circles around the British army in North Africa. Now though it might just be their turn. The talk in the mess was all about the newly-arrived ordnance. Hundreds of tanks, great war machines that rumbled forward on tracks, unstoppable, able with a single shot to destroy a house. Tanks. That was what this battle, this war, was all about. The Germans had started out with many more, and better. Tanks filled him with dread. He had a secret fear of being crushed beneath a caterpillar track. A fear which he had never told anyone. A fear that had him waking in the night in a cold sweat. Tanks.
Bird wished to God that they had just a few of the new Sherman tanks with them. Instead, they had guns, the new six-pounder guns that they said could take out a tank with ease. He had yet to see it. And now they were under his command. He had been thrilled to get his own company. He had been promoted to major now and had a bar to his MC as well. He’d won that back in July at Gazala. He had been in the south with the Free French in the Bir Hakeim box, fighting the Italian Trieste and Ariete Divisions and the Twenty-First Panzers. He’d taken a column of twenty-five lorries carrying food and ammunition through minefields to reach the beleaguered French in their strongpoint. And once there, the commanding officer of the French garrison, General Koenig, had persuaded him to break out. They’d done it and saved 27,000 men from being taken. On top of that he’d captured fourteen Jerry prisoners and not had a single casualty among his own men.
It was more, far more than he had thought he would achieve when he had joined back in ’40. He knew that it had much to do with Colonel Turner’s opinion of him. People had wondered why he had joined the Rifle Brigade, or the Sixtieth Rifles as the colonel liked to refer to them. For of course they were not a brigade at all but a regiment, one of the finest and proudest in the British army. A regiment that had come out of the colonial war as a response to the American practice of using light infantry skilled with smoothbore rifles. A regiment that had fought with pride against the French in the peninsula.
The colonel was a sound chap. More than that, a father-figure, or as Bird often thought of him, like a kindly housemaster from his old school. The regiment was like that. An extended family. The mess was filled with Etonians and Wykehamists. Sometimes Bird sympathized with the newly-commissioned officers who had to infiltrate this public-school elite. ‘Temporary gentlemen’ were not always welcome in the mess. He did not mind them himself, but there were others who did. The lads were good enough though. They’d come through a lot in recent weeks. They were Londoners mostly, Eastenders, most of them conscripted into the ranks. But none the worse for that. And then there were the old sweats, the NCOs. They’d taken to the new men, had spent some time on them and it had worked. Bird felt that now he was in command of an efficient fighting unit. In fact they constituted a formidable little brigade; 2nd Battalion had three motorized infantry companies, a carrier platoon, a machine-gun platoon and most importantly his four platoons of six-pounders, sixteen guns in all. Aside from that the colonel had also been given an attached force of another eleven guns from 239 battery of 76 AT regiment RA.
They were all mounted on ‘portees’, lorries from whose flat-bed top the gun could be slid down and into position. It was not an ideal method of transport, slightly Heath Robinson-ish. But it gave them mobile anti-tank power and that was vital in this war of machines. All day they had been sitting here, keeping watch over the minefields. Static and in support. It was not his way and he was impatient to be in the action. But Bird knew that their time would come and when it did, he knew too that they would acquit themselves with honour, whatever the odds.
FIVE
6.00 p.m. Tactical HQ, Eighth Army The beach, El Alamein General Bernard Law Montgomery
It was, anyone could see, a superb defensive position. And he cursed himself for not having been the man who had found it. For this was Auchinleck’s position, a defensive line chosen by the General whom he had been brought in to replace. Auchinleck – the man who had failed in all else but this. The chance to define this sublime line which ran for forty-five miles from the Mediterranean in the north, due south across the desert to the impassable vastness of the great Quattara Depression. It was the last line of defence between the enemy and Cairo. The perfect place to make a last stand. Here it was that they had fallen back to in the face of the enemy’s last attempt to take the city. Here it was that they had regrouped and rested. And it would be from here, he knew, that they would attack.
He looked at the map spread out before him on the table which stood in the middle of his small command caravan and traced a line along it from north to south. Forty miles of front line, all of it more or less level but with two passages of high ground: Ruweisat Ridge and Alam Nayil. Though on the map it looked flat, Montgomery, like the men who had lived out there in the desert, some of them for two years, knew that it was far from that. That it was marked by small hillocks and dunes, dips that seemed as hard to climb as ravines and sheer drops that could catch you off your guard and swallow you up. And it was not just sand, but rock and everywhere was punctuated by clumps green bushes of sharp camel-thorn. There were no roads and precious few houses. In short, it was the perfect terrain for modern, mechanized warfare. And ‘modern’ was a word that he liked very much. The whole essence of modern warfare could be reduced to three things: concentration, control and simplicity.
In short it was about modernity. It was the only way to win. Complete change in the British army. Dunkirk had taught him that. But it had taken till now to bring it in. Two long years. So many of the old guard had gone now, he thought, and they were so much the better for it. There was Ritchie, sacked after the Gazala disaster in June and his replacement Corbett who everyone knew to be an idiot. ‘A complete fathead’ his chief of staff had called him. So Gott had been brought in. Old ‘Strafer’ Gott. And it had been he that Montgomery had replaced. Though it had been unfortunate that it should have happened the way it had with Gott being killed in a plane crash. Montgomery had simply been the next man in line. In truth he knew that the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, had turned Churchill’s ear.
And what great good fortune to have been given such a chance. Surely God was rewarding him for his faith over the years and his devotion to the army. The army had been his life. Was still. Of course his late wife Betty had been so dear to him and her sudden and quite unexpected death, exactly five years ago this month had left a dreadful vacuum in his life that could never be filled. But at least he had their son, David, now thirteen. He’d left him at school at Winchester when he’d come out here, in the care of his former headmaster from prep school. David was just a boy, but, he reflected, he was not that much younger than so many of the ‘men’ he now led.
He turned to see his ADC, John Poston, a twenty-three-year-old captain in the 11th Hussars. Poston was a pleasant Old Harrovian, a good horseman who had been in the desert since 1940 having joined straight from school. He was only ten years older than David, he thought. A fine, handsome young man with a pair of honest and engaging pale grey eyes. He had taken to young Poston instantly on his arrival in the desert, and had asked for him in particular. Well, he had also been poor Gott’s former ADC and he clearly knew the ropes. Wouldn’t drive him into a minefield as young Spooner, the ADC he had brought with him from England, had done on his first day. Montgomery smiled at the boy’s clothes. Like so many of his officers, particularly those in the cavalry and yeomanry, he had adopted his own style of dress: suede desert boots, spotted silk cravat, corduroy trousers. Montgomery indulged it. He knew Poston to be somewhat apart from the class-conscious society of the mess and admired him for his simple professionalism. Hadn’t he himself been somewhat unorthodox in his own dress? He followed Wellington’s dictum; what mattered was not following the drill book to the letter but the quality and professionalism of the man. Besides, hadn’t he re-written the drill book?
‘Did you realize, John, that we have the longest supply routes the history of warfare has ever known?’
‘I think I overheard you say as much to the Field Marshal, sir.’
‘What very sharp hearing you have.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
Montgomery tugged at his right earlobe, a habit of which he was hardly aware but which was often remarked on behind his back. ‘No matter, you should know in any case, John. It is true. Although unlike Herr