Battlefields (2001) s01e01 Episode Script

They called it Ash Wednesday, Throughout Egypt, British officials began to destroy sensitive documents as their enemies advanced, In Cairo, the Egyptian capital, the British feared the worst.
The Germans seemed likely to take the city, just as they'd already conquered most of Europe.
In the Pacific, the Japanese had gravely weakened British and American power and taken Hong Kong and Singapore.
In the Atlantic, German submarines threatened to starve Britain into submission.
It was the darkest moment in the Second World War.
Few of the British servicemen were professionals, Ever since Dunkirk, they had had to learn their new trade in the hard school of defeat, This series follows their struggle to turn back the tide of disaster through four campaigns on the road to victory, starting in the deserts of North Africa, The Germans had come to North Africa the year before to defend their Italian allies in Libya, But now their aim was to take Egypt and with it, the whole of the Middle East, And in Rommel, the German commander, they had sent one of their best generals, as the British had discovered to their cost, Rommel was a man who exploited every situation.
He led from the front.
He was most of the time in front with his soldiers and we were against a very professional army, a very good army, and very well-equipped, better equipped than we were.
For the battered British soldiers, fighting Rommel in the desert became a struggle against nature as much as the enemy, This is a field of battle like no other.
The desert is a harsh and waterless place.
Living in it soaks up water.
Travelling through it soaks up petrol.
And for the inexperienced or unprepared, the whole environment soaks up resolve.
Simply surviving here is an effort in itself, The ration was two water bottles per day, one in the morning, one in the evening.
Two pints.
That had to do for everything.
It had to do for drinking, for washing, for washing of clothes.
Everything.
With no real landmarks, finding your way in safety is difficult, It was in the wilderness.
You didn't know where you was, and the living conditions was more primitive than we'd ever known.
And, you know, talk about Boy Scouts camping, it's no comparison, of course.
Perhaps the most obvious thing about the desert was, to the men who fought here, the most peculiar.
There were no civilians and almost no buildings to get in the way.
Put simply, desert fighting was a tactician's dream.
And in Rommel, the British were facing a master tactician, In 1942, the German commander was hoping to knock Britain right out of the war, His plan was to smash through the British army and take Egypt and the Middle East and with it the oil supplies which kept the British war effort going, The British line rested on the coast at Gazala, Rommel swung his massed tanks round the desert flank of the Allied line and pushed in towards the British rear, His attack smashed into the disorganised British, Their tanks were split up in small units and unable to stop the German advance, I watched the Germans come over this ridge.
We'd been told they had very few tanks.
I thought, "I don't know where they got them all, but somebody's given us wrong information.
" It was chaos.
It was chaos.
I mean, I'm being honest about that.
We suddenly found ourself surrounded and we were ordered to break out in transport, every vehicle for itself.
The 8th Army was in retreat.
We'd really believed and we were made to believe that we held all the aces, and then it all went wrong, and it's very hard then.
Broken British units raced back along the coast to Egypt, Some of them found themselves overtaken by the advancing Germans, We went through German positions.
When they realised what was happening, started firing at us, and we were going through crossfire to get out.
When we got back, there was only enough men to form one company, out of two companies.
I must admit, we probably thought, "Well, this could be the end.
" The headlong British retreat continued for 300 miles deep into Egypt, The lack of obstructions in the desert meant that movement along the Mediterranean coast was astonishingly fast.
Because the desert had no value in itself, vast areas of it could be given up in order to buy time.
The front line now was just 60 miles from the Nile, Back in Cairo, the panic began, GHQ was beginning to muster papers and there were things being destroyed.
There was a certain amount of preparation for what might happen if we lost the front.
And in the Egyptian bazaars, the rumours ran rife, Many Egyptians were unhappy with British domination and looked forward to a German victory, The British knew that information was reaching the Germans, In every alley, there might be enemy sympathisers, Behind each shopfront, perhaps a spy, As the retreat continued and the situation got worse, the commander-in-chief sacked the army commander and took charge himself, His name was Claude Auchinleck, He was a soldier of huge experience and great tenacity, As the battered British and Commonwealth units arrived, he ordered them to take up defensive positions near an obscure railway halt called Alamein, This would be the last line of defence before the Nile delta, The Alamein position was the strongest natural barrier in the Western Desert, for it was impossible to outflank, To the north lay the Mediterranean Sea, From there, the British line stretched south for 30 miles where it rested on another impassable barrier, I'm standing right on the edge of the Qattara Depression which falls away 200 feet below sea level into a sea of shifting sand, passable to a few camels, but a show-stopper for a Second World War army.
If Rommel was going to attack, he'd have to break the British line.
All this was closed to him.
In fact, the position at Alamein had been known to the British for some time, Auchinleck had had the area fortified in depth well before Rommel's offensive, To avoid being seen by air patrols, the British dug deep and these fortifications were so solid that traces of them still survive, So this is where the broken 8th Army rallied, with some of its units taking up position in concrete emplacements like this.
This one has been some sort of headquarters.
It's well tucked into the desert and it's littered with rusty oil and petrol cans.
In front, there were deep minefields.
Behind, Auchinleck had massed the army's artillery, ready to pour concentrated fire onto the Germans when they attacked.
With its back against the wall, the 8th Army just held out at Alamein, It had not been beaten, but it had been shaken, Some soldiers had been here for more than two years and many were exhausted, Partly it was due to the tough conditions in the desert, Out here, there were precious few home comforts for the troops, I can't ever remember, when we were in the line, having a proper meal.
When you'd open a tin of a can of bully beef, of course, it sort of half floated out the can, because the heat had melted all the fat that's in there.
You used to get these very hard biscuits.
Half of them was left over from the 1914 war.
There'd be flies round you before you could say "Jack Robinson".
You couldn't drink a brew without flies settling on it, so you'd use muslin, they were that bad.
You'd boil over all through the day and then at night-time you couldn't wrap yourself up enough to keep warm.
Desert sores was another problem.
If you knocked yourself, which was inevitable on a tank, as soon as you knocked yourself at all, it festered within a matter of hours and it spread like an ulcer.
The soldiers began to distrust a High Command which seemed unable even to provide them with adequate equipment, We knew, you see, we knew that the tanks we had were not really up to scratch.
We couldn't match the German tanks, and we kept on asking, and we couldn't understand that each time we got new tanks, they had this silly little peashooter, as we called it.
The inevitable result would be that we'd suffer and we'd lose a lot of people.
Most of all, it was failure that demoralised them, After months in the desert, they'd shown that they were as tough as their enemies, but despite that, their operations had not been successful, It seemed that their generals had let them down, and now there were signs that for some of them it was all becoming too much.
Many officers had taken to questioning orders.
Others had been relieved because of exhaustion.
Commonwealth troops often distrusted British officers.
Infantry was suspicious of armour.
"Brave but baffled," was how the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, described them, and now it was time for him to take a hand.
The Prime Minister flew to Egypt to see things for himself, He wasn't pleased with what he found, He urgently needed a victory and Auchinleck was adamant that there could be no offensive until at least September, A visit to the front left him even more depressed, The next day, he acted, A new commander-in-chief was appointed, He was General Sir Harold Alexander, a charming and steady warrior with a reputation for calm efficiency, And there was a new commander for the 8th Army too, Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery, His task was to destroy the Afrika Korps and throw Rommel out of Africa, Rommel was still hopeful of a final victory, a victory which might even be a war winner, Far away in Russia, the German armies had reached the Caucasus, From there, they might be able to threaten Persia and Iraq, Combined with a desert thrust through to Cairo, such a move might still give Hitler control over all the oil in the Middle East and knock Britain out of the war, But Rommel was a long way from his bases and short of supplies, Worse, British attacks at sea were interrupting the convoys from Italy, If he was going to make a move, he knew he had to do it soon, Rommel's new opponent swept into his task like a tornado, Arriving in Egypt two days before he was supposed to take over, he took off for the desert almost immediately and began issuing orders, There will be no further withdrawal, I have ordered that all plans and instructions dealing with further withdrawal are to be burnt, A veteran of the Western Front in the First World War, Montgomery had a reputation for prickliness and insubordination, but also as a consummate professional, dedicated to the art of war, Our mandate from the Prime Minister is to destroy the Axis forces in North Africa, It can be done and it will be done, beyond any possibility of doubt, Nobody had ever seen an army commander in person in a field of conflict.
And you couldn't help but be inspired.
We will stand and fight here, If we can't stay here alive, then let us stay here dead, I want to impress on everyone that the bad times are over, They are finishedl For the baffled soldiers of the 8th Army, there was now at least some certainty about the future, A fortnight after Montgomery took over the British army, Rommel made his move, He gathered his armoured forces and punched at the southern end of the British line, moving them by night towards a ridge called Alam Halfa, It was down this track that Rommel moved the hundreds of vehicles of the Afrika Korps that night.
Although the walls of the escarpment on either side prevented the British on the ground from seeing it, this huge concentration of armour was desperately vulnerable to air reconnaissance and the RAF spotted it.
Montgomery's army was expecting them, Both military logic and intercepted signals had predicted the attack, Monty knew that the battle at Alam Halfa would be crucial, If he lost, he was finished, and so was the 8th Army, This was to be a purely defensive battle, There was to be no wild armoured charge into the German ranks, Montgomery thought that too many tank officers were still cavalry soldiers at heart, They hadn't learnt the lessons of armoured warfare, The senior officers had led cavalry charges, 'cause that's the way they did it.
And we as tank men, who'd been trained to use ground and hold down positions, we were appalled at the tactics of draw cutlasses or sabres and charge.
And we kept doing this, and we kept losing.
Rommel's aim was to smash his way over the Alam Halfa ridge to emerge behind the bulk of the British army and push on towards Cairo, The Germans advanced with soft-skinned vehicles.
They had staff cars, reconnaissance, sometimes motorcycles as well, you see.
And behind them, the tanks, which you can identify by the amount of dust they raise.
Once he knew the direction they were taking, Montgomery gave the final orders for the tanks to plug the line, We were told to hold our fire till the last minute, virtually.
Suddenly the guns opened up and then flames, people baling out, machine-guns shooting them down General panic, a halt, people trying to get away, tanks withdrawing.
Obviously a lost cause.
It must have been for them quite horrific but very pleasing from my point of view.
It was the first time I'd been in a shooting gallery shooting at the target instead of being the target.
Having halted Rommel's advance, Montgomery called in the power of his artillery and air force, They battered the German columns for days on end, Eventually, Rommel withdrew, Montgomery had his victory and for the troops, the victory brought a new confidence in the future, Perhaps Rommel could be beaten once and for all, The fact that that was successful had an enormous effect on us, because we felt, right, this is now working for us, and there's no reason why we shouldn't do it anywhere else.
The dominance of the Desert Air Force at Alam Halfa shocked the Germans and it was a promise of things to come, Slowly, the British won command of the air, And the big change came when our Spitfires arrived, and the first thing we heard was With our little radios, we were able to often pick up the German planes and we heard a German voice saying "Achtung, Spitfire," and the Spitfires then arrived.
The climate changed, as you can imagine, and we all cheered each time the Spitfires came over and did their stuff.
We were able to walk in the sunlight from then on.
With Rommel halted, the British began the build-up for the coming offensive, 300 tanks and an extra 30,000 men arrived in Egypt, Just the sight of all the supplies and reinforcements was exhilarating for the old desert hands, At last, the things you'd asked for were being delivered and then you saw Sherman tanks with 75mm all-round traverse.
This was another army, and the whole desert was covered in vehicles and guns moving up.
In two months, Montgomery was ready, He had 200,000 men and more than 1,000 tanks, Rommel had less than half that, Along the whole of the 35-mile front, for months, both sides had been laying anti-tank mines in front of their positions in fields several miles deep, Today, it's still a lethal landscape, Hundreds of mines left over from the fighting litter the battlefield nearly 60 years on, These minefields were an overriding factor in Montgomery's calculations.
They formed an invisible barrier which vehicles couldn't cross.
But there was another way.
If he couldn't send tanks, he could send men.
Their weight wouldn't explode the mines.
Appropriately enough, he called his plan "Lightfoot".
Montgomery's plan was a complex one, involving thousands of men, To ensure that everyone knew what part they would play in the battle, he began a programme of addressing the troops, Well, he arrived, and was really quite a small chap, but, er asked for a thing something he could stand on, and talked to everybody.
Now, my forecast of this battle is that there will be three definite stages, First, the break-in, You knew he was in command, no doubt about it.
You didn't tend to drop your gaze if he was looking at you or look away somewhere else.
You were held by him.
Then the dogfight, I believe that the dogfight battle will become a hard killing match and will last for 10 or 12 days, He made people believe in that this was going to be it, and everything would be planned to the last detail.
The enemy will crack, Then will come the breakout and that will lead to the end of Rommel in Africa, All in all, what Montgomery was proposing was essentially a First World War battle, like those fought on the Western Front, where he himself had learnt his trade.
The infantry would advance into no man's land while the artillery barrage kept the defenders' heads down.
Unlike so many battles in the First World War, this one was carefully prepared and slickly coordinated.
But when it began, everything would depend on the power of the British guns.
Montgomery fixed the date for the 23rd of October, All day, his soldiers lay concealed in the desert, waiting for night, when the battle would start, Although he risked confusion in the dark, Montgomery hoped to catch his enemy by surprise, It was very dark, just before the moon.
You could see on the eastern skyline the oncoming moon beginning to light up a bit, but you knew, because you'd rehearsed it all, that everything was happening.
You could hear the soft crunch of sand behind you, as that was You knew which company that was and where they were going.
It was a thoughtful period.
You knew that tonight was going to be the real stuff.
I don't think anybody would have been human if they didn't go through a bit of panic.
We had our thoughts about our families and our friends, and And always a man will think, "Well, if it happens to me, well, it happens to me, "but at least I hope that when it does, I won't be suffering.
I'll have done my bit.
" It was such an enormous barrage.
The whole of the eastern skyline behind us was a ripple of light from one end to the other end.
Must have been 650 guns there firing.
Then the next moment, you were hearing the whistling away overhead and then the crump away out in front of us on the German lines.
It must have cured any constipation they had.
It was the biggest British bombardment since the First World War, We didn't hear anything coming back from the enemy of that volume.
It was spasmodic firing.
It was the firing of people who had been caught unawares.
After 20 minutes of the barrage, the leading troops, in this sector, Highlanders of 51 st Division, began to advance slowly in extended line into the minefield.
Their objective was the crest of that low ridge called Miteiriya on the horizon.
Behind it were Axis tanks and guns.
In front of it, the enemy infantry, with rifles and machine-guns, bayonets and grenades, were dug in, in and behind the minefield.
They walked towards the enemy at a steady march, just behind the barrage, which moved slowly forward in front of them, Despite the moonlight, the dust and smoke obscured almost everything, To guide them, the artillery fired tracer shells to mark the route and behind them, searchlights pierced the sky to create landmarks, And these two beams dropped down to be above our heads and they crossed like that.
To us, it was the cross of St Andrew's.
Your other noise that you'd all be listening for, the company pipers.
They were there, and we knew that we were the Highland Division going into battle.
When we reached the German lines and went looking for Germans, the only ones we found had already got their hands stretched above their head in surrender.
For Montgomery's plan to succeed, it was vital that clear lanes were marked out through the minefields, not just for the tanks, but for transport vehicles, so that the infantry could bring up ammunition and supplies, We must have been halfway across no man's land before the barrage started.
And we was out there in no man's land, and you felt very, very Ionely.
Each mine had to be identified, checked and lifted, The sand was quite easy to move away.
You'd just use your hands.
You just felt your way around.
You'd been trained what these mines were like, what they felt like in the dark, even.
If it was a German Tellermine, the fuse is on the top and has a pin attached to it.
You'd push the pin in, you'd unscrew the top off it.
That mine was safe then.
Yeah, it's a tense moment, but you know you've got to do it because the infantry people are relying on you to give a clear passage for the heavy equipment to come through.
When the engineers had finished, the tanks moved forwards in the narrow lanes, The tanks would emerge from the minefields before dawn broke to await the German counter-attack, At least, that was the plan, We started through the minefields, got to the second minefield.
The infantry had missed a lot of anti-tank guns and we came under intense anti-tank fire and we lost 31 tanks.
And we got orders to cease action, discontinue, disengage, withdraw.
Awful situation.
A good anti-tank gunner will take the first tank out and the last one and you can't get forward or back.
You can only risk it in the minefield.
You'd probably lose a track.
Once you lose your tracks, you're a sitting target.
So you're just hoping it's not you that's going to be hit.
It's a terrible feeling.
As dawn broke on the morning after the attack, it was clear that the Army had not in fact achieved its objectives, Montgomery's gamble had not paid off, But now he held his nerve, and it was one of those moments in military history when nerve really counted.
He knew that his force was larger, better equipped and had more air support.
He could afford a battle of attrition, and Rommel couldn't.
He took one of the toughest decisions that a general has to face: To accept the loss of men's lives in a tough slogging match to bring about victory.
The battle would continue.
After all, we'd managed to do it at Alam Halfa, so of course we could do it here.
It was only a matter of throwing more people in, I'm afraid.
It worked in this way that wherever there was a weakness in the enemy defences, the troops would move forward, sometimes 100 yards, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.
But edging forward.
You were crumbling at the defences, so all the time the pressure was on them.
Rommel had been on sick leave, He returned to find his deputy dead, his army under continuous heavy bombardment with little air cover, As ever, he was short of fuel, At one point, his army had only three days' supply of petrol, Day after day, for ten long days, Montgomery's dogfight went on, Along the whole of the front, the fighting continued under the desert sun, Indians and Australians, British and South Africans picked away at the German and Italian positions, taking prisoners here, gaining ground there, The dogfight led to one of the most heroic actions of the battle, On the night of the 27th of October, under the by now usual barrage, the men of the 2nd Rifle Brigade moved forward, bringing with them 19 anti-tank guns, They were commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Vic Turner, His objective was a place called, for want of a better name, Snipe, This is it.
Just a patch of churned-up desert on the forward slope of a low ridge.
They arrived after dark and began to reconnoitre the surrounding area, They had walked into a hornets' nest, Just north of us, about 1,000 yards away, was a tank leaguer of over 30 German tanks, They made their attack about 7 a.
m.
Six-pounders were doing the work.
Without them, we'd have been annihilated.
As the crews baled out of their tanks, we were shooting them down like rabbits.
Now, as I say, the shelling during the day and night was out of this world.
As the riflemen fought on, the shells hurtled down on their position, Several times that day, they were bombarded by their own side, We got the hell of a time from our own 105mm guns, and of all the unpleasant things in a very unpleasant day, I think that was the most unpleasant, The Germans attacked the British at Snipe all day in waves, even penetrating behind the British lines, I looked to the rear, about 200 yards to my rear, and there was a German Mark III.
I said to the lads, "Blimey, there's a German tank.
" I thought, "Christ, he's seen us now, we've had it now.
" The next thing I heard was this explosion.
Then I smelt burning rubber.
I looked back and this tank had been knocked out.
By the end of the day, Turner's 19 guns had destroyed perhaps 50 armoured vehicles, Turner himself received the Victoria Cross and many of his men were also decorated, The real value of the Snipe fighting lay in its contribution to the wearing down of Rommel's armour.
He had 77 serviceable tanks left.
Montgomery had 900.
It was time for the breakout.
Again, the British guns roared out in the darkness, Again, the infantry set off across the desert, spraying enemy positions with small arms fire, lobbing grenades into their trenches, But this time the going was easier, After a while, the Germans started retreating.
What you've got to understand is that those Germans had been under terrific bombardment and their nerves must have been in a terrible state.
I mean, the bombardment laid down to support us was tremendous.
We couldn't do nothing wrong, not with that support.
And we carried on for four miles, right until we got to our objective.
The ten-day dogfight had paid off, Now it was time for the armoured assault that Montgomery's army had worked so hard for, We got through the minefields and broke into the open ground, and then, from my point of view, it was purely a question of going forward and attacking.
This was going to be tank warfare as we'd done before, and we had a lot better tanks.
We had the aces for once.
The battle raged then.
It was just a personal thing then.
You lost sight of what was happening.
It was just you fighting whatever was there.
The Axis troops began to pull back despite a message from Hitler saying that there would be no retreat, Rommel's forces were decimated, I was still a bit sceptical, because I'd fought Rommel for a long time and there were times before when we thought we'd defeated him.
But when I saw the devastation and the knocked-out tanks, and some of the most modern supercharged Mark IVs with the 75mm gun on destroyed, and the anti-tank guns, and the dead, and the prisoners, columns of prisoners, I thought, "No, I can't see that he's going to recover.
" This was what everyone had been waiting for, Montgomery moved his army forward across the desert as fast as was safe in pursuit of his fleeing enemies, The pursuit took the army back along the Mediterranean coast, over all the battlefields of the past two years, and on towards the capital of Italian Africa, Tripoli, As they pushed on, they had some dramatic news, At the other end of the Mediterranean, a huge British and American fleet had appeared off the coast of the French colonies of Morocco and Algeria, They were to land another army in Rommel's rear, There was now no hope for the Afrika Korps, And so, three months to the day after the battle of Alamein began, British and Commonwealth forces entered Tripoli, They had achieved the aim they had set themselves so long ago, The success brought a new spirit to the 8th Army, There'd been a tremendous build-up of pride.
The 8th Army title became to be known as something that you wanted to be in.
It had risen from almost obscurity into this newborn army, so it meant a lot to people.
Today, the desert is almost as empty as it was before the fighting, The train still chugs up the railway line twice a day, There's more irrigation and a few more people, but it's very hard to imagine that nearly 60 years ago, there were hundreds of thousands of men and machines packed into this little corner of the desert on that October night, Nevertheless, here they were, sweating in the heat and cursing the flies.
Despite grievous losses, The brave but baffled men of 8th Army had won a famous triumph.
This great citizen army of brickies and barristers, teachers and taxi drivers, had come of age.
As Churchill put it, "Before Alamein, there were almost no victories.
" "After it, there were no defeats.
" Small wonder that bells pealed out across Britain at the news.
Elation.
Somehow the signals had got on to the London radio end and we heard this amazing sound coming all that distance from London into the desert.
Of the men who made up John McGregor's battalion of the Black Watch, almost one-third became casualties at Alamein, You all know that if you're a soldier, your life's on the line.
But when you take stock, it was a heavy toll for one unit.
It became a very personal thing and a bringing down to earth of elation.
Elation at a cost.