The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice

Notes on contributors

Dr Christina J.M. Goulter,

Christina J.M. Goulter was educated at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and King’s College, London, where she took her PhD in 1993. She worked for two years as a historian at the Ministry of Defence, London, and was later Associate Visiting Professor of Strategy at the United States Naval War College. She is the author of A Forgotten Offensive. Royal Air Force Coastal Command’s Anti-Shipping Campaign, 1940–1945 (London: Frank Cass, 1995).

Recommended reading

Bartlett, C. P. O., Bomber Pilot, 1916–1918 (London: Ian Allan, 1974)

Goulter, C. J. M., A Forgotten Offensive: Royal Air Force Coastal Command’s Anti-Shipping Campaign, 1940–1945 (London: Frank Cass, 1995)

Harris, A., Bomber Offensive (London: Greenhill Books, 1990) Despatch (reprinted by Frank Cass, London, 1995)

Hastings, M., Bomber Command (New York: Dial Press, 1979)

Messenger, C., Bomber Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive, 1939–1945 (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1984)

Terraine, J., The Right of the Line: The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939–1945 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985)

Webster, C. F. and Frankland, N., The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945 (London: HMSO, 1961)

Wells, M., Courage and Air Warfare (London: Frank Cass, 1995)

Williams, G. K., Biplanes and Bombsights: British Bombing in World War I (Maxwell Air Force Base, Air University Press, 1999)

Wise, S. F., Canadian Airmen in the First World War, Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Vol I (University of Toronto Press, 1980)

Raleigh, W. and Jones, H., The War in the Air (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), Vols I-VI

Chapter 7 (#ulink_a5aac307-83f6-50d7-af73-4fc35fa31b4d)

The Desert War experience (#ulink_a5aac307-83f6-50d7-af73-4fc35fa31b4d)

Niall Barr

The numerous campaigns fought in the deserts of the Middle East during both World Wars form only one era in a long history of warfare in the region. The first recorded battle in history took place at Megiddo in Palestine between the Hittites and the Egyptians in 1468BC. During Allenby’s 1917–18 campaign in Palestine, soldiers could not help but be aware that they were fighting in regions that had a long history of warfare. The British troops who marched across the Sinai desert in 1917 came upon dusty villages and towns whose names had been learned by heart at Sunday school and Bible class:

‘And so we got to the end of the sand after a good many weeks and came to the first village in Palestine and that after seeing nothing but sand for weeks and possibly months it was – one saw this green and gold of – of what I suppose to the old Israelites was the promised land and one can well understand the aptness of the description.’

The news that the British Army was fighting in Palestine, and that the news reports mentioned familiar, if exotic, names created a sensation in Britain. This gave the capture of Jerusalem in December 1917 a heightened significance, and some British troops even had the unusual distinction of fighting in the holy places. One British sapper was ordered:

‘… to make sure that in the Holy Sepulchre there was no Turks lying about. So, “Go in there with your platoon again, Mathews. And make sure there’s nobody about. If there is boys, you know what to do.” So Mathews went in with his platoon and we advanced. And there was nobody there. They’d all gone.’

Clearly, for this toughened veteran, there was no real difference where he fought. While Allenby’s men were familiar with many of the place names that they fought over, the commander of the British 60th Division was surprised to find himself connected to a previous English commander during the advance on Jerusalem. When his staff officers complained that they could not find any wells in the area around the town of Qaryet el ’Inab on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, General Sir John Shea went to the local monastery to see if the monks could help him. He related that the abbot:

‘…looked at me, and then he half smiled, and said, “General, you are the second General who found he couldn’t find any water when he came here.” I looked at him rather in surprise, and said, “Oh sir, please forgive me for saying so, but you must be wrong because I know I am leading the army, there is nothing in front of me. The 60th is the leading division.” And again he looked at me, and then he smiled and his whole body shook, and he said, “The General I was referring to was Richard Coeur de Lion.”’

The British troops of this century who served in the deserts of the Middle East shared their battlegrounds with many previous generations of soldiers. Richard the Lionheart’s Third Crusade was far from Britain’s only previous connection with the Middle East. Thousands of regular British troops had already marched and sweated their way across the Egyptian desert by the time the first soldiers of the Great War disembarked in Egypt for the Gallipoli campaign. Abercrombie’s victory over Napoleon’s army at Alexandria in 1801 had inaugurated Britain’s modern involvement with the Middle East. The construction of the Suez Canal in 1869 meant that Egypt was of great strategic importance to Britain, and the Royal Navy’s bombardment of Alexandria in 1881 and the invasion of Egypt that led to the battle of Tel el Kebir in 1882 began the British occupation and domination of Egypt, which lasted until 1952. The numerous campaigns fought subsequently, including the ill-fated attempt to rescue General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885 and the battle of Omdurman in 1898, were all part of Britain’s experience of Empire.

Thus the troops who fought in the Middle East in 1914–18 and 1940–43 were following in the footsteps of previous generations of British soldiers, and in some respects the experience of soldiers this century was little different from their Victorian counterparts. The campaigns fought in the Middle East against the Turks during the First World War can be seen as an extension and continuation of Imperial interests, and even the desert campaigns fought in the Second World War can be seen as a form of traditional ‘defence of Empire’. Yet in a very real sense, these campaigns represented a break from the past. They were not isolated actions fought against native opponents, but major struggles for dominance in the Middle East fought on an unprecedented scale. As an integral part of much wider World Wars, they brought far-reaching change to the region and sparked a new sense of Arab nationalism among the inhabitants.

The armies that Britain sent to the Middle East during the two World Wars were also very different from their forebears. Not only were the forces sent to the Middle East during the two conflicts far larger than any previous forces, but they were composed of volunteers and conscripts rather than the toughened regular soldiers of Victoria’s army. They were also polyglot forces, which contained men and women drawn from across the British Empire. The 51st Highland Division noted proudly in its war diary on the eve of the Second Battle of Alamein that:

‘It is interesting that in this, the biggest organised offensive yet put in by the British Army in this War, the Highland Division is the only Infantry Division representing Great Britain, alongside the Australians, New Zealanders, and the South Africans.’

Even this list omitted the heavy contribution made by the Indian Army, not to mention the numerous armies in exile, such as the Free French, the Polish Carpathian Brigade and the Greek Brigade, which all served in the desert during the Second World War. Nonetheless, the Highlanders’ pride in being the sole British representative among the Empire infantry was perhaps misplaced; there were many other British units serving alongside the more distinctive Dominion troops. This multi-national pattern was repeated in both wars, and lent a distinctive ‘Imperial’ character to the British armies serving in the desert.

Just as the armies sent by Britain to the Middle East were diverse and polyglot in character, so was there a bewildering variety in the campaigns in which they became involved. There were diverse campaigns fought against a range of enemies and conducted over a vast area of harsh terrain. One of the first took place in the North African desert along the Libyan/Egyptian border when the British suppressed a Senussi-led Arab uprising in 1915–16, while from 1917 onwards T. E. Lawrence, in the Hejaz, helped to support the Arab revolt against Turkish rule. Meanwhile, large-scale conventional campaigns were fought against the Turks in Sinai, Palestine and Mesopotamia. The Second World War saw an even greater variety of campaigns against a wide variety of opponents. There were short but sharp actions against the Vichy French in Syria, an Axis-sponsored revolt in Iraq, and a hard-fought campaign against the Italians in Ethiopia and Eritrea. However, the main campaign took place against the combined German and Italian forces in the Western Desert. This campaign certainly represented a break with the past, as, for the first time, the Western Desert became an enormous battleground for two major conventional opponents utilising high-intensity manoeuvre warfare.

Such a diverse mix of regions, opponents and fighting raises the difficult issue of whether it is possible to make valid comparisons between the experiences of British troops of both World Wars. While the conduct of the campaigns was often different, and the nature of the opponents and terrain often sharply in contrast, nonetheless the British soldiers of both wars who served in the Middle East were connected by their experiences of Egypt and the desert, of soldiering in a harsh environment, and through their experience of the British Army. British soldiers were aware, if only dimly, of the weight of history present in the region, and they were linked by tradition with the previous British soldiers who had served in the desert.

The desert campaigns fought in the First World War certainly influenced the soldiers of the Second World War. T. E. Lawrence, the British hero of the Arab revolt during Allenby’s campaign in Palestine, influenced an entire generation with his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom5. Many officers of the Eighth Army quite self-consciously modelled themselves on the independent spirit of Lawrence of Arabia. This was reflected in the rejection of army-issue clothing in favour of sheepskin coats, corduroy trousers and desert boots, or ‘brothel creepers’ as they were better known. The glamorous idea of the British officer as guerrilla leader also found its way into Eighth Army tactics. This was most noticeable in the formation of ‘Jock columns’, which were small independent forces of motorised infantry and artillery, designed for raiding and scouting rather than heavy fighting. Lawrence’s influence also encouraged the growth of many raiding groups such as the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), Special Air Service (SAS) and ‘Popski’s private army’, which were used for deep raids and observation of the Axis positions.

All the British troops who served in the Middle East were linked by their experience of travel. While troops serving in Flanders or France travelled to a reasonably familiar corner of Europe, the men who served in the desert had to endure a long sea voyage to a very different part of the world. After the relative inactivity on board ship and the tedium of routine days, the first experience of the Middle East could come as a shock. One Second World War veteran, whose first landfall in the Middle East was on the barren, rocky shores of Aden, remembered that, ‘I think one’s first impressions when you go ashore at a place like Aden are so mixed, you’re bewildered with the difference. It’s all so utterly different from anything one’s ever seen in one’s life.’

This sense of entering a very different, alien world was common to all British soldiers who served in the Middle East.

Once the long journey was over, there was one experience that linked almost every British soldier sent to the Middle East. The sights and sounds of Cairo and Alexandria were familiar to thousands of British soldiers who first arrived in Egypt and who spent their precious hours of leave taking in the sights and indulging in the bazaars and fleshpots of these two cities. A visit to the surviving Ancient Wonder of the World was obligatory. E. A. Woolley, a First World War veteran, remembered that, ‘I visited the Great Pyramids and went on top and also inside the Great Pyramid… I also went to the Sphinx… seeing them as I did, one could not but be impressed by these fantastic constructions.’

The pyramids remain a potent symbol of ancient Egypt, and thousands of British soldiers had their photographs taken next to these monuments as a reminder of their visit.

However, the soldiers’ experience of Egypt went far beyond the ancient world. One veteran remembered being fascinated by:

‘Cairo, the Nile, the souks [markets], the mingling of so many nationalities, the pleasant smells of spices and cooking borne on the warm evening air (but not the ghastly daytime smells of which there were plenty). I suppose it summed up for me what I’d always imagined the Orient should be like.’

Many troops enjoyed the exotic and foreign experience that Egypt offered, while many others simply enjoyed Cairo’s and Alexandria’s bars and nightlife. These innocent pleasures were sometimes mixed with more base concerns, as a naval rating related:

‘… three of us went ashore in Alex to the Fleet Club for a game of tombola and our ration of beer. We still had plenty of time, so we said to ourselves, “Let’s go to Sister Street.” We were young and curious to visit the most renowned of the Eastern Fleet brothels, and wondered what effect it might have on three randy young men.’

Egypt’s reputation as a part of the exotic Orient was certainly enhanced by encounters such as these, but these experiences, although welcome, tended to be short-lived and most soldiers found themselves serving far away from the Delta and its temptations.

It was the experience of the desert itself that united all the soldiers who fought there. The desert in popular imagination has long been a place of romance and mystery, but British soldiers soon found that the reality was very different. The intense heat, sand, dust and flies soon removed the mystery, and the most widely held belief among British soldiers in the Eighth Army was that, ‘“The blue” was… a right bastard.’

Living in the desert brought a series of discomforts and irritants that were quite new to British soldiers more used to a green and temperate climate. The first unpleasant shock to be experienced by any soldier was the intense heat of the day and the chill that descended as soon as the sun went down. One veteran remembered that:

‘In early July 1917 we found ourselves in the desert of Sinai about eleven miles south-east of Gaza, and there we found that the all-pervading heat… almost struck us physically, so intense was it. There was no avoiding it [and] no shade whatever.’

In the Eighth Army, during the Second World War, the mark of a desert veteran was to ‘get your knees brown’, which proved that you had been burned by the sun and served in the desert long enough to adapt to its conditions.

Another feature of the desert conditions was the sheer physical effort needed to march through sand. Marching through the night for the surprise attack on Beersheba on 29 October 1917, one soldier found it:

‘…particularly tiring to march through sand… the desert may be romantic but we didn’t see much romance about it that night. We marched and marched and marched through that desert the whole night long.

The worst feature of all to me I think was the dust. There was choking dust flowing over us from the other columns on our sides. We were perspiring madly [and] the dust settles on your face. I remember seeing my own face next morning when I went to shave – it was nothing but rivulets of dirt or rather clean rivulets amongst the dirt on my face – I wouldn’t have recognised myself.’

The huge clouds of dust thrown up by the movement of thousands of soldiers were an unavoidable discomfort. Clouds of dust were ever-present, but they probably reached a peak at Alamein in October 1942, when the passage of thousands of tanks and vehicles along a set number of tracks ground the sand into a powdery dust:

‘…as much as two feet deep in places. Like fluffy snow upon the ground, it rises into the air and hangs like a thick fog in the darkness. Eyes, ears and noses are filled with it and it nearly chokes a man whenever he opens his mouth to speak.’