Episode 1 Tankies: Tank Heroes of World War II

The Second World War was the ultimate conflict of the machine age.

And this machine was its iconic symbol,

the decisive weapon of the war on land.

From north Africa to the Russian front, tanks ruled the battlefield.

And if you didn't master armoured warfare, you faced annihilation.

It's quite terrifying, really,

because you could see these flashes of the enemy's guns

in the distance, and you think, "Any minute, one of them is going to hit me."

Tanks were there at the beginning of the war,

and tanks were there at the end.

The men who fought inside them

had an exceptional view of the entire conflict...

..from the fall of France, to the deserts of Africa.

From D-Day to the final victory in Germany.

As a young officer training in the Royal Tank Regiment,

I was indoctrinated in their exploits.

And who could fail to have been awe-inspired by the way those men

faced death time and time again, in these iron-clad monsters?

When I first went in, I thought it was going to be great fun, and all that.

But I realised it wasn't.

There was a tank near me, I saw just blown to bits.

A couple of my mates were in that. It was terrible.

The bond you established in Tank,

was not a normal relationships of friends.

You were a partnership, it was closer than friendship.

That crew were friends for life.

This is the story of six remarkable men from one armoured unit,

The 5th Royal Tank Regiment, 5 RTR.

Or to those who really knew them, the Filthy 5th.

Their war is brought to life not only by the few surviving veterans,

but also by previously unseen letters and diaries

that give us a real insight of the visceral reality of tank warfare.

Each of these men has his own story.

Some were wounded, some captured and some were killed.

A few, the lucky few, went all the way through.

Together their accounts form a unique picture of the war.

And they weren't called the Filthy 5th for nothing.

The Filthy 5th's odyssey began at the very beginning of the war.

Not with a bang...but a whimper.

In June 1940, men from the 5th Tanks are stuck at Cherbourg, waiting for a ship home.

Having been bloodied in the disastrous battle for France,

the unit was scattered.

Its men bitter and disillusioned.

It had, after all, only arrived a few weeks earlier.

Their mission had been straightforward enough...

to reinforce the British expeditionary force in France,

and halt the German onslaught across northern Europe.

But as they approached the River Somme, in tanks that were fast

but poorly armoured and already obsolete, the 5th Tanks

were given the sledgehammer treatment by superior German Panzers.

By 1940, the tank was the essential component of warfare on the ground.

Yet Britain simply didn't have what was needed.

In the years before the war, they'd left it too late

to start their rearmament and there was nobody for whom that failure

was more galling than the Royal Tank Regiment.

Pursued by the German Panzer divisions, the 5th Tanks went to pieces,

claiming they never got any orders, let alone food.

As they retreated along with their French allies,

they left most of their equipment behind.

It was a shambles on a grand scale.

During those few weeks in France, they'd lost most of their tanks.

They could only claim a single, knocked out German one,

and many of the soldiers confessed they'd spent much of the time drunk.

The 5th Tanks' first experience of the war had been an exercise in humiliation.

Corporal Harry Finlayson, 25, a regular,

had already seen service in India.

But commanding a tank in France was bewildering.

Couldn't believe we'd be pushed back.

It never entered my head. I thought we'd go straight into Germany,

was so sure about it.

When we started getting pushed back, I couldn't believe it.

When you think of the tanks the Germans had and the tanks we had, they were all over us.

We didn't have a chance.

There were Germans everywhere, like.

Harry wasn't the only one dismayed by the 5th's French farce.

A canny 25-year-old Glaswegian, Trooper Jake Wardrop,

provided one of the most perceptive accounts, written in a pocket diary.

"It was all as inadequate as would have been an effort

"to tie down a mad bull with white cotton.

"We had a ridiculously small amount of material,

"and an even smaller amount of organisation.

"My own opinion of the Somme episode

"was that it was a very silly place to be."

Jake Waldrop was a great treasure to the 5th Tanks.

He was no fool, he was able to assess the situation very...

..adequately for his own satisfaction.

Hence the diaries he wrote.

Which, of course, he shouldn't have been writing.

Because if the tank was captured and the diary was in it,

positions and the details of the unit would be available.

But 5th Tanks had regard to those rules which...

they liked to abide by, and not those they didn't.

Back in England, the 5th Tanks regrouped at an army base in Surrey.

Here, the old regulars were joined by new recruits,

citizen soldiers, like 24-year-old Gerry Solomon.

When I arrived, I felt like a fish out of water, because there were we, more or less rookies,

as they called them, and all these other people

had just come back from France and they were more hardened soldiers.

They didn't sort of include you in their conversations.

"He's a new boy, so he wouldn't understand it."

But, eventually, I was accepted.

And just as Trooper Solomon was settling in,

5th Tanks was told to make ready for active service abroad.

CROWDS CHEER

In June 1940, the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini,

declared war on Britain.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

CROWDS CHEER

His ambition was to conquer British-occupied Egypt

and the strategically vital Suez Canal.

Libya, an Italian colony, provided the launching pad for this invasion.

By the autumn of 1940, the men of 5th Tanks were on their way

to the Middle East to the Allied garrison, protecting Egypt.

For some, it all seemed like an adventure.

Well, I was excited about going abroad and seeing the Middle East.

I was regarding it as a sort of sightseeing tour, more than anything.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, 1940, after almost two months at sea,

the 5th Tanks gathered in the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

Far from home, each man thought of those they'd left behind.

My mother, she was very upset because I was going.

She said to me, "Promise me, Harry, that you'll come back."

I said, "Yeah, I promise you, I'll come back." And she was crying.

I told her, "No, don't worry, nobody there is going to kill me,

"I'll come back."

At the front, a small force of Allied troops was giving

the Italian invaders a beating.

For the loss of only 500, British forces had turned the tide and advanced into Libya.

News that cheered the newly landed 5th Tanks.

When we arrived we'd heard they had taken no end of Italian prisoners.

Everybody was very, sort of, jubilant about it all,

because I think it was possible we weren't going to be needed.

But if Gerry Solomon thought they might be spared the unpleasantness

of actual fighting, they were about to think again.

In February 1941, a battle-hardened German force

arrived in North Africa to rescue their Italian allies.

The Afrika Korps.

Armed with better tanks than the British, the Afrika Korps

was led by a man who would change the dynamic of desert warfare...

..Erwin Rommel.

Jake Wardrop described him as the bold, bad policeman.

But he was more commonly known as the Desert Fox.

The 5th Tanks had already encountered Rommel in France.

But it was out here that the German general's talents found a perfect arena.

It was, he wrote, "The only theatre where the principles

of motorised and tank warfare could be applied to the full."

And he had big plans for the Afrika Korps -

to conquer British Egypt and drive onwards to the Arabian oil fields.

On 24th March, 1941, Rommel launched an offensive.

British headquarters had believed he wouldn't be ready for months.

So when, on April Fools' Day, the 5th Tanks were attacked,

they had been told by their commanders it could only be the hapless Italians.

We'd got in this ditch and we saw some tanks coming,

huge great tanks with big, black crosses on them.

I said, "Bloody Germans!" We didn't have any Germans there.

And then we see lorries coming with Germans in them.

So I went back and reported and they wouldn't believe me.

Company commander wouldn't believe me. "There's no Germans there."

I said, "Well, they are." The next morning, we knew they were there.

The tanks we had against theirs was impossible.

They knew from bitter experience

that British tanks such as the A-13,

which had performed so poorly in the battle for France,

were simply no match for the German Panzers.

So, here it is - the A-13, a tank that embodies everything

that was worst about British inter-war armoured vehicle design.

It was overly ambitious in its technology

and shoddily executed in the way it was manufactured.

But the A-13 was also a death-trap to the men of the 5th.

Get inside one of these and you'll see how hard that was to do.

Or, more to the point, how hard it was to get out of them in a hurry.

And that, combined with the thin armour,

deprived the crew inside of the sense of security

that you might have expected them to have.

The 5th were now facing an enemy they simply weren't prepared for.

Their poorer tanks were struck down by German shot.

They were assailed from the skies by Stukas and Dorniers.

The British command structure went to pieces.

And, for some in the 5th, it was their first taste of action.

Once you get into battle, you think, "Well, this is it. It's me or them."

Everybody was scared. Everybody was sort of jittery and jumpy.

When you're in a tank and you're being fired at,

it's quite frightening.

Because you're sure that he's going to hit you before you hit him.

I don't think I ever prayed in the desert.

I often wondered afterwards why I didn't.

What Gerry Solomon and the others in 5th Tank were up against again was

the superiority of the German mark three, the Panzerkampfwagen III.

It had several advantages over British tanks.

It weighed nearly twice as much and most of that was armour.

And it was more reliable.

The mark three is very well designed from the human perspective.

The commander, who sat in this position, had fantastic all-round visibility -

better, in fact, than I did in the same slot on a Chieftain back on Cold War exercises in the 1980s.

He could also talk to other members of the crew very easily.

The gunner, for example, who sits where I am. They've got very easy eye contact and all the rest of it.

And, if it does all go horribly wrong, they've got escape hatches there, behind me and in the hull.

They can get out much faster than the British crew could.

As the German Panzers overran the British lines,

chaos and confusion spread like wildfire.

The funny thing was I don't think I felt scared.

I think I was more worried about my crew.

And I was telling the driver where to go.

And I felt disappointed because we didn't have the power

to knock Jerry tanks out.

In the midst of this

was a veteran officer aged just 26.

Lieutenant Arthur Crickmay.

Arthur Crickmay understood this landscape better than most.

Before the war, he'd been out here with his best friend, Ted, as students exploring.

Then he'd been posted ahead of 5th Tanks to another battalion

that was already "up the blue", as the army called this wilderness.

But he was dismayed at the failure of those in charge,

as his letters home show so eloquently.

"There was no information about what was happening. Rumour was rife.

"It was April 1 and no mistake.

"As the Daily Mail would say, 'Let us draw a merciful feel

" 'over the next six days of muddle and confusion,

" 'order and counter-order.'

"My most vivid memory is one of our tanks exploding.

"All the ammo inside must have gone up at once.

"I've seen many tanks on fire,

"but have never seen one go off like that before or since.

"The next few days were among some of the most unpleasant I can remember."

Lieutenant Arthur Crickmay understood only too well

what happened when a shell struck a tank.

It was the fate that befell so many of the men here.

The projectile penetrating one side

would lack the energy to exit through the other,

ricocheting about inside, tearing people to pieces.

If it struck ammunition or fuel, a fire could soon take hold.

Smoke and flames would billow from the turret and, within 30 seconds,

the temperature inside could match that of a furnace.

The crew would be incinerated.

Rommel's blue-eyed boys, as Wardrop called them, had in just over a week

reversed British fortunes

and regained all the territory the Italians had lost.

Rommel was good, of course he was,

but in this attack he hardly had to be brilliant. And here's why.

Of 5 RTR's 52 tanks, nine had been destroyed by the Germans,

two had limped into Tobruk,

and the rest - 41 of them - had broken down in the desert.

How good did the Afrika Korps have to be

when the British had tanks like that?

We were quite aware of the specifications of the German tanks.

All their tanks had longer barrels

which meant higher velocity for AP rounds.

And we never really caught up until late in the war.

Outgunned and outmanoeuvred, the 5th retreated

to the only town in eastern Libya that Rommel hadn't taken.

Tobruk.

Bereft of their tanks, Corporal Finlayson and his crew

were packed off to the trenches as infantry.

We were surrounded at Tobruk at the time.

And I was writing a letter to my wife.

And a mate of mine was writing - one of the chaps was writing -

a letter to his mother.

And he said to me, "If I don't come out of this, will you post this letter for me?"

I said, "Yeah. If I don't come out, post this letter." He said yes.

So we wrote these letters.

And we were in a trench.

We sat down there in the trench writing,

and when I had finished I turned around and looked at him.

He was lying there dead with a bullet through his head.

He was lying there, blood coming out of his head there, he was dead.

Oh, it was terrible.

And he'd only half done this letter.

I didn't know what the devil to do, whether to send it or not.

I thought, "No, I'd better not. It wouldn't be nice." Horrible thing.

He was writing that and died, so I thought I'd better not.

So I didn't send it.

I did get in touch with the mother

and told them I was with him when he died.

I said he didn't suffer, he was killed outright.

After weeks of being trapped in Tobruk,

the 5th Tanks were delivered from that hell by the Royal Navy,

taking their chances with the dive bombers

and leaving the port to be defended by the Australians.

By the time they returned to the comparative sanity

of their base outside Alexandria, it was the end of spring.

Having arrived at Christmas,

they'd yet to experience the roasting heat of an Egyptian summer.

Water was always an issue.

Water was rationed in the desert.

Each man got about this much to last 24 hours.

That's if supplies got through - that was often a big if -

and if they didn't have a leaking radiator on their tank

that they had to pour some in.

On their first march through the desert,

some of the men in 5th Tanks became so desperately thirsty

that they tore the seat cushions from their vehicles,

left them in the desert overnight to collect dew

and wrung them out into their mouths in the morning.

It tasted disgusting, but what choice did they have?

Some reprieve from the hardships of the desert

came when the 5th were given leave in Alexandria.

This allowed them to indulge in a little of what they fancied.

Jake Wardrop headed to one of his favourite haunts, The Golden Bar.

"At 9am, we hit the place.

"And at 5am the following morning, we decided to call it a day.

"What a time. A notable session."

Well, Jake Wardrop survived that particular visit

to The Golden Bar without a scrap.

In his diary, he's rather coy about how many beatings

he did in fact hand out.

But we know from others there were quite a few.

Wardrop himself said he couldn't resist tweaking the noses of those in authority.

And soon after he'd got to Egypt,

he was court martialled for a noisy drinking session in his tent.

Officers came to the view that

Wardrop was one of those men best kept in the field.

Jake Wardrop was a very nice fellow.

But he was a bit rough, if you know what I mean.

And, according to what I'd heard,

he was nothing but a source of trouble.

You know, he would be lance corporal one day

and a week or two later, he'd go out and get drunk

and sort of smash places up and he'd be back to a trooper.

But, of course, he was quite fearless.

But while Jake and the boys enjoyed the drinking dives of Alexandria,

everyone understood that in order to beat the Afrika Korps,

the 5th and the rest of the British forces

were going to need some new hardware.

On 22 July, the 5th Tanks received some new American-made armour.

The M3 Stuart - or, more commonly, the Honey.

The old sweats cast a hard eye over this new American import, the Honey.

And in some ways it was quite similar to the British tanks

they were used to. Same sort of weight, about 12 tonnes,

37mm gun also similar.

But the really key difference

was that the Americans used off-the-shelf technology

and that made it much more reliable.

The suspension - look at this -

came from a tractor that had been built in America in the '30s.

And the engine was from a fighter plane. It was a radial piston.

Now, what all of that meant was

it would keep going for far longer and far less trouble.

And a nice side effect of the air-cooled engine,

you didn't need water - very precious in the desert -

and it sucked its air through the crew compartment - air conditioning.

For the men of the 5th Tanks, the Honey was to be tested to the limit

in one of the most visceral battles of their war so far.

Operation Crusader.

On 18 November 1941, after four long months of preparation,

the 5th Tanks crossed the border into Libya.

As part of the 7th Armoured Division,

they were in a 750-tank army,

twice that of the Axis Forces put together.

They also had generous air support.

Their mission was ambitious -

to retake eastern Libya,

relieve Tobruk, and destroy the Afrika Korps.

To do this, they hoped to envelop the Axis Forces along the frontier

with a great left armoured hook.

This would bring them up close to the Tobruk garrison

which would then break out to meet them.

The Afrika Korps would be trapped

between Tobruk and the Egyptian border.

Churchill signalled the importance of the battle to come.

He said, "For the first time,

"British and Empire troops will meet the Germans with modern weapons.

"The battle will affect the whole course of the war.

"The desert army may be able to write a page in history

"that will rank with Blenheim and Waterloo.

"All of our hearts go with you."

Within two days of crossing the border, the 5th Tanks had

bypassed their enemy's frontline and advanced an extraordinary 150 miles.

When we got the Honeys,

that was when we really started to get involved in the fighting.

The Honey was a very manoeuvrable tank,

it could get in places where others could not get.

The Honey's speed and reliability helped the 5th rush ahead

to the airfield of Sidi Rezegh near Tobruk.

The British seized it with a surprise attack,

but soon that success turned sour as British commanders

decided that the tactic of rushing the Germans,

rather like the charge of the Light Brigade, might keep working.

Balaclava charges, rushing towards the enemy, were a tactic

frequently used by British tank regiments in the desert.

To Jake Wardrop and his mates, that was absolute madness.

A - because it did not work, and B - because it cost lives.

"It was decided to give them the good old charge again.

"Quite frankly, I was not so strong for this charging business,

"although we continued to do it.

"Off we went. We went storming right into these tanks, firing as we went."

Rommel had to break out of the British encirclement or face defeat.

Sidi Rezegh became the focus of his efforts.

Anti-tank guns and tanks slugged it out.

It was like a scene from the Apocalypse.

My tank was hit.

It immediately went up into flames.

One of the crew scrambled out of the tank, and he was...

What little bit of clothing he had left was still flaming.

And, er...

he, when we managed to get to him and tend to him,

his skin had all rolled off, curled up and rolled off.

We thought we'd go and look in the burnt-out tank, and we looked down

and there was a bleached skeleton, right across the floor of the tank.

There was just these steel-rimmed glasses on the skull.

There.

Gerry Solomon had received a salutary lesson

in the limitations of the popgun, as he and the others

started calling the 37mm cannon mounted on their Honey tanks.

It fired one of these,

and in order to have a decent chance of knocking out a German

armoured vehicle, you had to get to within about 800 yards of it.

All the time you were trying to do that, you could be under

fire from an 88mm German gun with a range of two miles.

It fired one of these.

Desperate to avoid defeat, the Axis troops attacked again and again.

It became a grim slugging match, a battle of attrition in which

superior German guns and armour began to tell.

As regards firepower, the Honey was inadequate against the German armour,

which was three or four inches thick.

The shells would just bounce off.

By the evening of the 21st November, 5th Tanks had been

sucked into the desperate fighting on Sidi Rezegh airfield.

One of the commanders there, Brigadier Jock Campbell,

took matters into his own hands.

At the height of the battle, Brigadier Jock Campbell

appeared through a hail of shot and shell in an open-top staff car

and urged the 5th Tanks' Honeys to follow him forward.

It was an act of courage bordering on madness, for which he won the VC.

But an officer from the 5th Tanks tried to stop him,

and Brigadier Campbell drew his revolver,

telling the officer that the tank men had been sent there

to die anyway, and if he got in the way he would shoot him.

The price of this attack was heavy.

When Harry Finlayson's tank was knocked out that night,

he joined the list of those missing in action.

They just put a shell on my engine and blew it up.

That was it, we were right in the middle of the German lines,

we couldn't do anything else.

I stood on the top of the tank, put my hands out,

when they came round surrounding us, I got my crew out

and the German officer said, for you, the war is over.

After weeks of fighting, Rommel battered his way

out of the Allied trap, saving the Afrika Korps from destruction.

In early December, the British relieved Tobruk

and completed the reconquest of eastern Libya.

The 8th Army had succeeded in two out of three aims,

but Rommel's escape and the scale of the slaughter

meant its soldiers were hardly in a mood to celebrate.

Arthur Crickmay had lost his best friend.

The operation as a whole can only be described as a gigantic cock-up.

We won in the end, but at what cost?

Returning from the front, the men of 5 RTR lost themselves

in the bars and brothels of Alexandria and Cairo.

Having garrisoned the country for 60 years,

the British Army knew plenty about Egypt's brothels.

They gave the men condoms

and brought doctors to inspect the prostitutes for VD.

In the 1930s, a certain lieutenant colonel, Bernard Montgomery,

who we will meet again soon,

had insisted on medical inspections of this kind, because he said

his men absolutely required their horizontal refreshment.

Horizontal R&R and heavy drinking provided short-lived catharsis

for those in 5 RTR,

who'd come through the meat grinder of Operation Crusader.

For many in the 5th Tanks,

Sidi Rezegh marked their first real taste of the bitter reality of war.

For anyone still with the Battalion who thought the war was

a bit of a lark, illusions had been shattered.

They now wanted vengeance.

Vengeance for the 5th came in early 1942 in the form

of new tanks from Uncle Sam.

There's nothing quite like a bit of American overkill,

and this is a monster.

It weighs in at 26 tonnes, and look at the height of it.

But the most important feature was the arsenal of weapons.

It's got the same 37mm popgun up there

in the turret that the Honey had,

but the key thing is that it mounts this 75mm cannon here.

This, for the first time, allowed the British tank crews to knock

out not just Panzers, but anti-tank guns using high explosive shells.

It also has machine guns in the hull and on the turret.

One British commander described its arrival in the desert

as being like the shift from sail to steel.

Men were moving on, too - Arthur Crickmay was sent to Burma

and Gerry Solomon, the former grocer and one-time rookie,

was now a corporal commanding a tank.

Jake Wardrop, despite his longer service, was still just a driver.

The Allied front was settled on the Gazala line.

It stretched from Gazala on the coast to the old

Turkish fortress of Bir Hacheim, 40-odd miles to the south.

But this was a risky position.

The Gazala line didn't extend all the way to the impassable sands of the Sahara.

This open flank had been left

to allow the British to resume

their advance, unless the Germans went inland and used it first.

On the afternoon of 26 May, 1942, Rommel attacked the Gazala line.

His artillery pinned the Allied troops close to the sea, while his

armoured divisions were sent south of the Gazala line to attack their flank.

On the morning of 27 May, 5 RTR were told to pack up and get ready.

"The Bosch were not far away now, and we had to keep an eye on them.

"I got up, had a wash, shave, cleaned my teeth and slicked my hair up.

"In fact, it used to be quite a ritual with us to get queened up,

"as though we were going to the Plaza when we had a date with Erwin."

Throughout the small hours, reports had been flying around that

something very sizeable was going on to the south of the Gazala line.

At 7.30pm, the order came through to move to battle positions.

Five minutes later, the Honeys and the new Grants lurched forward.

In the confusion of a desert battle, your enemy could be two miles away,

and you have to scan the horizon with the utmost attention.

A kick of dust was a gun firing.

A second or two later, a sound like ripping paper announced

a high-velocity round flashing past you or overhead.

If the light burning in its tail was red, it was British fire.

If it was green or yellow, it was enemy.

Registering those fleeting sights

and sounds could make all the difference between life and death.

The hot, dry wind, which was so unpleasant that the Arabs

claimed it was enough to excuse murder, started to blow as well.

British commanders had been caught by surprise.

In the unfolding mayhem of confused close-range fights, the generals'

habit of keeping ordinary tank crews in the dark cost them dear.

It was very confusing, you could not get any definite information.

They didn't want you to have information, in case

you got captured and you gave it away.

They kept information from you.

They only told you what they wanted you to know.

On the 2nd June, the 5th Tanks suffered their worst day of the war.

Only eight Honeys and one Grant returned from battle.

Some 51 officers and men of tank crews were dead or missing.

The surviving officers decided to fortify their men by a method

used since antiquity, a rum ration.

Alcohol might have numbed them temporarily,

but the grim reality got clearer by the day.

The Gazala line had collapsed.

On 21 June, 1942, Tobruk's garrison of 30,000 surrendered.

After trying to take the city for two years, Rommel was triumphant.

The British Army was now in full retreat,

having been out-gunned, out-manoeuvred, and out-generalled.

Those in charge called it a strategic withdrawal,

but this was a disaster by any other name.

Just a few weeks before, the British had built up a huge

superiority in weapons, and were poised to mount their own

offensive, yet now they were in headlong retreat.

How had it happened? Many soldiers had a one-word explanation, Rommel.

It's true the conduct of his campaign had been brilliant.

In my view, the only one in the desert war where

he really deserved his stellar reputation.

But the real failure was that of British military leadership.

While Rommel basked in glory, Churchill was desperate.

He wrote, "Defeat is one thing, disgrace is another."

5 RTR had to be rebuilt - and quickly.

Dozens of new recruits arrived, like Bill Chorley

and fellow conscript Bob Lay, both in their early 20s.

Bill and I were in the same tank.

I was the operator and Bill was a gunner

and because of the loneliness

of the desert, your social life was

limited to your crew every day.

You knew everything,

everything there was to know about each other.

And you had a very, very good bond with them.

"Bob Lay has been with me since I joined up.

"We spent six weeks at base.

"Most of the time was taken up

"on wireless and driving courses.

"This was our introduction to the desert. It was a rough do, there."

By 30th June 1942, the British had fallen back to

the only defensible line between the frontier and the Nile Delta,

a railway halt just 60 miles from Alexandria,

El Alamein.

The geography of the North African coast offers very few places

where you can make a stand.

If you put in a blocking position on the coastal strip,

people can simply go round on the inland side and bypass it

and that's what Rommel did time and again.

This is one of the few places that's different, Alamein.

Inland, there's the

Qattara Depression, an impassable

area of sand dunes that Rommel

simply couldn't get through.

This is where the British chose to fight.

And Churchill decided that for this battle the Desert Army needed

a clean sweep at the top.

His senior generals had presided over woeful failure.

They hadn't delivered the victory he so craved

and that Britain so needed.

On 20th August, he made a personal appearance in the desert.

'We felt very proud and honoured when Churchill came

'and he was all praise for us.'

We knew very well the job wasn't done.

We had to go and make sure

the enemy was out of the desert.

Churchill was joined by

Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery.

The Times newspaper reported that,

"It may well be that historians will

"point to this date as decisive in determining the course of the war."

The one great thing that Montgomery did

was to ensure that

everybody knew what the opposition was,

what the objectives were,

so we had a concept of what was expected of us.

He was the type of man who would say, "You want me to beat the

"Germans in the desert,

"you must give me enough tanks and men to do it.

"And they are not going to do it until you do."

That was his attitude.

And so it was.

We couldn't believe the amount of stuff that was coming up there.

Monty also had a real flair for publicity.

He took to wearing a black RTR beret with the regimental tank badge

next to his general's one,

as a sort of sign of respect for men like Gerry Solomon and Bob Lay.

As to what they made of him, that was a more complex issue.

Many relished the change in atmosphere that his arrival brought,

but equally, they couldn't forget that he might send them

to their deaths and he didn't really understand tank warfare.

But what Montgomery did understand was that Rommel could be

relied upon to try the tactics

he'd used so effectively before.

And Monty had a plan.

He would secure his inland flank south of Alamein at a ridge

called Alam Halfa.

During the early hours of 31st August,

the Germans were sighted moving north.

British intelligence had pinpointed the time

and place of this thrust with precision.

Alam Halfa arose

because Rommel liked to make surprise attacks in force

and at speed.

We had Enigma then

and we prepared for it.

Rommel assumed that he had a clear desert ahead

and that he could repeat his Gazala success,

hardly imagining that it was now his turn to waltz into an ambush.

Waiting for him were, among others, 5 RTR.

And we waited

and he appeared.

We let him come on and when he was

in range, we let him have it.

It was at Alam Halfa that the

desert war reached its real turning point.

The British brigade had been deployed along this ridge,

slap bang in the path of a German Panzer division,

advancing from the south.

In a couple of hours, its integrated defence of artillery,

anti-tank guns and the Grants of 5th Tanks,

took apart the Panzer division.

Rommel had tried his old trick,

out-flanking from the inland side, and failed.

He'd been beaten at his own game.

One endeavoured to get as close to the enemy as possible,

so that your gun was in range

and could knock him out.

The Battle Of Alam Halfa lasted just over a week.

Alam Halfa was a significant battle

for the 5th RTR, because we'd

adopted new tactics

and we'd given the Panzer division a good hiding.

With his supply situation precarious

and superior Allied firepower,

Rommel fell back to regroup.

While the Afrika Korps licked its wounds,

British forces rehearsed every detail for the battle ahead.

5th Tanks, exhausted after two years of fighting,

were asked whether they were still up for it.

"A parade was called

"and we were given the choice of going to Cairo

"and missing the push,

"or staying on the blue and taking part in it.

"At the end of his speech, we were asked to step forward

"if we wanted to stay...

"..and the whole battalion took a pace forward."

Having rededicated themselves to the fight,

the 5th Tanks came back out to the Alamein position.

Montgomery had received vital strategic intelligence from

intercepted German communications - Ultra.

He also had hundreds of new tanks,

ample supplies

and substantial RAF support.

It was time for the 8th Army to take the offensive.

At 1900 hours, on 23 October 1942,

220,000 men and over 1,000 Allied tanks lined up along the front.

The long-awaited British assault to smash Axis forces

and then drive them out of Africa altogether was about to start.

To achieve this, the enemy needed

a bit of softening up.

EXPLOSIONS

The sky was illuminated by continuous flashes of light.

The whole horizon was covered.

Not good for your ears. Hearing aids.

The barrage lasted for six hours.

It could be heard all the way to Alexandria, over 60 miles away.

Once guns had been fired, German morale pummelled

and minefields breached,

it was time for Monty to let the armour loose.

British tanks, including the 5th Tank Regiment,

cut through the enemy lines.

The biggest tank battle of the Desert Campaign had begun.

We knew that this was going to be a God Almighty fight.

I think after about a week we did start to get through.

And I could see this monumental task that lay ahead of us.

Losses were heavy.

200 British tanks in the first 48 hours,

as many as the Germans had started the battle with.

But the 8th Army pressed on regardless.

They had overall superiority and they knew it.

GUNS FIRE

It became quite apparent, very quickly,

that they were making a run for it.

There were tanks burning all over the place.

And we were collecting prisoners, particularly the Italians, of course,

cos they were left behind.

"There were thousands

"and thousands of prisoners.

"If we happened to stop beside any,

"we nipped out, pinched their watches,

"binoculars, or anything else

"they had and carried on."

By the end of October,

the situation was critical for Rommel.

Having lost a vast quantity of his armour,

his position was hopeless.

On 4th November, the Afrika Korps

began a full retreat.

BELLS RING

In Britain, as the news came through,

Churchill ordered the church bells to be rung.

It was the first time that this had been allowed since Dunkirk.

On November 13th, Tobruk was retaken.

In mid January 1943, Tripoli fell.

Four months later, the Axis forces

had been overwhelmed in North Africa

and more than a quarter of a million prisoners taken.

Churchill sensed a turning point in the war.

CHURCHILL: 'Ah, this is not the end.

'This is not even the beginning of the end.

'But it is, perhaps,

'the end of the beginning.'

Churchill added, "When any man is asked what he did in the war,

it will be sufficient for him to say, 'I fought in the Desert Army.' "

Well, many in 5th Tanks took that as a hint that, in future,

others would be called upon.

No such luck.

As the 5th shared the Desert Army's triumph, they were

greeted by the news that they were now to be engaged in the fight

for Italy, piercing what Churchill called,

"Europe's soft underbelly."

GUN FIRES

After the desert,

the close-range fighting in southern Italy

came as a strain for everyone.

We thought we'd had enough.

Let somebody else have a go.

But, you see, they wanted seasoned troops

and there weren't many seasoned troops.

On 7th January 1944,

the 5th returned home at last.

They'd been away for three years and 69 days.

Most couldn't wait to get home,

but leave, like much else, was being rationed.

Men who'd been fighting overseas

for more than three years were

then given barely two weeks' leave.

That felt like an insult, because they knew that soldiers who'd

been sitting back in Britain throughout that period

got two weeks' leave every three months.

The 5th's new home was a secret military camp in Norfolk,

known as Shakers Wood.

Damp, grotty, and bitterly cold,

many of the 5th's veterans felt

they'd been dumped by an ungrateful government in the middle of nowhere.

But they'd been recalled for a reason.

Experienced, trusted and battle-hardened, they were part of

the famous Desert Rats, too valuable to sit out the rest of the war.

The fighting far from over,

who better than the 5th to spearhead a second front?

That's the way it was.

If you've ever witnessed a green regiment...

..going in for the first time,

you would understand how completely unprepared they are.

The experience of going into battle

is absolutely necessary to become competent.

And so, our heroes would fight again,

in some of the biggest battles of the Second World War.

Next episode, the 5th face D-Day...

..the battle for Normandy and the eventual defeat of the Nazis.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd