughter pregnant. He’d been a legionnaire almost ever since. Wandering over to him, Pierre said, ‘Tomorrow is going to be a nightmare. What are you fighting for, Mamuric?’
‘For freedom, my Captain,’ Mammoth replied without thinking. Pierre was astounded. ‘Big ideals rarely spring from the mouths of soldiers,’ he noted. ‘If Mamuric invokes freedom it is perhaps because he is going to die.’32
The following afternoon, after a morning of further heavy bombardment, German infantry appeared through the mist of heat and dust. Advancing to the right of the French position, the Germans severed the legionnaires from the rest of the brigade, but by bringing to bear a heavy artillery strike of their own, the Fighting French once more repulsed German assault. By nightfall, the French brigade still held their positions. They had not been overrun, but their situation was without hope. Over a hundred aircraft had attacked Bir Hacheim that day. Susan Travers was disgusted that despite being clearly marked, even the hospital and surgical theatre had come under attack from the Stukas, and although the RAF had dropped urgently needed supplies of plasma, the bottles had shattered as they’d hit the ground. They were also now down to less than a cupful of water per person per day. Albert Martin and his colleagues in the 2nd Rifle Brigade were once again up all night, hoping to bring in more supplies, but the French guide never appeared.
More and more enemy aircraft arrived the following day, bringing with them a hurricane of fire, metal and stone. Pierre had been in a foxhole but was half-buried as the sides collapsed on him. He emerged momentarily blind and punch-drunk; when his eyesight returned, all he could see was a thick black cloud of smoke covering the landscape like a funeral shroud. A pause, and then the Axis artillery struck, shells from the German 88s exploding before Pierre had even heard the report. Tanks also emerged ahead of them and began advancing towards his section of the line. ‘Open fire,’ Pierre told the commander of his three 75-mm anti-tank guns. ‘If I do,’ the officer replied, ‘the guns will be detected and destroyed.’
‘Open fire,’ Pierre told him again, ‘because it’s now or never.’ One enemy tank was hit, but within a couple of minutes the legionnaires’ guns were, as predicted, destroyed by the lethal fire of the 88s.33
Unbeknown to Pierre Messmer, Koenig had already decided that they would attempt a breakout that night, 10 June, and although Ritchie had spent the previous few days urging him to hold on, he did finally authorize the decision. Koenig had told his lover, Susan Travers, in person the night before and so she spent the next twenty-four hours preparing herself for what seemed like ‘nothing less than a suicide mission’.34 Each hour dragged by; there was little she could do but prepare the car as best as she was able, lining it with sandbags, making sure it was filled with fuel and water and placing Tommy guns on the back seat. After that, there was nothing for it but to wait.
Koenig had decided a mass breakout to the south-west was their best chance of success. Sappers would clear a 50-yard-wide path through their minefields, then battalions of legionnaires would push forward, creating a corridor through which the rest would follow. The French commander, with Susan driving, would lead the convoy of vehicles carrying the wounded behind the legionnaires.
‘H’ hour was midnight. The mood in the camp was tense, although the senior officers, Pierre Messmer included, did their best to appear outwardly calm. Susan Travers brought the car to the assembly point, sick with nerves. The car had played up badly the last few times it had been out and she feared it would break down on them. ‘Please don’t let me down tonight,’ she muttered to the car. ‘Don’t stall on me.’35
It was a dark, moonless night, and cold, too. Dead on midnight, the General appeared and stepped into the car beside Susan. ‘You’re to do exactly as I tell you, when I tell you, for both our sakes,’ he told her. Then, putting the car in gear, Susan crept them forward. More agonized waiting followed, while the path was cleared of mines, then they trundled forward again, in total silence save the low rumble of their engines.36
The comparative calm was shattered as a Bren carrier hit a mine. In moments, the sky was lit with Axis flares and then another Bren carrier exploded too. Shortly after, shells began falling, and arcs of tracer cut across the sky. Susan Travers fully expected this to be the end, especially when Amilak’s car also hit a mine. The Russian count was, however, unhurt, and having ordered his troops to move forward, joined Susan and Koenig in their car. ‘Drive straight ahead, as fast as you can!’ the General shouted. ‘If we go, the rest will follow.’37 Susan did as she was told, but first had to manoeuvre around the various burning vehicles ahead of her. In doing so, she was forced to venture off the cleared path and into the minefield. But all fear had left her. Instead, she felt only exhilaration as she hurtled the car towards ever increasing amounts of tracer and gunfire.38
By 7 a.m. on 11 June, only 1,500 French troops had reached British lines, and it appeared the breakout had been a costly failure. Koenig, Amilakvari – and Susan Travers – were all missing. But as the morning wore on, the situation improved. At 8 a.m., the 7th Motor Brigade signalled that they had a further 2,000 troops from Bir Hacheim, including a number of their own who had been trapped during an earlier attempt to resupply the besieged brigade. ‘What a bloody night it was!’ noted Albert Martin in his diary. At dawn, he had been sitting in a disused slit-trench watching the French emerge through a ‘solid wall of fire’. Albert had helped round up hundreds of wounded, dazed and exhausted men and led them to waiting trucks and ambulances.
Shortly after, with the French safely out of the way, Albert and his section had seen a huge column of enemy tanks, vehicles and troops heading in their direction.
‘What do we do now, Corporal?’ asked one of Albert’s section.
‘What you don’t do, matey,’ Albert told him, ‘is run around like a headless chicken – now keep still, stay in your trench.’39 His experience was showing, but clearly there was little they could do to save themselves. Heroics would achieve nothing and so Albert resigned himself to being taken prisoner – ‘put in the bag’. He felt completely drained of emotion. He’d been in the desert a long time, and now it was over. They all started collecting their things together – water bottle, spare socks, photographs and letters – and waited to be rounded up.
To their surprise the Germans then suddenly changed direction. ‘They clearly saw us,’ says Albert, ‘but we were ignored.’ After a while, the riflemen got up out of their slit-trenches and gingerly moved off in their trucks on a parallel line with the Axis column. ‘We gave the enemy a wave, which they returned,’ says Albert, ‘and then they moved off at a tangent and away.’ Sometimes collecting prisoners in the desert was more trouble than it was worth.
Koenig and Amilak were still missing, but were safe. Miraculously, the car never let Susan Travers down, even though it had been punctured by a number of bullet holes. In the early hours before dawn they had even mistakenly stopped in the midst of a German leaguer. ‘Drive! Vite!’ Amilak had urged her as they heard German voices and then rifle fire. ‘My heart was in my mouth,’ wrote Susan, ‘as I flew past the menacing silhouettes and on into the darkness.’
As the faint flush of dawn appeared on the horizon, they realized they were now in an empty stretch of desert. Nothing could be seen for miles and miles. Miraculously, they had survived, but Koenig was in despair, believing they were the only survivors. In the early afternoon, however, they saw a large convoy. As they approached, they realized to their joy and relief that it was a large part of the brigade that had broken out with them the previous night.40 Even Pierre Messmer, who had been ordered to stay until the last moment, had made it to safety. At one point he and his men had found themselves in the middle of a German company, with only one pistol between them. A number of equally lost French armoured vehicles inadvertently rescued them in the nick of time. They later stumbled on a German command post, which they overran before the startled Germans had time to realize what was happening.
Over 2,500, from a garrison of 3,700, managed to escape that night. On 26 May, Rommel had reckoned Bir Hacheim would be destroyed in less than an hour. Instead, the Free French had held out for two weeks, despite desperate shortages of water, food, ammunition, and equipment. When it seemed that all was lost, they had saved themselves with a breakout of outrageous daring, and in doing so had done much to restore the pride and reputation of the French. For General Koenig, the leader of this remarkable band, the relief was almost too much. Turning to Susan Travers, tears filling his eyes, he said, ‘Well done, La Miss. Between us we did it. We got them out.’41
But with Bir Hacheim no longer in the equation and the southern half of the Gazala Line destroyed, it was time for the armour to face each other once more. And this time the outcome would decide the battle once and for all.