For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II. Dr. Campbell-Begg Richard

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СКАЧАТЬ heel had been sliced off my right boot. I guess it took a minute or two to recover our senses, then we discovered the bloke nearest the bomb had taken the full impact and was quite badly wounded. We carried him to the HQ truck and found quite a number of wounded already there. Ambulances started to arrive so we got out of the way. We learnt that there had been about 20 men at the radio truck when it sustained a direct hit, killing 12 and wounding the rest.

      Several trucks were on fire, so the area was well lit up. Most of the drivers elected to move further away from the burning trucks, but when we got back to our truck we found that a lump of shrapnel had flattened one tyre, so decided to stay put until daylight. That same night, those with the Division at Minqar Qaim had a worse time. The infantry cut their way through the German lines with bayonets, with the transport vehicles following behind. Two of my friends who were carting explosives for the engineers received a direct hit and were literally blown to kingdom come.

      After several days we were all sorted out and back with our own units. I still couldn’t hear with my right ear and my neck was pretty sore. I reported sick and was sent to Field Hospital. There I was told I had a burst eardrum and a whiplash. I was told that my problems would heal themselves and was sent back to my unit. My ear has never healed properly.’

      Apart from the dangers of battle, there were other real problems in the desert. Kenneth Frater again:

      ‘From my point of view, my worst enemy was the Egyptian fly. With German and British troops combined there were 3-400,000 troops in an area 50 miles long and probably 8 miles wide. On the battlefield dead bodies often lay unburied for days. The only hygiene was to be like a cat. Scratch a hole in the sand and cover it up. The flies during the heat of summer moved in dense swarms. Having a meal was a real conjuring trick. You had to keep your food covered and then try and get a spoonful in your mouth with as few flies as possible. I contracted dysentery. I was taken to Field Hospital, but I continued to get worse. There was talk of evacuating me to Base Hospital. I didn’t want that, as when you returned from Base, you were liable to be drafted into the infantry. Fortunately an orderly, an angel in disguise, brought me a tin of Highlander condensed milk and said, “Get that into you – it’ll stop anything.” Within 4 hours my contractions had stopped and I was thinking perhaps I could manage some food. I had a couple of days on mashed potatoes and gravy and was then sent back to my unit. Our Medical Officer apparently didn’t like the look of me so recommended that I have convalescent leave. I had five days in Cairo. I wondered who the strange guy was when I saw myself in a full-length mirror. I had lost just on 3 stone.’

      New Zealand Gunner Officer and Battery Commander, Leonard Thornton, had clear memories of the alarm caused by Rommel’s advance towards Alexandria:

      ‘The NZ Division was in Syria when Rommel began his push in the Western Desert again, and Tobruk fell and we were hurtled back into the battle. And we made what was really, for a division, a lightning move. It took us only about, I suppose, five or six days, to move all those hundreds and hundreds of kilometres back into the Western Desert. And as we went up into the desert from Alexandria and went up that narrow and well-known desert road towards the west, the Eighth Army and the Air Force were coming pell-mell back down the road and it was, shall we say, not exactly riotous, but it was certainly a very disorganised retreat. And morale had fallen to pieces, so it was quite a challenge. The Kiwis rather liked the idea that they were going to save the situation, so we went in the most orderly way we could. Up alongside the road, mostly against the stream of traffic coming back from the disordered battles that had occurred further to the west. And we were ordered to take up a fixed position as they prepared defensive positions at Matruh. General Freyberg, who was our redoubtable commander, made one of the best decisions of his life when he said, “I command a mobile division and I am not going to have them shut up in old-fashioned silted-up defences protected by rusty and not very effective wire. I must fight the battle in a mobile way.” And because of his insistence we were allowed to get out on a flank and fight the battle at a place called Minqar Qaim.

      Freyberg was an unusual man and he was in a unique position really, because he was the overall force commander as well as being a fighting commander, and as the Divisional Commander, so he had wide responsibilities, wider than an ordinary major-general commanding an ordinary old infantry division. However, secondly he was directly responsible to the New Zealand Government for the safety and, indeed, the employment of the New Zealand Force. The New Zealand Force was a pretty large and mobile force. We had, at that stage, three infantry brigades and the usual bits and pieces, so if really necessary, if he thought it was necessary, he could at any time refer to the New Zealand Government to say, I have been asked to do, perform such and such a task here, and I think it’s either appropriate or I think it’s not appropriate, and I’d like you to say whether I am to conform. I don’t think that, in this case, he found it necessary to refer the matter back, although after the debacle in Greece to which New Zealand troops had been committed, he was a little wary. We then fought the battle at Minqar Qaim and, of course, in the nature of things, as the battle flowed towards us and then round us, the Division was surrounded. You had to accept that as a normal situation in a mobile operation, but it’s not a very comfortable one.

       Leonard Whitmore Thornton

      I had, in the meantime, been detached from my regiment, which was, as you might say, in the bag at Minqar Qaim, because I had been sent off with an infantry battalion, the 21st Battalion. I was now commanding a field battery to defend another small outpost area to the south of the main divisional position. We were quite detached so we fought our own operation down in this lonely part of the desert while the Division defended itself in its locality at Minqar Qaim. The Division, having defended itself through something like two days and nights of defensive fighting, realised that the situation was rather threatening and they would have to break out. And at that critical moment General Freyberg, making a reconnaissance of the front-line areas towards Cairo, that’s to say on the eastern side, was wounded by some stray shelling and quite badly wounded in the neck, so that was just the wrong moment to lose your commander.

      However, the reserve commander took over and that night the whole Division did an extraordinary operation, just charging through the night, a silent attack, and broke through the German lines and the entire force escaped with very, very low casualties really. An extraordinary operation – my own regiment came out on the Saturday and broke their way out separately and they all moved off towards a defensive position, which had been prepared further towards the east. In the meantime, of course, I didn’t know what had happened; communications in those days were very chancy indeed. You seemed to think that in the field everyone would be in touch; we had no idea really what had happened to the Division. And so I had a rather uncomfortable day being pursued by a few tanks and armoured cars and that sort of thing and trying to support the battalion. The battalion itself got scattered and, anyway, the long and short of it was that after a very uncomfortable night in the middle of the desert and not knowing quite what was happening, we moved off back and got the buzz, really from a chance encounter with an engineer officer, a lone figure travelling across the desert. We then fell back on to the main position.

      So we reorganised ourselves back on what was eventually to become the Alamein Line. And there was fought a series of battles, and these were very untidy battles indeed with very poor co-ordination. I look back on it now, I realise how poor the co-ordination was between the arms. We had lost a large number as prisoners at that time, which is always a sign of poor control and c-ordination. There was a total lack of understanding between the British armour and the infantry – I don’t mean only ourselves, but the armour and infantry generally were not working well together. We had no armour at that time, no tanks in other words at that time, apart from some light tanks. So it was a very, very unhappy period and our losses were very high, including, I can’t remember the figure now, but we must have lost something over 2-3,000, probably prisoners. So we were in a very depleted state when that phase of the battle came to an end. It came to an end really because Rommel СКАЧАТЬ