Episode 1 Desert War

It's Easter, 1941.

The Second World War has been raging for a year and a half.

18 months of victory for the Nazis,

eighteen months of retreat and defeat for Britain

and her Commonwealth allies.

But here, in North Africa,

on the outskirts of a small desert town called Tobruk,

things are about to change.

Sweet Jesus.

There are 11,000 British soldiers defending Tobruk.

Men from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Joined by 14,000 raw volunteers from Australia.

'I was scared, naturally.

'You had the wind up, but you were there doing a job,

and you knew damn well you had to do it.

And in all cases, shame would keep you there

because you couldn't let anybody else see that you were afraid.

'We were inexperienced, you see?'

But we were so excited and we were prepared to have a go.

Coming at them, the toughest,

most experienced fighting force in the world.

The Germans. They were magic words.

No one had stopped them and now we were going to meet them.

The Australian Infantry and the British Artillery

went into that battle knowing that the fate of the war depended on them.

'All these screaming planes coming down

'and letting a bomb straight at you.'

If anybody wasn't frightened, well, they weren't human.

Well, I saw the tanks and I saw the infantry behind them.

And they were coming towards us. It was an absolute circus.

It's from Rommel.

"Show white flags and you will be out of danger. Surrender."

Ah, tell him to go get stuffed.

General Erwin Rommel will soon become the most celebrated soldier in the German army.

In North Africa, he'll simply be known as the Desert Fox.

Rommel is the master of rapid tank warfare.

In May 1940, Rommel's German Panzers had swept through France

in a blitzkrieg that took him all the way to the English Channel.

But the pitiless desert of North Africa

was a very different battlefield.

There are enormous distances to travel,

there's little food or water or shelter

and he hasn't counted on the resolve

of the Allied troops who will come to oppose him.

Men like 20-year-old Gordon Wallace from Queensland...

'We had two options.

'Either win or be taken prisoner, so there was no option.'

There was no way on God's earth

we were going to surrender, that's for sure.

..19 year-old Alex Sim from Aberdeen...

'The air was tense, you know. You're apprehensive.

How will you react when the shots come, the bullets come,

in your direction, whizzing past your ear?

..and 21 year-old Ray Ellis from Nottingham.

I was actually in the trenches

with the Australian Infantry

during the Easter battle.

I was cheek by jowl with those men of the 2nd 17th Australian Infantry.

You realise that the men on the artillery

actually do not see the enemy.

They're several thousand yards behind.

So you've got to have eyes and that is the observation post

up forward with the infantry.

And that was the most dangerous job in the regiment.

That was me.

Range, 5-8-50! Five rounds!

Range, 5-8-50!

Drop 500!

Five rounds gunfire!

Five rounds gunfire. Fire!

As the German Infantry came across No Man's Land towards us,

so we were reducing the range of our own guns

until eventually we were calling down fire upon ourselves.

Drop 500! Five rounds gunfire.

Fire!

Fire 300. Fire 300!

Fire!

Fire!

And the smell.

There's a smell in the battle. There's a smell.

It's blood. Cordite.

As well as the sound. The sounds, the sights.

Well, it's all there, all the senses are involved.

And you shoot at anything,

whether it's running this way or running the other way.

It makes no difference.

I don't think you're quite human when you really get a go on.

All of a sudden, raw troops, we're being attacked by German Panzers.

And they're big bastards, believe me.

From his underground bunker within the Tobruk perimeter,

Australian General Leslie Morshead orders his men

to stand their ground and let the German Panzers pass by them,

drawing the enemy closer to the British artillery.

5-150!

5-150!

When the tanks came, they were firing point blank at the tanks.

I saw one battery Sergeant Major with his arm almost shot off at the shoulder, still giving fire orders.

To be in the middle of a bayonet fight is absolutely terrifying.

Because this is real.

YELLING

You're seeing a piece of steel go straight into a man's body,

and you're seeing men screaming and in agony and kicking,

and you're in the middle of it.

GROANING

In April 1941, after three days of carnage,

these Commonwealth soldiers have done something that nobody else

has yet achieved in the Second World War.

They've stopped a German offensive in its tracks.

It was the first time that the German army had been stopped

and they were stopped by the Australian Infantry

and the British Artillery.

When we started that battle,

they were referring to us as Pommie bastards.

But at the end of the battle, we'd become cobbers.

By April 1941, Hitler's Nazi war machine controls much of Europe

and is expanding. With its Axis partners,

Germany has become the most powerful nation on the planet

and appears unstoppable. The USA is neutral.

The Soviet Union has a non-aggression pact with Germany.

Now, aided by Fascist Italy,

Hitler's army threatens to sweep into Egypt, seize the Suez Canal

and occupy the oilfields of the Middle East.

The vast bulk of Britain's oil

comes from Basra,

and from down in Persia and it goes through the Suez Canal.

HORN BLARES

As far as Britain is concerned, the Suez Canal is, as a waterway,

second in importance only to the River Thames.

It's a lynchpin of the British Empire.

Which is why General Erwin Rommel is so desperate to take it.

But to do so, he must first take Tobruk.

'Tobruk is the only deep water port between Tripoli

'and Alexandria that can handle'

the sorts of supplies

that Rommel is going to need if he is actually going to drive into Egypt.

If he can't take Tobruk,

his supply lines have to travel over a thousand miles

across a single desert road all the way to the front.

If Rommel can take Tobruk,

there is virtually nothing to stop the Afrika Korps

and its Italian allies from reaching Cairo.

But standing in his way is a heavily fortified line.

After colonising Libya in 1934, the Italians made Tobruk a fortress.

It is surrounded by 30 miles of concrete bunkers, barbed wire

and a deep anti-tank trench.

Whilst Tobruk has been in Allied hands since January 1941,

Italian and German Axis forces control the rest of Libya,

right up to the Egyptian border.

The main Allied army in Egypt is scattered and vulnerable

and Middle East Commander in Chief Archibald Wavell

is desperate for reinforcement.

'Wavell asked the Australians in Tobruk'

to hold Rommel's forces

in play for eight weeks while the main army regrouped back in Egypt.

The Australians dig in,

not knowing that eight weeks will become eight months.

'I just turned 21, and I was 21 all through Tobruk.'

They put us in with some of the old hands,

although the old hand that I went into a hole with was a chap

named Rex MacDonald who came from Sydney.

Rex MacDonald.

He was an old hand as far as the fighting was concerned

because he'd been with them right from the word go,

but he was younger than I was.

But he told me, you know, what to watch out for.

Don't worry about that, mate. You can tell by the sound.

It's going way past us.

A bit of a rough sort of an introduction!

The Tobruk commander is Australian General, Leslie Morshead.

He's a veteran of the Gallipoli trenches

and knows what it takes to endure a siege.

We'll have no Dunkirk here. If we get out of here,

it'll be down a road we have cleared for ourselves in battle.

There will be no surrender and no retreat.

Every man in the garrison, whether he be a cook,

a mechanic or a clerk, regardless of rank,

should be ready to pick up a weapon.

Some of the blokes out of the mortar platoon became gunners,

with the help of the British gunners, showed us what to do.

And it was a gun,

you looked up the barrel to get a sight.

Bob Anson is a signaller,

but also a member of what comes to be known as "the bush artillery".

They use captured Italian guns to take pot shots at enemy positions.

And it was operated by a crew of mortar men,

or operated individually by a bloke who was passing by.

Just to send a shell out over El Adem, to throw a bit of dust

and annoy the transport of the Germans that were going up

and down outside the wire.

Conditions in the Libyan desert in midsummer were quite appalling.

The temperature rarely fell below 40 degrees.

Lack of water was the first of the major problems.

What the men on both sides had to do as use their water very,

very sparingly indeed.

Inside the Tobruk perimeter, conditions are no better.

Fortunately, Joe Madeley has somebody to show him the ropes.

Rex MacDonald, he said, "Oh, you get your water bottle full".

You're gonna get that full. You have to have a bit of a wash.

He said, "Get a bit of a pull through..."

A little rag, it's just here, here and here.

"That's enough", he said. "Just wipe here and there", he said.

"Because you've got to remember", he said ...

It's got to last you. That's all the water you get for the day.

He said, "It gets very hot during the day here", he said.

"Hot and dusty," he said,

"and water is one of the things you're going to miss out on."

And I learned very quickly.

BULLET RICOCHETS

Defending Tobruk means hard work

and thorough organisation as well as hard fighting.

You'll realise this as you come with me

from dockside to gun pit, and from hospital to machine gun post,

so you may hear what actually happens during a typical day in Tobruk.

Chester Wilmot, an Australian war correspondent

who'd gone to Tobruk,

was able to feed information

to the British broadcasting media.

And he was able to give a bird's eye view about what was

happening inside the perimeter.

'During the day, the crew sit and lie around reading, writing

'and playing draughts, or perhaps they kick a soccer ball around.

'When I first saw them play soccer here one evening,

'I was amazed to hear them calling out a famous Australian football war cry,

'"Up there, Cazaly". As a broad Scotch voice came out with this,

'it didn't seem right that this essentially Australian catch cry

'should be shouted in a foreign tongue,

'a foreign game in a foreign land.

'But the Scotties had picked it up from some nearby Diggers

'with whom they used to play a friendly game.'

-Yeah, Cazaly!

-He's open! Get it in! Yay!

'For the first time in this war, you have troops facing each other

'across a narrow strip of No Man's Land.

'By hard work and ingenuity, the men have made themselves as comfortable as they can

'in a shallow trench that's continually swept by drifting dust.'

We used to sit down in the morning

and see how many fleas you could catch in your blanket.

"Jeez, I got 110 this morning",

and the Germans'd be doing the same across from us.

They were only about 200 yards away from us at one section.

Oh, the fleas were something shocking. And the flies.

Don't talk about the flies.

We had never been used to flies, you know, and they were everywhere.

You only had to graze your finger and a fly alighted onto it,

and you know, within days it had developed into a big sore.

Food at Tobruk is the most basic military ration.

99% of the time it was bully beef and biscuits.

The biscuits were about six inches square,

three parts of an inch thick, hard as rock.

Now our refrigerator was about an acre square

and about four cases high, out in the boiling sun,

so you just had to take the chance of it being all right when you opened it.

It had a key that you put into this strip on the tin and wound it up.

If you were lucky it went all the way round

and you can take the top off and push the bully beef out.

And of course it was this greasy oil and stuff came out of it

when you were doing this and most unappetising, but it was food.

Cheers, boys.

The food was appalling.

We had no vegetables or fruit or anything,

and so we had to take ascorbic acid tablets,

otherwise we'd have got scurvy.

The Italian rations supplied to the Axis forces are even worse.

Even Rommel has to eat from a tin, and like his men,

he soon develops dysentery and desert sores.

But food and flies are the least of Rommel's problems.

Despite the fact that Tobruk's fortifications were built by the Italians,

not one of them can supply him with a detailed map.

Without a proper map, Rommel's next attack plan is hand drawn.

Gentlemen, our positions in the field.

Hill 209.

In Tobruk headquarters, Morshead is much better informed.

We must hold this at all costs.

And he knows where to put his best men, on the high ground.

In the south west corner of the Tobruk perimeter,

there's a bit of a hump, a thing called Hill 209.

Its local name, Ras el Madauar.

Even though it's not much more than a hump, you get on top of it

and you can see the entire Tobruk area.

So whoever possesses it gets a huge advantage,

because they can get their artillery observation officers

up on top of that hill,

they can get their machine guns up on top of that hill

and they can dominate a huge great area with firepower.

On April 30th, two weeks after his first attack, Rommel tries again.

This time, his forces break through a small section of the perimeter,

despite fierce resistance.

Rommel's gains are minimal,

a small bulge or "salient" in the Australian line,

but it costs him dearly.

A thousand casualties and half his tanks.

And Tobruk is still in his enemy's hands.

The one point where a British army

and a German army were clashing was Tobruk.

It was in the news all the time.

Tobruk was holding out,

we were dishing out as good as we got or more.

It did seem to give a sense of hope

to the people of Britain, Australia,

the Allies who were fighting against the Germans,

that the Germans could be beaten.

'Here we are at an ack-ack post beside the Tobruk Harbour.

'Nearly all the crew come from Bathgate, near Edinburgh.

'The story of life in this post is best told by the gunners themselves.

'So Jock, do you find it much of a strain on your eyes,

'peering into that bright sun looking for planes?

'Aye, it is, especially for us Scotsmen.

'We're used to dull skies and it takes some getting used to,

'this bright sun.

'Here is the Sergeant in command of the post.

'So, Sarge, do you think a Stuka has much of a chance

'when he dives on a Bofors gun?

'One Stuka against one gun, the gun'll get the Stuka first,

'four times out of five.'

SIREN BLARES

'The Australians are the first to admit that these and other British gunners

'have saved the garrison more than once.'

There's this deafening whistle,

you know, terrifying whistle, you know,

when it comes screaming at you.

The performance of the Tobruk garrison

is especially welcomed by Winston Churchill.

He's desperate to bring the Americans into the war

and this is ideal propaganda.

Churchill was always convinced that

the worst thing we could possibly do

was present ourselves to the Americans, still neutral,

as victims, as poor people out for the count,

"Would the Americans please come and pull our chestnuts out of the fire?"

And I'm sure that this is why he cared so passionately

about being seen to fight hard in North Africa and being seen to win.

Churchill sends a cable to Middle East headquarters in Cairo,

urging an immediate attack to break the siege at Tobruk.

General Wavell responds with a combined armoured

and infantry assault at Halfaya Pass near the Egyptian border.

Operation Battleaxe will smash through the Axis forces

and drive on to Tobruk to relieve the garrison.

MORSE CODE BEEPS

Details of the plan are sent to troops assembling in the desert.

But British signals units are not the only ones listening.

German Unit 621 is Rommel's mobile "ears in the desert",

and for months it's been monitoring thousands of Allied signals.

Rommel's getting a very clear picture

of the British order of battle from Unit 621.

This is a group of perhaps 200 very, very effective signallers,

but also linguists.

It's a concentration of German soldiers

and German officers who are fluent in English.

And by fluent I mean that they're capable of using British slang.

'Harrier 1, the Wooden Tops are a man down at Lords, over.

-'Sticky wicket, over?

-No, Winnie's thrown a shoe and needs the farrier, over.'

British radio discipline was dreadful.

They will chat to each other as though they're talking on telephones.

They will use nicknames.

They will even use the nicknames of their regiments,

believing of course that the Germans won't know who the Wooden Tops are

or who the Harriers are. But of course, the Germans do know this.

'We have to get a man down there now or we'll be hit for six, over.

'Harrier 1, I can't get there till after tea. You'll have to...'

And this was an absolute gift to the boys of 621

who were listening in, putting together an entire order of battle

from the chit-chat they were picking up.

On June the 14th, 1941,

the day before the launch of Operation Battleaxe,

Unit 621 alerts Rommel when and where it will begin.

The Desert Fox has time to prepare an ambush.

He sends his deadly 88 millimetre guns to Halfaya Pass

and waits for the allied approach.

The 88 could fire a larger shell over a longer distance

with greater accuracy than any other gun in the desert.

The shell left the barrel

faster than the speed of sound,

and the terrifying effect of this

was that the first thing you knew

sitting in your tank brewing up tea,

is that the tank next to you would explode in flame.

Shortly after that you would hear a crack

and then you'd see a little puff of smoke out there,

and that was an 88 that had just taken your neighbour out.

Operation Battleaxe starts badly.

The British tanks advance without the expected infantry or aerial support,

straight towards the hidden German 88s.

Those 88 millimetre guns

would knock out an English tank at 2,000 yards.

If it hit at the right angle,

where the turret joins the hull,

it would lift the turret right out of the hull

and it would throw it up in the air.

I mean, obviously if that happened, nobody would survive that.

It would be instant death for all of them.

In three days, the British lose nearly 100 tanks and 1,000 men.

British tactics were appalling,

that they just had not learnt

how to integrate tanks,

anti-tank guns and infantry as is absolutely essential in modern war.

Wavell sends Churchill a telegram.

"I regret to report the failure of Battleaxe."

The Prime Minister is livid.

There's only one thing that matters when you're deciding

who your generals should be, can they win battles?

And Wavell had lost his confidence.

And generalships just like anything else,

unless you believe you can beat the enemy, you're not going to do it.

Churchill sacks Wavell and appoints Claude Auchinleck to replace him.

In the meantime, the Afrika Korps has its own problems.

Hitler has broken a non-aggression pact with Stalin,

and launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union.

All available supplies are going there, rather than North Africa.

For an ambitious general like Rommel,

it's an enormous frustration.

If you really want to find out what Erwin Rommel was like as a man

and what was going on in his mind at the time,

you've got to read a series of documents,

all of which start with the words, "Dearest Lu".

They are his letters to his wife.

"Dearest Lu, a quite atrocious heat, even during the night.

"One lies in bed, tossing and turning and dripping with heat.

"It's no good going until the Russian affair is more or less over,

"otherwise there will be scant regard for my interests.

"I for one wouldn't be sorry to have a change of theatre."

With the onset of summer in North Africa,

the Desert War slides into a sweltering stalemate.

Neither side has the resources, or the energy, to launch a new attack.

Opinions were very divided about holding Tobruk.

The Navy wasn't keen at all, because they said,

our ships are taking a terrible hammering supplying Tobruk.

Why are we doing this?

But then it slowly began to dawn on people.

Here you've got this weird saga in the making,

that the Australians who are garrisoning Tobruk and holding Tobruk

are producing a little epic of their own,

that at a time when the main army's not doing much

and he's just desperately trying to get itself some more tanks

and retrain and regroup and prepare itself to take on Rommel again,

that here suddenly is this terrific propaganda epic.

'Although Tobruk has had a pretty good bashing, it still holds up.

'More than that, it's a real thorn in the enemy's side.

'In spite of air raids and bombardments, the life of the stout-hearted garrison

'goes on almost as if it hadn't a care in the world.

'With a sense of humour plus enough to eat, you can stick most things.'

Unable to break through Tobruk's physical resistance,

the German Propaganda Ministry launches a psychological attack.

RADIO: 'Germany calling, Germany calling,

'Station Bremen and Station DXB with GK2 on the 31 metre band.

'A special hello to all those rats in their little holes in Tobruk in North Africa.'

Lord Haw Haw. Yeah, he'd come over on the radio every night,

or every second night.

'Our thanks to these self-supporting prisoners

'living their wretched existence six feet underground.'

He called us Germany's self-supporting prisoners of war.

He called us that.

He said we were living like rats in the ground, in holes in the ground.

This ordeal, this experience of Tobruk has bonded together

a whole range of servicemen in a way which rarely happens.

Oh, OK, you're going to call us rats.

Well we're very proud to be rats, thank you very much.

We are the Rats of Tobruk, and it stuck.

And eventually, the name "The Rats of Tobruk",

was more or less taken over as a source of pride.

They thought The Rats of Tobruk weren't doing too bad.

They were holding the mice of Germany out, anyhow.

Lord Haw Haw's is not the only voice on German radio that the rats enjoy.

# Vor der Kaserne Vor dem grossen Tor

# Stand eine Laterne

# Und steht sie noch davor... #

Her name was Lale Andersen, and she used to sing a beautiful song

which became the 8th Army hit after a while, Lili Marleen.

# Wie einst Lili Marleen

# Wie einst Lili Marleen

# Wie einst Lili Marleen. #

# Underneath the lantern By the barrack gate... #

But she used to sing it in German.

# Und steht sie noch davor...

# So woll'n wir uns da wieder seh'n

# Bei der Laterne wollen wir steh'n

# Wie einst Lili Marleen

# Wie einst Lili Marleen

# Wie einst Lili Marleen. #

"Dear Mother and Father,

"Here I am again,

"still alive and kicking

"and wondering what on earth I'm going to write..."

"Dear Mum and Dad,

"it's been two months since we got here..."

"Dear Mother, please write as many letters as you can

"as we know our letters off by heart.

"It's dreadfully hot..."

"I'm always thinking about home and green hills and sweet water..."

"Dear Leonard,

"thank you for the ten shillings sent for Thelma's birthday."

"And Hamish at the Three Keys saying, 'That's there right, laddie.

"'You've got to be 18 to be a soldier.'"

"Dear Jimmy, still no letter from you, my darling.

"I'm hoping and praying that everything is all right.

"I went to see a silly film at the Odeon..."

"I heard from Binky with the last lot of mail.

"She says she still loves me, poor girl.

"I don't think she even knows me, really."

"Bindle had her foal, a filly,

"and trotting behind Mum like a thoroughbred..."

"The last big battle was fought here. I think it was Easter.

"It was a snorter.

"Things have been rather quiet lately, but any time now... "

Shells came over

so I dived into the first hole.

And I had my rifle with me, mind you,

but I dove in the hole, of course, I dived on top of it.

And another shell's come over and the next thing,

two blokes dive in on top of me.

And they were Germans.

Well, we started to fight and then a couple more shells come over

and we were hugging one another in the bottom of the hole.

And when the shelling stopped,

this big fella said, "Bloody Italians!", he said.

I said, "Yeah, that's right. Bloody Italians."

Bloody Italians.

So we had a bit of a laugh and then they just turned their backs

and away they went, and I went on.

And I often thought, God, if I'd only found out who they were.

After, you know, you don't think of it then,

but after the war, to meet 'em!

It's June 1941.

Tobruk's defenders are getting enough food and ammunition through the harbour to hang on.

But the garrison's commander, General Morshead,

does not want his men to succumb to a siege mentality.

He said, "We're going to besiege the besiegers."

And the essence of that policy was patrolling, aggressive patrolling,

not just for reconnaissance but to take the fight to the enemy.

Patrols were part of our life, every night.

RADIO: 'Red line at minus one seven five.'

You get told what you're going to do,

what you're supposed to do, and you check out all your weapons

and what you're going to take

and you make sure you don't have anything on

that will jingle or anything like that.

We didn't, very rarely wore our tin hats out on patrol.

We generally wore a knitted beanie because hats, or tin hats,

made a noise in the wind and you couldn't hear properly.

And by the same token, of course,

you can get behind a tin hat and a lump of sand

and you think you're bulletproof

and of course, that doesn't stop much at all,

but still and all, it feels good.

RADIO: 'Black line Z plus 235

'seventeen fifty yards at eight minutes.'

If you were on patrol, you had one bloke counting paces

so that you knew how far you were going.

And you'd work by the stars.

And naturally, of course, they're in the northern hemisphere

so it takes a while to get used to the different stars.

And believe me at night time, there, when it's clear,

no dust storms or anything like that,

you can read a compass or a watch by starlight.

'Red line at minus one seven five,

'fourteen fifty yards at four minutes.'

I can remember one night we went out,

it was right up to their barbed wire,

and you could hear them talking, but I think there was only five of them.

So we tied...

very quietly tied stuff onto their barbed wire,

so as when they woke up the next day and looked up,

they'd know darned well we'd been right there on their doorstep.

Just to get on their nerves, and we thought it was a hell of a joke.

Occasionally, the patrols are more deadly.

But if conditions in the desert change, it's easy to get lost.

When a sand storm blows up, you can't read your watch,

you can't read the bloody compass,

and you're hoping to God

that somebody is a better direction finder than you are.

SAXOPHONE PLAYS

And all of a sudden you can hear the sax.

Ted Donkin.

Luckily in B Company,

we had a bloke named Ted Donkin that used to play the saxophone,

and he used to play every night.

One of the things he used to play was Estrelita.

Little Star, or Star Of Love.

HE HUMS ALONG

And that got to be one of my favourite songs, believe me.

As the months wear on, the poor diets and constant shelling take their toll.

In varying degrees, they all get dysentery and desert sores

and sick at heart.

I reckon we'll be out of here in a month or so.

They're starved of news and rumours abound.

How do you figure that?

The boys from 2nd 24th said to me. They reckons Rommel's pulling out.

There were always rumours of course.

The Australians were going out in a fortnight's time

or something or other.

The boat was coming, somebody was coming to relieve us or...

Then there was a rumour that Rommel was pulling out.

Bull dust, mate. He's not going anywhere and neither are we.

We'll be here until Christmas at least.

Even though they were rumours, I don't think any of us

ever really believed them, just the same.

They were too hard to believe that we'd be pulling out and coming home.

But the rumours aren't far off the mark.

From July 1941, General Blamey, the Commander of the Australians

in the Middle East, was putting pressure on his own government

and on British command to relieve the Australians from Tobruk.

He felt that they were run down

and he got the backing of the Australian government in that.

When the requests arrive at Middle East High Command,

they ignite a major row.

Taking the Australians out of Tobruk is a big risk.

It means using a lot of shipping to move the Australians out

and their replacements in,

and troops that are being brought in to replace the Australians

have to be found somewhere else, at a time where General Auchinleck

is under pressure to prepare for the next big offensive.

As politicians and generals argue their future,

the Rats of Tobruk enter their fifth month in the front lines.

You all right, mate?

THEY COUGH

All decisions affecting Allied troops in the desert war

are processed through this building in Cairo.

American Military Attache, Colonel Bonner Fellers,

is a frequent visitor.

The United States is not in the war and he's a neutral observer.

Colonel Fellers? General Webb will see you now, sir.

Nevertheless, the British are desperate for American help,

so Cairo is told to make Colonel Fellers welcome,

and roll out the red carpet.

In the summer of 1941,

Churchill's wooing of the United States was approaching a crescendo.

He was acutely conscious that

while Britain might be able to avert defeat, it hadn't a cat's chance

of achieving victory without the United States in the war,

and he knew that the United States was quite uninterested

in propping up losers.

If we are to hold on to Cairo and Suez, we must defend Tobruk.

As the representative of a potential ally,

Fellers is given access to the most secret and strategic information.

In Cairo, there's nobody more important to the Brits

at this point in the war than Colonel Fellers.

Through Fellers,

they can deliver their perspective on that theatre to Washington.

Middle East Command is confident that it can not only hold Tobruk,

but drive forward from Egypt and relieve it.

Bonner Fellers is encouraged to go and see for himself.

He is allowed to go wherever he wanted, to any battle

and to position himself wherever he wanted to

in order to observe that battle.

There were no doors closed to Colonel Fellers.

But the British strategy soon backfires.

Colonel Fellers reports back to Washington that the British Army

is not very good, that British equipment is inferior

to the German equipment in North Africa, and he also reports back,

in detail, that the British are likely to lose the war

in North Africa.

At the end of a long summer,

Rommel's North African campaign receives a boost.

The Australian General Blamey has got his way

and the battle-hardened diggers are pulling out.

The news that we were leaving was absolutely wonderful.

It couldn't have come quick enough.

We were tired, we were hungry for a decent meal.

We had sores,

we wanted to taste a bit of decent water, a decent bit of food

and somewhere where somebody wasn't shooting at you for a while.

The Australians leave Tobruk and are moved to Syria

to recover and resupply.

We were sorry to see them go.

We didn't think they were running away.

They were being ordered to go and we were all soldiers.

So we know, you get an order, you just obey it.

Actually we were sorry that we weren't Australians

because we would have liked to have gone as well.

The Australians are replaced by fresh troops

from England and Scotland.

BAGPIPES PLAY

'We're at Battalion headquarters, and you'll gather from the sounds

'from the next dugout there are some Scotsmen about.

'A famous Scottish regiment has come to relieve an Australian Battalion,

'and at the moment we are in the CO's dugout where the Australian Colonel

'is about to hand over command to a Scottish Battalion.'

The make-up of the new British division was interesting

because it had in it one regiment

which was thoroughly battle hardened,

and that regiment was the 2nd Black Watch.

The Black Watch were a very singular regiment from three

counties in Scotland - Perthshire, Angus and Fife.

So you've got a soldier there who is used to country ways,

added to a genuine physical and mental toughness.

It represented a part of Scotland which was very distinctive,

and they were very sure of themselves.

They were more of a family perhaps than a fighting formation.

I was 19 when I joined up.

I wanted to get into the Black Watch but it was full.

So I had to go into the Royal Engineers, because I had

an uncle in the Royal Engineers in the First World War

but finally I was commissioned in the Black Watch,

on my 21st birthday.

While the men from the cold regions of Scotland

acclimatised to the desert,

the Allies start building up their resources at the Egyptian border.

Auchinleck is planning a major new offensive to begin in November.

Operation Crusader.

Operation Crusader will deploy 120,000 men and 700 tanks.

The main force will destroy Rommel's armour in the areas south

and east of Tobruk, then, in a coordinated manoeuvre,

link up with troops breaking out of the garrison.

This will bring an end to the siege in Tobruk.

Laid out on a map in the war room in Cairo, it looked simple.

On the battlefield, it's soon bloody chaos.

Bonner Fellers is there watching American-made Stuart tanks

go up against the heavier German Panzers.

They're fast but thinly armoured.

Meanwhile, the men inside the Tobruk garrison are preparing

to attack through the south eastern perimeter.

Our job was to make a corridor and then hold that corridor

until the British troops linked up.

BAGPIPES PLAY

The Scottish 2nd Black Watch regiment bears the brunt

of the initial fighting.

What happens to Black Watch here was that there was a muddle.

The armour wasn't in the expected position at the right time

and that meant that lightly armed infantrymen were having to occupy

strong points which basically needed armour to give them

the proper kind of support.

The Black Watch made their initial charge through No Man's Land

with tremendous casualties.

Of the 650 Black Watch soldiers who went into action,

there were only 130 odd left, and a watching officer

of the Royal Horse Artillery said that that move

by the Black Watch was one of the most courageous things

that he had ever seen during the siege of Tobruk.

Operation Crusader grinds on for weeks,

until both sides are at the point of exhaustion.

And I remember looking at the sky...

..and the clouds were blowing to the west.

And I thought, "That's symbolic."

Isn't it funny how these things stick in your mind?

And watching these clouds I thought, "Yes, that's a signal.

"God, Tobruk's going to be relieved. Oh, thank God."

With 33,000 of his men killed, captured or missing,

and with most of his tanks destroyed or out of action,

Rommel is exhausted.

The pendulum in the desert war has swung again.

Now, it's the Desert Fox who must retreat.

"Dearest Lu, we are pulling out.

"There was simply nothing else for it.

"You can't imagine what it's like.

"Hoping to get the bulk of my force through and make a stand somewhere."

'The garrison broke out of Tobruk and joined up with the relieving forces.

'Tobruk had done its duty magnificently and now

'in place of the gallant Allied defenders, it was quickly filling up

'with German and Italian prisoners, waiting to be sent back to Egypt.'

The Allied successes in North Africa dominate the headlines...

..but only for a week.

Churchill hears the news of Pearl Harbour

at around about 9 o'clock in the evening,

when he's at the Prime Minister's country retreat, at Chequers.

And Churchill is almost overjoyed

because now America is in the war, and he records that that night

he went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved.

But for the defenders of Tobruk, and the Axis forces opposing them,

the desert war is far from over.

Oh, shit!

In early January 1942, Rommel and his Panzerarmee Afrika are back.

With fresh supplies, and a new shipment of tanks,

the Desert Fox launches a surprise attack.

In just three weeks,

Rommel is once again within striking distance of Tobruk.

But this time, he has an extraordinary advantage.

In the most incredible intelligence coup the Germans ever have

in the Second World War, he has information,

high level information, from deep within his enemy's camp

that will deliver him Tobruk and perhaps even Egypt itself.

Next time on Desert War,

the Axis juggernaut rolls towards Cairo with new-found confidence.

I'm afraid the British Cavalry units often showed themselves very brave

but they also often showed themselves incredibly stupid.

The Desert Fox knows his enemy's every move.

The whole army was retreating.

It was a rout and they suspect a traitor.

But in a windswept desert, at a place called El Alamein,

the last great army of the British Empire will draw

a line in the sand and turn the tide of the Second World War.

Tonight, we're going to hit the enemy for six.