Previous chapter: Disaster at Tobruk
Late September 1942
After a few days up in the desert we got back into our old ways and began to get accustomed to new faces and a new officer, new ways of doing things. The new officer started calling a roll call every morning, a kind of first parade of the day, which didn’t go down terribly well with anybody else because we had never had them before. They were assuming up in the desert you weren’t going to disappear, if you were there you were going to be on parade and available for work. Anyway after a week or two I think somebody must have had a quiet word in his ear because he dropped the thing all together and it was never done again.
Just about this time of course the army had been having a rough time. The Eighth Army had been trounced by the Jerries several times around Tobruk, while we were nowhere near the scene of course. We were either in Syria or Alexandria while this was going on, and we had lost several Generals. Some were posted out. Auchinleck was dismissed because they considered he wasn’t doing his job properly. Then there was a fellow called Ritchie and another man, Gott, known as “strafer” Gott who was a real go-getter and was tipped heavily to be the new Commander of the Eighth Army. I think he got the order to take the post up but was killed either flying down to Cairo or back again in an aircraft crash. So that left us more or less like a headless chicken as an army for a while. Then we heard about this man Montgomery who had just come out from England and was going to transform everything.
Eventually sure enough he turned up. He was making it his business to go around and talk to every unit and give them a pep talk and tell them what was going on. He arrived with us wearing a weird looking hat with badges all over it. A little chap, he hopped up on the top of a jeep and said “Come closer Chaps” in a very clipped and modulated army voice. We stood there while he told us we were going to knock the Jerries for six out of Africa. There was going to be no more retreating. You were supposed to stay there and fight. You weren’t supposed to run away. He didn’t exactly say it that way but that’s what he meant. There would be a general tightening up all round the army, not the discipline, but the way the army was supplied.
Off he went again leaving us all kind of cheered up thinking “well, here’s somebody who at least knows what he wants to do” because nobody had ever spoken to us at all, never mind in that tone of voice. The next thing we knew was that an order came round that everybody from the C.O. downwards were to do PT every morning for half an hour, and strenuous PT, they were all getting too flabby sitting around in the desert, “go and exercise yourselves”.
The NAAFI wagons, which used to come up and supply us with goodies, were all cancelled and cut off. Montgomery’s view being that what we needed was guns, ammunition, food and petrol for the wagons and everything else was superfluous and all the wagons were going to be used to do that. We knew he meant business when it got down to having no NAAFI truck.
Everything began to take on a faster tempo. There were more and more people arriving in the desert. More units. There was camouflage stuff being dotted about here and there. Loads of supplies. The whole place began to look like an army dump instead of a battlefield, which it was going to be we knew.