Miracle at El Alamein

By Richard McMillan

Miracle at El Alamein, first published in 1943 as Mediterranean Assignment is British journalist Richard McMillan's first-hand account of World War Two in North Africa and Greece during 1940-1942. He was the first war correspondent to be licensed by the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF), and accompanied British forces in most of their campaigns in the European and African theaters of the war. He details the strategy, tactics, and on-the-ground fighting of Field-Marshal Montgomery's forces versus those of German General Erwin Rommel through the early set-backs to the final defeat of the Afrika Korps at El Alamein. McMillan's clear and descriptive writing make the conflict in the Mediterranean region understandable, while bringing to life the experiences of the fighting soldier as well. The role of Allied air forces and navies in the Mediterranean theater are also detailed, with vivid descriptions of the author's experiences while on-board aircraft or ships.

McMillan, a long-time European United Press correspondent, later went on to land with British troops in the Normandy invasion France. While covering the assault on Cherbourg he was wounded in the back by shrapnel. After a short time in England to recovery he returned to France and reported on the liberation of Paris, and remained with Allied troops as they advanced on the Rhine and into Germany.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eumenes Publishing
• Release date: Dec 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781839741173

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

MIRACLE AT EL ALAMEIN

The Stunning Victory of  Field Marshall Montgomery and the Allied Armies over General Rommel’s Afrika Korps

Richard McMillan

Miracle at El Alamein was originally published in 1943 as Mediterranean Assignment by Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc.

* * *

To MONTY AND HIS MEN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Preface 5

CHAPTER I — Forty-eight Hours to Gibraltar 7

CHAPTER 2 — Duce Blunders 17

CHAPTER 3 — Towards Albania 27

CHAPTER 4 — C’est pour Nous 35

CHAPTER 5 — Desert Old Boys 49

CHAPTER 6 — African Jewel 62

CHAPTER 7 — Benghazi and Bergonzoli 68

CHAPTER 8 — Destroyer to Greece 77

CHAPTER 9 — Olympus to Thermopylae 86

CHAPTER 10 — Alias Bill Bell 96

CHAPTER 11 — Afrika Korps 111

CHAPTER 12 — Rommel’s First Defeat 122

CHAPTER 13 — The Epic of Bir Hacheim 132

CHAPTER 14 — Why We Lost Tobruk 141

CHAPTER 15 — Monty of El Alamein 151

CHAPTER 16 — Rebuilding the 8th Army 161

CHAPTER 17 — On Les Aura 171

CHAPTER 18 — Gates of Hell 179

CHAPTER 19 — Kamerad! 188

CHAPTER 20 — Rommel—Luck or Genius? 196

CHAPTER 21 — Knights of the Desert Air 203

CHAPTER 22 — The Navy’s Part 217

CHAPTER 23 — Lone Desert Rangers 225

CHAPTER 24 — Heroic Isle 235

CHAPTER 25 — Panzer Lessons 244

CHAPTER 26 — This Is Victory 253

Maps 266

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 269

Preface

Towards the end of June 1942, anyone able to see, as I saw, the 8th Army arrive at the El Alamein line after its 300-mile retreat before Rommel’s Afrika Korps would not have gambled much on its chances of holding this gateway to the Nile Delta.

The Army had lost 70,000 men in prisoners, killed, and wounded. Its punch had gone. It had lost faith in its leaders. It was demoralized. It was hopeless and exhausted. After years in the desert, its only prospect, or so it seemed, was defeat and retreat, no matter how much the troops suffered or how well they fought.

In Cairo a general exodus of civilian and, to some extent, military population began. The fleet had left Alexandria. Everything pointed to a further withdrawal. Beyond doubt, that would have meant the loss of the Suez Canal—of little strategic importance since the Mediterranean became closed to our shipping—of Egypt and Palestine. The way, then, would be open to the oil wells of Persia and a link between the Axis and the Japanese somewhere east of the Euphrates.

The only barrier to the Nazi progression was the El Alamein line—that and the beaten 8th Army. When the Army took over these positions, General Sir Archibald Wavell, the first desert victor, happened to be on a visit to Cairo. He told me at G.H.Q.:

I know the Alamein line well, because I happened to build it. I built it against the Italians when they reached Sidi Barrani in 1940. But it is far from complete. It requires a great deal of work to make it solid.

A defeated army and an incomplete line of defenses covering the approach to Alexandria and Cairo, distant only a few hour’s drive by car—how, with only these precariously slender supports, did we succeed in holding off and in throwing back the crack Afrika Korps legions, on the threshold of their most grandiloquent triumph?

This book tries to give the answer to that and other questions everyone is asking.

In searching for a title, I was tempted to call the book Miracle at Alamein. El Alamein meant to Egypt and, indeed, all Africa what Verdun symbolized for France in the most tragic days of World War L

But the story of the 8th Army and its most brilliant recovery is not one but a whole series of miracles, closely related though separated by time and place. The miracles of Tobruk, of Malta, of the puny Western Desert Air Force, which grew from a fledgling to a mighty eagle, of the sorely battered eastern Mediterranean fleet—all have a part in the plan of our desert victory.

The book deals with all the facets and aspects of the Mediterranean battle front and, above all, with the man who, in six months, changed the war map of the entire North African continent in our favor

—General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, the Desert Cromwell.

London, 1943

CHAPTER I — Forty-eight Hours to Gibraltar

Apple-green seas hissed against the cruiser’s sides as the armada of warships swung through The Straits into the Mediterranean.

To port, the Rock of Gibraltar rose like a dark Sphinx with its back curving down into Spain, a few miles away. To starboard across the sparkling sea, a snuff-colored fringe of land marked where Africa and the desert began—the desert to which I was heading, though I did not know it right then, on a long-term assignment for the United Press.

The assignment should have ended at Gibraltar. After the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain, I had shipped in a convoy from England on a tame mission—a two-day visit to the Rock to write about its reinforced defenses and its preparedness to meet a drive by Hitler through Spain towards Africa. As it happened, I was not allowed to set foot on the Rock. Instead, I found myself catapulted into a warship and heading through the Mediterranean to keep a date with the enemy somewhere east of Gibraltar—and a rendezvous with Rommel. That two-day time limit fixed by the authorities for my stay in Gib stretched out to two years—two years spent roaming the Mediterranean battle front, from Tsamuria to Tobruk, Crete to Capuzzo, and Albania to Alamein.

It was November 1940. In Europe the massed cannon waited, temporarily silenced, for the next master stroke of the Führer. For the time being, the Chancellor of the German Reich had all his attention divided between digesting his conquests in France and pursuing his dream of subduing Britain by aerial bombardment.

While the guns stood mute in Europe, they began to speak in the Balkans. Hitler and Mussolini had met in the Brenner Pass on October 4, and Il Duce had outlined to his Axis partner the plan of the Fascist plot against Greece. Mussolini proposed to browbeat the Greeks into ceding to Italy the province of Tsamuria, on the Albano-Greek frontier, as the first step in a series of annexations of Greek territory which would give Italy domination of both sides of the Adriatic and possibly also the Aegean Sea.

Hitler had not wholly approved. Il Duce, however, reminded him that Italy had not received satisfaction in his revindications against France for cession of Tunisia, Nice, Savoy, Corsica, and Djibouti, and argued that no danger of a Balkan war existed, as Metaxas would soon capitulate. So the Führer agreed.

The theory was all right, but the Greeks would not subscribe to it. They refused to be dragooned or blackmailed by their Black Shirt neighbors. They cherished their freedom with the same spirit of resolute independence as had Leonidas and Themistocles. Il Duce, whose battle slogan had become Woe to the weak! decided to teach them that tanks and guns, not history and culture, dictated the power of a modern nation. And so, once more the Balkans blazed.

Now it was Britain’s turn to strike, the first move in a carefully thought out plan of major strategy. Its object was to hit back at the underbelly of the Axis, to teach Mussolini that the war was far from won and to show him that the effete British Empire still packed a powerful punch and, unlike France, would go on fighting to the end.

Our voyage through the Mediterranean was the first phase of this long-term offensive, which was to culminate two and a half years later in Allied domination of the Mediterranean with the elimination of Rommel and the Afrika Korps from all Africa.

When I began my voyage from Gibraltar, the British cause in the war had reached fairly near to zero level. Five months before, the French had surrendered and concluded an armistice with their Nazi conquerors, while Mussolini, betting on the certainty of a bloodless victory and unlimited booty in Africa and the Mediterranean, had entered the lists on the side of Hitler.

Britain’s military, naval, and air position in the Mediterranean became precarious overnight.

The British Government had hoped that the French Army of North Africa and Syria would refuse the order of Marshal Pétain to capitulate under the terms of the armistice of June 17, 1940. After some hesitation, General Noguès, in North Africa, and General Mittelhauser, in Syria, announced their obedience to Pétain’s command. The British were left weak and alone to face the Fascist jackal.

There could be no doubt in the mind of any military authority about the British weakness in the Middle East Command. In the first place, British naval strength in the Eastern Mediterranean, based on the big naval harbor of Alexandria, depended to a large extent upon the concourse of the French units which, until the armistice, had co-operated with them. The armistice signed, these units dropped anchor in Alexandria harbor, and their officers and crews remained with folded arms while their former comrades of the British Navy carried on the fight alone. Eighteen months later, after General Giraud resumed the fight in North Africa, they rejoined our cause. The ships then sailed to the United States for refitting.

A much more important effect of the French defection was the lengthening of Britain’s lines of communication to the Army of Egypt and to the Far East. Owing to the loss of the French air and sea bases (and the protection of territorial waters) along the North African coast, it became exceedingly risky to send convoys through the Mediterranean. We could not give them adequate fighter protection over the long stretch between Gibraltar and Malta, and from Malta to Egypt. When the German blitz on Malta started, after the Luftwaffe had moved into Sicily to aid the Italian Regia Aeronautica, it became almost impossible to give adequate fighter protection from the Malta airfields. In these circumstances, all British troops and supplies had eventually to be routed the long way round the Cape and up through the Indian Ocean to Suez.

Encouraged by the isolation of the British in Egypt, Il Duce launched an offensive from Libya in September 1940, promising his officers and men they would soon be drinking of the waters of the Nile, for he felt confident that within a few months he would be master of the Nile Delta and astride the Suez Canal.

Under Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, nicknamed the Butcher of Cyrenaica because of his addiction to savage repressive measures against the Senussi tribesmen of the desert, such as dropping their leaders alive from airplanes, the Italian Army rumbled forward through the sand against the British General Wavell.

On the day Italy entered the war, Mussolini declared that the hour destined by fate has sounded for Fascist Italy, and he boasted that proletarian Fascist Italy has arisen for the third time, strong, proud, compact as never before. So much for words; now for deeds.

Advancing from the Italian frontier fortress of Capuzzo along the 400-mile-long barbed-wire fence Il Duce had erected between Libya and Egypt, the vainglorious Italians scored what seemed to be important military triumphs. By September 14 they captured the Egyptian frontier post of Sollum, which the British had evacuated. They pushed forward quickly and two days afterwards entered Sidi Barrani, a small coastal village about fifty miles inside Egypt. Foolishly, Graziani decided to rest on his laurels for the time being. He planted his infantry on a line about twenty miles to the east of Barrani, while he set about a laborious program of preparation for the final invasion of the Nile Valley.

His decision, undoubtedly stupid, gave the British the breathing space necessary to enable them to regroup and reinforce. If, instead of hesitating, Graziani had struck from his positions beyond Sidi Barrani, Italy would, almost surely, have conquered Egypt and Suez. The Fascist general delayed and lost both the initiative and, eventually, the command of his army.

The truth was that the might of the Italian fighting forces rested more upon the empty boasts of Mussolini than upon either their capabilities or their equipment. The British soon concluded that the Italians’ poor reputation as soldiers, gained in the war in Spain, was thoroughly justified. They had no heart for the job. Their equipment was poor, their artillery inefficient, their tanks outdated, their generalship unenterprising.

Great Britain’s difficulties in the Mediterranean area had become further complicated by the Italian attack on Greece through Albania. Pledged to aid all nations which resisted Axis aggression, Britain was in the position of being obliged to help the Greeks when she found herself in a desperate plight in Egypt, as well as at home. The Greeks were fighting well, alone, but it seemed clear to the military mind that sooner or later the strain would tell. It was, in consequence, imperative for Great Britain to send help.

This was the general picture in the Mediterranean in November 1940, and the reason for our presence as we prepared to sweep east to our secret rendezvous.

From the ex-French luxury transport Pasteur I changed over, under the guidance of a stalwart marine, to a cruiser. The cruiser was H.M.S. Glasgow, one of the newest town-class types which had already proved themselves fine fighting units in the British fleet. Coincidence? My native place is Glasgow, on the Clyde, home of so many fine ships of war and peace which have carried the name and the fame of Scottish engineers to the corners of the world.

Said the commander, when I climbed to the bridge, I come from Glasgow, too!

As for me, said the captain, "I can boast the next best thing; I was a midshipman in the old Glasgow, at the Battle of the Falkland Isles in the last war. My first action. And now I command the new Glasgow in this war."

Looks like it’s a happy augury for our trip, I said.

The battle squadron came out in line through the boom and from under the shadows of the Rock. We moved in circles out in The Straits, in the backwash of the big fellows—the battle-wagons, as the British tars call their battleships. H.M.S. Barham and H.M.S. Warspite were there, and many cruisers and destroyers. We awaited the Ark Royal. She steamed out, curtsying in the swell. She took her place ahead of us, with the battleships on either side. We, the cruisers and destroyers, came up on the flank in the rear.

As we slipped east of the Rock, the sun dipped into the indigo of the darkening ocean. Gibraltar began to twinkle, for its lights have never gone out. (Experience has shown that if the town becomes a pool of darkness in the surrounding glare of lights from La Línea and Algeciras, on the Spanish coast, it is an easier target for enemy night raiders.)

We raced ahead, zigzagging to outwit enemy submarines. Our erratic course made a ragged pattern of yeasty, phosphorescent foam in the dark seas.

In the wardroom I made acquaintance with the other officers. Bones, the surgeon, discussed with Pills, the second doctor, their plans in the event of action. The senior surgeon would go forward, and his second would remain aft.

In that way, said Bones, matter-of-factly, if the ship is hit amidships and communications between fore and aft are cut, there will be one of us on hand at either end to look after the wounded.

Torps, the torpedo officer, discussed with Guns, the gunnery officer, and Schooly, the schoolmaster, the respective merits of torpedoes and gunfire. Flags, the flag lieutenant, acted as umpire. A lad who looked about eighteen—the anti-aircraft first lieutenant—and whose long, golden hair sprawled over his ears, expounded the merits of the new direction finder which was being fitted to His Majesty’s ships. He looked like a schoolboy, but he had commanded a motor cruiser at Dunkirk.

It was warm and pleasant in the brightly lit wardroom. We had comfortable armchairs, a carpet on the deck, sporting prints on the bulkheads, and plenty of books, magazines, and papers to read. The impeccable service of the stewards made the Ritz, at home, seem third-rate. We had a glass of fine old port to help digest the excellent meal of—yes, it was—roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, with horseradish sauce on the side.

A number of army officers and men had been transferred from the Pasteur, among them Neville Chamberlain’s son. He was listening to the news from London with the rest of us as we approached Malta, when the announcer read out: We deeply regret to announce the death of Mr. Neville Chamberlain. It was a tough break for the boy, having to hear such personal news in such a cold, impersonal way.

Glasgow steamed on into the night. When it came time for bed, I clambered out onto the darkened decks. Ghostly figures moved about among the guns. They were the gun crews, looking like Arctic explorers, muffled in their long, white, anti-flash gear. The hoods covered their faces, except for slits for the eyes, and gave them protection against burning cordite. They wore thick leather gloves and coats that covered them almost to their feet.

The gun crew of the 6-inch guns forward sat around the huge steel casemate that was the gun turret, smoking and gossiping and singing. One of them warbled an air about A bloke named Charley Mopps, the man who invented hops! I noticed a little lad half hidden between the bulk of two husky gun layers. He listened intently, like the lad in the famous picture of Raleigh’s boyhood, to the stories of war and adventure which the two old tars were swapping. The lad was a Cockney, only fifteen years old, making his first trip. He was the powder monkey of the 6-inch turret.

My job is to go into the galleyway under the gun and handle the cordite for the gun layers, he said. You swing the cordite onto a trolley and move it below the gun. Then the layers hoist it mechanically up to the gun breach to ram home after the shell is in position.

In the night we switched north to escort Ark Royal to the naval base of Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, which lies to the south of Corsica. The Italian fleet, hiding from the British Navy, often took refuge there.

Ark Royal, sunk in November 1941, as she was limping back from Gibraltar after a U-boat had got her, used the old-fashioned, slow-flying Swordfish biplane bombers and torpedo-carrying planes for the attack. Dating from pre-war days, these machines provoked mirth on the part of the Italian propagandists at the beginning of hostilities, but the British have every reason to be satisfied with the work of destruction they did and still are doing against the Axis in the Mediterranean. And this mission through the Mediterranean was to make the Italians—both propagandists and people—change their views on the value of the Swordfish.

Ark Royal successfully carried out her night raid. Her planes dipped down upon her flight deck, and we swung back on our course towards Malta.

In the morning the bombers came. They were Italians. We knew of their approach long before we could sight them, thanks to the functioning of the new radio direction-finder.

I told you it was a wonderful gadget! said the young ack-ack first lieutenant with the abundant hair.

There they are! exclaimed the ack-ack officer, pointing into the sun ahead of us to starboard. Flying at 12,000 feet. About twenty-five of them.

From the bridge I could see all the ships of the squadron spread out over a distance of three or four miles. Ahead of us, Barham had begun to take evasive action. She was zigzagging furiously. The Italians were going for her. But before their bombs dropped, the guns of the entire squadron opened out in a vast turmoil of smoke and flame.

I thought of the blitz on London. That was death in the darkness, soul-shattering, ghastly. This was death in the daylight. The bombs, like little black pellets, slipped out into the sky from the silver and brown bombers that looked like toys as they rushed over towards us.

Our own guns opened up. My ears pounded. The flash from the guns leaped up before us like the red gates of Hell, and the roar of them seemed to be the voice of Doom sounding down the corridors of Time. Again and yet again they fired.

All the guns of the whole squadron were pounding now, and there must have been a thousand. The heavy guns had a massed bellow which nothing in the world can imitate for terrifying sound; the medium ack-ack had a sharp crack, like automatic hammers pile-driving on massive steel; the pom-poms had a hollow, sepulchral note, like African tom-toms beating through the jungle; the machine guns cracked like quick, steady whiplashes.

I should have been afraid: and I was afraid. It was so majestic and unimaginable. The human eye and brain could hardly register the frightening vastness of it all—all these cannon blasting smoke and flame and thunder until the heavens were a vortex of grey-black, curling vapour and a bedlam of fury.

Yet, was I afraid? I did not know. I looked around me at the officers on the bridge. I could see at a glance that the prospect of imminent death meant completely nothing to them. Death might strike us and blow our bodies into shapeless, bloody smithereens before we could take our next breath, but for them it was just another business deal. This was their job. This was the task for which they had been reared, for which they had spent years of careful study and training, and to which they had looked forward eagerly day by day and night by night. War. They were out to out-brave the enemy. And they did.

The signal boy, an Edinburgh lad from the training ship Arethus, kept his eye to the spyglass, as steady as a rock, calling his observations from time to time to the captain in a shrill, cheery voice. The captain stood with his head back and his glasses to his eyes watching the bombers come. One saw the tenseness in every line of his features: his ship and the lives of his men were the stakes which counted for him in this gamble. On him, on his word, might depend death—or salvation.

Quietly he passed orders to the commander. The ship wheeled round in response, out of line of the bombs. Her guns still crashed.

I looked around. The ratings were going about their tasks as if on a peacetime church parade at Portsmouth. Some of them did not even trouble to raise their eyes to the enemy.

Then I thought of the little powder monkey. He’s getting what he wanted, his first taste of battle, I thought, down there in the remote innards of the big gun turret.

We could see the puffs of the ack-ack fire ringing the Italian bombers. The Italians kept at 12,000 feet. One plane fell away, crippled, and we saw it struggle out of sight. Another had smoke pouring from its engine, but it kept in line.

The first salvo of bombs straddled Barham. The sea spouted huge columns of water all around her. The bombers were now directly ahead of us, with Ark Royal as their target. The aircraft carrier squirmed like a frightened fish; then, as the bombs fell, she disappeared from sight behind cascades of foam. My heart thumped at a different tempo now. This was a new brand of fear: fear for the fine carrier and her crew. My eyes glued to the wall of water, I wondered what went on beyond. The tension did not last long: a few seconds afterwards we saw Ark Royal emerge, still twisting and turning. The mountains of foam subsided, and the bombers swung away.

Nothing to write home about, said the commander, which about summed up the Italians as airmen. They might be all right against naked Ethiopians, but they showed up poorly in real war.

I remained on the bridge to see if they would return. The captain studied the sky with his glasses. Hours passed. It was long after lunchtime now, and no sign of the enemy.

How long do the Italians usually take to eat their spaghetti? the captain asked, grinning.

We went on without any further interference. Next morning we kept our rendezvous—with Illustrious and almost the entire Mediterranean fleet. Like matchsticks studding the horizon, they steamed at speed to meet us. As far as the eye could see the ocean was filled with warships. Such a rare naval occasion and spectacle had not been staged in the Mediterranean since the day Eden massed the same ships as a sanctions gesture against Mussolini in an unsuccessful attempt to bluff Il Duce into calling off the invasion of Ethiopia.

This time it was different; Mussolini was going to get some long-delayed punishment. Ark Royal had turned back to her base at Gibraltar. Illustrious, living up to her name, was to write some glowing chapters of history in her fighting career in the Mediterranean. A roving pirate, she sailed the seas without challenge, sinking transports, attacking ports, smashing warships, until the nearly fatal day when the Ju.s, which had moved into Sicily to give support to the Fascists, caught her in the central Mediterranean. She was dive-bombed by relays of Stukas for hours, and she lost hundreds of killed and wounded. Her decks running with blood, nipped by bombs, cannon shell, and bullets, she fought off the attack and limped through to Malta. There again the Stukas found her, but her guns were still firing. With the bomb holes patched up, she steamed for Alexandria and later sailed for the United States for complete repairs, and today she sails the seas again, carrying on the battle.

A stately cavalcade of British naval might, we sailed into the Grand harbor at Valletta, while the islanders on the ramparts cheered. It was the kind of welcome you give to heroes, but actually the heroes were these folk themselves. They had known invasion and conquest through the centuries, but nothing was to match the bloody battle about to begin as Goering launched his grand air blitz against the island. Given by Charles V of Spain to the Knights of St. John as a bastion against Islam, Malta became a lone buttress against the modern antichrist from the West.

We landed ack-ack reinforcements for the island’s defenses, refueled, and nosed out again. In the air the Italians were waiting for us once more. They sent some shadowers out to trail us. Il Duce had, no doubt, suddenly become alarmed at the movement of this British armada from both ends of the Mediterranean. He should have put his own navy on the job, but he dared not risk that. So he sent his birdmen after us. Her decks rising and falling in the swell, Illustrious maneuvered into the wind and sent off a flight of Fulmar fighters. Like hesitant geese, they fluttered from the tilting flight deck, circled the carrier, and soared up to tackle the enemy. They shot down about seven Italian machines.

Then the bombers came back again, to give an Italian version of dive-bombing.

Lavatory-bombing, we call it, said one of the pom-pom gunners. They dive from 20,000 to 15,000 and then pull the chain!

The guns crackled as they bracketed on the attackers overhead. The bombs fell wide. The Italian pilots hared off again and then left us alone.

We were traveling at top speed now. The cruiser swayed under us. The seas broke away in creamy combers. Illustrious tossed like a rodeo steer. Some of the fighters had to make several attempts to get down to the unstable flight deck. At last they were all back home to roost for the night. Warspite and Barham had been joined by another 30,000-ton battleship, Valiant, which had come from Alexandria. One to port, another to starboard, and a third ahead, they rolled like great whales as they kept guard over the carrier as darkness fell.

Looking through night glasses fitted in the windshield of the fire-control tower above Glasgow’s bridge, I saw the carrier swing into the wind, the landing lights on her flight deck glowing.

The Swordfish began to appear on deck as they were hoisted by the elevators from the hangars below. The first plane shot off, circled twice, and then, a mile away, dropped a red flare which, floating on the sea, marked the rallying point for the flight.

A dozen planes took off to attack Taranto. They were soon aloft and in formation; their tail lights were doused, and they roared into the distant night sky and disappeared. Silence, then, except for the throbbing of the cruiser’s engines and the voices of the men about the deck.

Four hours after the take-off, when the pilots were back, I went aboard Illustrious. In khaki-drill tunics and shorts, the pilots appeared one by one in the captain’s cabin and related their story—the story of the first British victory over Fascist Italy.

They said they arrived over the target at Taranto in bright moonlight. Photographs taken previously by the RAF had given them a good idea of the position of the Italian warships. The Fascist fleet lay in the inner and outer harbors. The ships included Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, two brand-new, 35,000-ton battleships, and two capital ships of the Conte di Cavour class. These were in the outer (Mare Grande) harbor. Several cruisers and destroyers were berthed in the inner (Mare Piccolo) harbor.

We knew there were barrage balloons around the warships, said the young flight commander who led the attack. We went in and turned towards the target from the west. We could see the balloons clearly against the moonlight. It was easy to nip in through them, and we came down to fifty feet. When we were about fifty yards distant from the target we let our torpedoes go, then swerved to avoid the masts. As we climbed, we saw a tongue of flame shoot up. The other fellows were over the targets and registering hits, too.

While the torpedo bombers were attacking the warships, other bombers went for the power station and the oil drums. They fired the oil to give better light to the planes that followed them.

Then one solo airman flew over the harbor a quarter of an hour after the others had gone.

It was my lucky day, this pilot said to me. "In the morning I had a spot of bad luck. I forcelanded in the sea on a practice flight. I got picked up by another ship. Very kindly, when I explained what was on, the captain gave me a seaplane, and I flew back to the Illustrious. Then another spot of trouble developed. As my torpedo bomber was being wheeled from the elevator onto the flight deck it collided with another machine. Part of my wing got ripped. ‘That’s torn it,’ I said to myself. I asked the fellows in the shop if they could fix it. They said, ‘Half an hour.’ I went to the captain and pleaded with him to allow me to go. I was pretty desperate. Finally he said, ‘All right, if you can be ready in reasonable time you may go.’

It was all fixed within the half-hour, I took off, made good time, and actually gained a quarter of an hour on the others. When I arrived at Taranto the Italians seemed to be waiting for me—they turned all their ‘sweet lavender’ on me. All the colors of the rainbow came up to me.

Did you get anything? I asked.

Oh, sure, came the easy answer. A couple of cruisers in the inner harbor!

Next night, running under full speed towards Alexandria, we heard the voice of Winston Churchill on the radio announce the tidings to the world.

We have scored a great victory over the Italians at Taranto, he said. "Swordfish aircraft from the Illustrious carried out a brilliant attack against the Italian fleet in the harbor there. One battleship of the Littorio class has been hit and is aground. Two battleships of the Cavour class have been sunk. Some smaller cruisers and destroyers have also been hit."

Of six battleships which the Italians had in commission, three had been put out of action in this lightning attack—a 50-per-cent loss in capital ships! The defection of the French fleet had, in those few hours, been effectively offset. We had lost only two planes. The attack completely altered the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean and vitally influenced the future course of the war in the Middle East in our favor. It was, moreover, the first serious military or naval setback Mussolini had experienced since Il Duce carried out his back-stabbing act against France in June 1940.

The little powder monkey from the 6-inch turret expressed his feelings with the usual Cockney directness:

It ain’t ‘arf a sock in the eye for old Musso. And he added, And won’t my old mum be pleased when she learns that I was there.

A story circulated throughout Italy credited the British Secret Service with having made the discovery that the anti-torpedo nets protecting the Italian warships at Taranto had been raised just before sundown on the night of the attack. The nets had been lifted because the fleet—so the story ran—had been ordered to sail the following morning. Twenty-five Italians were arrested and put on trial for communicating this information to the enemy. Twenty-one were found guilty. Two were sentenced to death. I do not know if they were executed. The whole business of this trial was a trumped up piece of Fascist bamboozle. The British attack on Taranto had been planned for Trafalgar Day, October 21, and postponed. If, indeed, the nets were lifted it was a simple coincidence that it happened on the night of November 10-11.

If those two unknown Italians were executed, they died to divert Italian attention from the naval tragedy of Taranto and to assuage to some degree Mussolini’s rage at the audacity of the British, who had shown they were not beaten but on the offensive.

The British blitz against Italy had begun, an attack which was to continue through many vicissitudes to victory on the battle fronts at El Alamein and in Tunisia.

CHAPTER 2 — Duce Blunders

The world, in June 1940, was too fascinated by the spectacle of Germany clubbing France to prostration to pay much attention to a minor assassination in the remote mountains of Albania.

A headless body lay in the summer sun in the craggy wilds of the Greco-Albanian frontier region. Smeared with blood, the torso had a number of dagger wounds. The head had been slashed from the body by a strong blow from the vicious-looking knife used by the Balkan mountaineers.

It was clearly a case of murder; maybe a settlement in one of the interminable blood feuds which are part of the savage existence among these half-civilized folk from whom the Macedonian comitadjis come.

The head was missing and could not be found.

Italian guards from the frontier post near Konispolis, the scene of the crime, appeared, led to the spot by an old peasant who had found the ghoulish remains. After an enquiry among the hill folk of the region, it was possible to identify the victim. He was a fifty-year-old peasant, Daout Hodja by name, and although he had described himself as a shepherd, his real job in life had been banditry.

It would seem difficult to link this Macedonian murder with the Machiavellianism of the Axis dictators, but it is a historical fact that it was a staged Fascist crime which served as Mussolini’s opening move in the game of blackmail and intimidation he was evolving against the Greeks. Aping his Berlin master, Il Duce had decided to try to win himself an empire from the Adriatic to the Aegean by some Axis-style sleight of hand.

Konispolis was to be a second Sarajevo.

Il Duce, sitting at his desk in the Palazzo Venezia, in Rome, sorted the threads of the Balkan murder mystery and began to piece them together to fit into the broad tableau of intrigue he had begun to design. He summoned Ciano and other political henchmen, and together they concocted a message to Athens. This diplomatic note drew the attention of the Greek Government to a terrible political crime committed by a band of lawless Greeks against an Albanian patriot.

Couched in formal diplomatic terms, the note explained that the assassination of Hodja had aroused the most profound emotion in Albania, where the old peasant had enjoyed wide esteem as a fervent Albanian