Episode 2 Desert War

It's May, 1942.

The war in the North African desert

has been raging for the past two years.

GUNFIRE

BULLETS RICOCHET

MAN GROANS

British and Commonwealth forces

are battling a German and Italian Axis army

intent on taking Egypt and the Suez Canal,

gateway to the oilfields of the Middle East.

The pendulum of power has swung back and forth over hundreds of miles.

Each side has had its victories...

..and its bloody defeats.

MEN CRY OUT

But before the year is over,

the last great army of the British Empire will draw a line in the sand

and fight one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War.

HE BREATHES DEEPLY

The leader of the Axis forces is General Erwin Rommel,

the Desert Fox.

He's the most famous soldier in the German army

and he's poised for a new offensive.

Facing Rommel are British Generals who've come to fear,

but also admire, this master of mobile warfare.

To even the odds, new formations are being prepared for battle,

including one in Scotland

that has a special reason to take the fight to Rommel.

Two years earlier, Rommel spearheaded a blitzkrieg in France

that brought him up against the 51st Highland Division

in the town of St Valery.

While tens of thousands managed to escape at Dunkirk,

the 51st was trapped.

It fought on until the entire division of 10,000 men

was forced to surrender.

The 51st Highland Division, commanded by General Fortune,

had the great misfortune

to be in the southern part of the line,

and they were captured in total by the Germans.

Rommel was in charge of the German troops.

Every man from Fortune down

were taken prisoner.

Took us years to overcome that.

The capture of the 51st Highland Division

came as a tremendous shock to the people of Scotland.

There's hardly a community in the Highlands of Scotland

which is left unaffected by what happened.

They went into imprisonment

and were not seen again until the end of the war in 1945.

And of course, Scots being Scots,

who don't like setbacks of this kind, don't appreciate them,

there was a desire to get some kind of revenge

at some point during the war.

Two years later, the 51st Highland Division is back in business

and spoiling for a fight.

They were desperate to get back to action against the Germans.

But the whole of Europe is under the German jackboot,

which leaves North Africa.

And it didn't escape their notice - in fact, it was rubbed into them -

that the General commanding the Afrika Korps

was the same Erwin Rommel who had taken the previous division

into captivity.

But before the Scots can enter the battle,

the Desert Fox makes his move.

Rommel pushes the Allied forces back

to a 50-mile front called the Gazala Line,

and concentrates his Panzerarmee in the north.

The British 8th Army occupies a number of fortified boxes

that extend down the line to Bir Hacheim.

Although protected by minefields, no-one in the British Army

underestimates their enemy's strength and resolve.

'Dear Father,

'in the near future, you may cease to get mail from me for a time.

'We have got a job to do, so I can't tell you what it is

'because it's secret and damned dangerous.

'There's only a 50/50 chance of coming through alive,

'from what I can make out.

'God bless you. Your loving son, Ray.'

'It's one thing talking about the Battle of Gazala now'

because we have history to look at

and we know what the Germans did and what the British did,

and where they all moved

and careful plans were drawn with arrows and everything.

It's all very clear and simple.

Not to us, it wasn't

because we didn't know what the bloody hell was going on.

GERMAN RADIO TRANSMISSION

RADIO CRACKLES, TRANSMISSION CONTINUES

Determining Rommel's next move is the task of Captain Peter Vaux.

As intelligence officer for the British 7th Armoured Division,

he analyses enemy radio intercepts,

interrogates prisoners

and tries to predict where the Desert Fox might strike next.

'According to accounts of German prisoners

'clearing mines in the southern minefield,

'an attack was due to take place here within a few days.'

Vaux is convinced that Rommel will soon attack here,

at the southern end of the Gazala Line...

Why I have to go north, I don't know.

..but his superiors disagree.

They think that any attack will take place further north

and that's where they've placed their strongest units.

Then, as he fine-tunes his plans,

the Desert Fox receives an intelligence windfall

that Generals only dream of...

..an incredibly detailed summary

of the strength and location of British troops.

'It's the goose that lays the golden eggs.'

They called it "The Good Source",

which, by itself, doesn't give too much away.

A good source can be anyone.

It could conceivably be a spy in Middle East High Command.

'Rommel said that the level of this intelligence was stupefying.

'They could not believe what they were reading.'

While Rommel had this unique ability

to foresee British operations and strategy in North Africa,

he controlled that theatre.

But the Germans are not the only ones with an ear in the enemy camp.

At Bletchley Park, near London,

a top-secret decrypting unit has cracked the Nazi Enigma Code

and is deciphering German radio traffic.

Their reports, called Ultra, are so highly classified

they can only be read by the British Prime Minister

and a handful of trusted aides.

'Until the amount of traffic was such that it was physically impossible

'for one human being to read'

all of what Churchill called "the golden eggs,"

he read every single Ultra decrypt.

Everything.

The British remain unaware of Rommel's "good source"

until a code breaker at Bletchley Park

reads a curious message.

A single sentence in an intercepted radio exchange

reveals that the Germans know something important,

that the British have discovered the secret location

of their Air Force Headquarters in North Africa.

'Churchill himself reads this cable traffic

'and asks this crucial question,'

"How did they know that we know where that German air base is?"

Churchill's spy masters assume that there's a traitor

inside British High Command in Cairo, and set out to find him.

Meanwhile, on the Gazala Line,

the latest information from his "good source"

convinces Rommel that the time to strike is now.

As the battle begins, Axis forces move north,

making sure that the British spotter planes can see them.

Then, in the failing light, there's a classic Rommel manoeuvre.

Hundreds of tanks all change course,

charging south at top speed.

GERMAN RADIO TRANSMISSION

'Enemy Panzer columns are bearing down on us.

'Looks like the whole damn Afrika Korps.

'George 3, what's your position, over?'

Just as Peter Vaux had expected,

by the early hours of the following morning,

Rommel's army has completed a grand sweep

around the southern end of the British line,

heading straight for him.

GUNFIRE

His headquarters under heavy fire,

Vaux and his intelligence team only just escape.

30 miles away,

21-year-old Clifford Pace and his tank crew

are waiting for orders.

'We were somewhere towards the middle of the line.'

It was dawn, we'd got up,

we'd packed up our bedrolls,

but not loaded the tank...

'People were sitting on the ground, having tea, when suddenly...'

All right lads, mount!

Well, now!

The order came over the air, "Start up, stand by to move,"

and we were in action.

Tank crews on both sides fight in conditions that are hard to endure.

Inside is scorching heat and choking dust.

Outside, any movement instantly exposes your position.

GUNFIRE

The whole thing was a gigantic battlefield.

But the real fear is the German artillery,

especially the deadly-accurate 88-millimetre guns.

They did far more damage to our tank formations

than the German tanks.

The big guns fire solid shots.

Now those solid shots, if they don't actually hit a tank or target,

bounce along the ground.

You know, the same way a child can skim a stone

across the water of a pond.

If they hit anything, or anyone...

Well, you can imagine what happens if it's a person.

I saw lots of dead bodies.

They're not a pretty sight.

If you thought too much about that sort of thing...

..I don't think one could have gone on for another day.

'I personally hold nothing could be more startling than that

'the German 88-millimetre guns could outrange British and American guns.'

Observing the battle on the Gazala Line

is American military attache, Colonel Bonner Fellers.

'It is imperative that our army not engage the Germans

'with such inferiority in gun power.'

The United States entered the war only a few months ago,

and the US Army wants to learn everything it can

about modern armoured combat.

'The air-ground liaison is poor

'and the RAF repeatedly bombs its own forces.'

PLANE ZOOMS OVERHEAD

MISSILE WHISTLES

'It is essential that American troops

'have the means of definitely identifying ground and air troops.'

Fellers is trying to persuade the US War Department

to deploy troops into North Africa.

Performances like this make that task more difficult.

The Germans have become masters

at combining tanks, artillery and infantry in the desert.

By contrast,

the British Army is still struggling to coordinate its forces.

'The British have only had voice radios for about four or five years.

'There are still tanks which only have receive sets.

'That means they can't actually transmit.

'The argument was always,

"Well, the only person who needs to transmit is the command tank.

"He doesn't want to have people on the net confusing things,

"answering back."

And that's very much the culture of the British Army at this time.

RADIO CRACKLES

RADIO BEEPS

'Officers who have actually been brought up on field telephones

'find it very, very difficult to cope

'with the speed at which information is arriving.

'They suffer information overload very quickly indeed.'

And what happens again and again and again

is that their brains literally freeze.

GUNFIRE

'There was this extraordinary amateurishness that continued,

'and it was amazing that the British had still not developed

'the sheer, tough professionalism

'that the Germans brought to every battle that they fought.'

And the British total losses in those Gazala battles

were absolutely appalling, especially in armour.

Colonel Fellers returns to the US Embassy

to prepare a summary of the Gazala battle.

His coded report to Washington is blunt and disparaging.

'The 8th Army failed to maintain the morale of its troops.

'Its tactical conceptions were always wrong.

'It neglected completely cooperation between the various arms.

'Its reactions to the lightning changes of the battlefield

'were always slow.'

Fellers was right. This wasn't just American prejudice.

The fact was that nobody at the sharp end in the desert

had the smallest confidence in British leadership.

Feller's report is cabled to Washington,

where President Roosevelt and the US War Department

are considering American involvement in North Africa.

The Americans concluded that Rommel's army had shown

it was much better than the British,

and had concluded that Rommel was going to get to Cairo.

In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill

is rapidly forming the same opinion.

The Desert Fox seems to know where and when to strike.

If the spy or traitor supplying him with information is not found,

the Allies are in danger of losing the desert war.

We received the order...

"We are not to retreat.

"You stay here and fight to the last man and the last round."

22-year-old Ray Ellis is a gunner on the Gazala Line,

and he's in the thick of the fighting.

The first thing we knew was that we were spinning up into the air...

..and then landing heavily and being dazed,

and then...

going up again.

EXPLOSION

'I got to my hands and knees

'and looked around and my gun was finished.

'The Saint, it was called, my gun. It was destroyed...

'..and my crew were all obviously dead.

'There were heads off and bodies split

'and they were in a terrible state.'

There was nothing much else I could do but try and fight,

cos the battle's still going on.

The Allied forces use their artillery, with some success.

18-year-old Wolf-Dietrich Jahn is in a tank which takes a direct hit.

He has to bail out and run for his life.

GUNFIRE

Ray Ellis moves to another gun and keeps on fighting.

'One by one, the guns were knocked out

'until there was only my gun firing.

'And there were only two of us left,'

and there was a man - I never know where he came from or who he was.

'All I remember, he wasn't wearing any shirt

'and he'd got a bandage on him.

'And then a big German tank got behind us,

'and I heard this machine gun.'

MACHINE GUN FIRES

And all of a sudden, this man just became a mass of blood, gore,

just...

into the inside of the shield, and he was dead.

And I took a deep breath, waiting for the next burst...

'..and the tank didn't fire again.

'I'll never know why it didn't fire.

'And the battle was over.'

We'd done what we'd been asked to do,

fight till the last man and the last round,

and virtually, I was the last man, by some miracle.

'We'd been fighting each other all day,

'and I thought to myself afterwards...

"We weren't enemies, really, as individuals.

"We were enemies without enmity."

'And he drove me away from the battlefield.

'I didn't feel that I was driving away with an enemy,

'I was just driving away with another soldier.'

Ray Ellis will spend the rest of the war in a POW camp.

As Axis forces continue to advance,

British Intelligence makes a breakthrough

in the hunt to identify Rommel's "good source".

An Ultra decrypt of a German signal

compares British with American battle procedures.

Churchill orders that other intercepted German messages

be urgently cross-checked.

It's soon clear that the Germans are receiving information

from an American source in Cairo,

but the British are still not sure if it's a leak or a spy.

However, before he can be silenced,

the "good source" delivers the Nazis

another piece of devastating intelligence.

The British are about to launch extensive raids

on Axis airfields in the Mediterranean.

GUNFIRE

The operation is a disaster.

Many of the raiders are killed or captured.

The enemy knew they were coming.

'It was a rout.

'I think you'd be hard pressed to find,'

in the whole of the Second World War,

such a complete reversal of fortune as a consequence of this penetration

and they suspect a traitor.

Churchill is departing for America when he's told of the raid.

Seething with rage, he cables his security chief.

The leaks must stop.

It does the trick.

Within 24 hours, the source of the leak is uncovered.

It's a cipher called Code 11, used at the US Embassy in Cairo

in its most secret communications with Washington.

Italian military intelligence

broke into the United States Embassy in Rome

'in September of 1941.

'That team managed to steal a copy of the Diplomatic Code 11,

'photographed it and returned it undetected.'

The well-informed Colonel Bonner Fellers

has been using Code 11 for months.

He's not a spy,

but he has been most helpful to the enemy.

'His frequency of reporting back was, on average, five reports a day.

'The British are telling Fellers where their troops are deployed,

'the weaponry that their troops have,

'the operational planning of their troops,

'their tactics and their strategy.'

It is not an exaggeration to say that possession of Fellers' intelligence

was the greatest secret that the Germans possessed

in the Second World War.

The British insist that the Americans

immediately change Code 11.

But Washington is slow to react.

Fellers continues to send his detailed coded reports

and once again, they end up in the hands of the Desert Fox.

His Panzerarmee charges confidently toward Tobruk.

Allied troops fall back,

abandoning their equipment in a dash for the Egyptian border.

That was the end of the battle.

The whole army was retreating.

'Today, the enemy has made a determined attack against Tobruk.

'He penetrated defences in the south-east sector

'and advanced elements have reached the harbour.'

By the morning of June 21st, the battle is all but over.

In just two days,

Rommel takes the fortress of Tobruk with a force half its size.

Tens of thousands of Tobruk's defenders are taken prisoner

and huge amounts of equipment and supplies fall into Rommel's hands.

IN GERMAN:

'The fall of Tobruk came at the worst possible time

'for Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

'Suddenly, all his arguments about

'continuing the fighting in North Africa was built on sand,'

and the Americans saw Tobruk

as a reason for not continuing the fighting in North Africa.

'They were much more concerned

'to take the war back to Germany and Europe.'

In Washington,

Churchill is talking to President Roosevelt in the White House

when he's handed a message with the news.

"Defeat is one thing," he wrote.

"But disgrace is another."

The humiliation for Britain,

the humiliation for its Prime Minister,

to be in the home of America's President and be told

'that a large British army had simply given up

'with no display of heroics, with no great last stand,

'had just handed over everything.

'To Churchill, this was a terrible, terrible moment.'

For General Claude Auchinleck in the Middle East High Command,

the fall of Tobruk caps off a terrible month.

Egypt, the passage through the Suez Canal

and the oilfields in the Middle East are threatened.

If Rommel is not stopped soon, the desert war is lost.

'An optimistic estimate of the British tank force at the front

'is 100 tanks.'

Colonel Fellers' report to Washington

reflects the Allies' desperate position.

'They lost from 40% to 50% of their artillery.'

But no-one has told him that Code 11 has been compromised,

so he continues to use it.

If Rommel intends to take the Delta,

now is the time.

KEY CLICKS

MACHINE BEEPS

Rommel's troops are battle weary.

They've been in action for weeks.

But armed with the latest intelligence,

Rommel has momentum now.

He drives them forward towards Cairo,

the Suez Canal and, perhaps, ultimate victory.

General Auchinleck orders the remnants of his 8th Army

to withdraw to a new line at a place called El Alamein

and start digging in.

El Alamein is the last natural defensive position

between Rommel and Cairo.

In the north is the Mediterranean.

In the south is the impassable Qattara Depression.

Between the two is a 40-mile stretch of soft sand and rocky desert.

It's here that the war in North Africa will be decided.

Meanwhile, Rommel is eagerly awaiting an update

from the "good source".

It could make all the difference.

Right on cue,

the methodical Colonel Fellers is soon ready to telegraph

his latest report to Washington.

MACHINE BEEPS

Germany's best code breakers are standing by, as usual.

But something's wrong.

The Americans have finally changed the code.

'For Rommel, June 1942 was the equivalent of

'a man with full vision...'

being put into a room with no lights on.

I mean, he had 360 degrees, all the lights on

and then...the lights went off.

Despite this setback, Rommel still has his eyes fixed on victory.

The Afrika Korps, followed by the Italians,

rolls eastwards towards the Suez Canal.

The news reaches Cairo that Rommel is only 70 miles from the Delta.

British Headquarters begin burning documents.

One or two fires appear, one above the British Embassy.

Soon there were ten, then there's 30.

And, suddenly, it seems that the whole of Cairo,

and then British bases right throughout the Delta,

are burning everything they've got.

At El Alamein, the 8th Army works tirelessly,

building its defences, waiting for the inevitable attack.

Rommel's plan is to smash through the Allied line in the north,

seize the vital road and rail lines,

while a secondary force protects its flank further south.

ARTILLERY FIRE

The battle rages for several days.

Auchinleck is determined to do more than simply defend.

And he has just the men to take the fight to the enemy.

The Australian 9th Division

is brought back into the line from Syria.

These men are no strangers to the desert.

For six months in the previous year, they'd fought bravely

to keep Rommel out of Tobruk.

We got told we were moving.

We didn't get told where.

We knew that Rommel was on his way down the desert

but we didn't have a clue what was going on, you know.

We were on trucks every day,

and anything was a little bit dangerous,

that's where they sent us.

Sort of reinforcements for that little area.

The Australians rush into action on the coast west of El Alamein

and quickly overrun the Italian defensive positions.

Some German troops behind them are taken completely by surprise.

In their first encounter with the retreating Germans,

the Australians are about to strike a major blow in the desert war.

The Australians come across a group of tents.

These tents are the tents of Wireless Intercept Company 621,

a vital intelligence unit of Rommel's.

GUNFIRE

As the Australians work their way through 621's headquarters,

they realise very quickly that this is no ordinary unit.

Hands up! Drop your weapons!

Take your weapons off!

There are too many radios, there are decrypt books,

-there are code books lying all over the place.

-Hands on your head!

You don't have to be a genius to realise that what you've got hold of

is a very, very important Intelligence Unit.

The British are shocked by what they find in the haul.

Unit 621 had become expert, not only in using captured code books,

but in breaking map ciphers and simple codes

used by Allied officers communicating in a hurry.

It's clear there's been a lot of careless talk.

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

Rommel's operators were so good, he was getting Allied signals

faster than those who were actually meant to receive them.

Rommel was furious.

By losing company 621,

he effectively lost his greatest source of intelligence.

It's been called the most important intelligence coup

of the entire North African campaign, and it was.

During his time in North Africa, Rommel's fingertip feel

for the shifting sands of battle has earned him his title,

the Desert Fox, with his uncanny ability to deploy troops

at the right place at the right time.

But with Rommel deprived of both his good source

and his battlefield intelligence,

8th Army seizes the moment to attack.

What Auchinleck then does is not simply to try and seal things off,

he conducts a remarkable series of offensive battles himself,

so that Rommel is not simply held,

but then given a knock, first in one place and then another.

After weeks of attack and counter-attack,

neither side can gain an advantage.

It's a stalemate.

In August 1942, Winston Churchill arrives in North Africa.

Auchinleck may have stopped Rommel, but he hasn't beaten him,

and the Prime Minister is not happy.

Churchill is not just fed up.

Churchill is in a state of near fury over what has happened.

He has sent an enormous amount of equipment to the Middle East

and now he finds himself meeting General Auchinleck

in his headquarters

less than 50 miles from Alexandria,

70 miles from Cairo.

Churchill is furious.

There is a photograph taken

of Churchill meeting Auchinleck in the desert.

One can only see Churchill's back,

but one can tell from his posture that Churchill is in a state of rage.

It's all Churchill can do to control himself.

Churchill's instinct for war was a very highly developed instinct,

and he felt that Auchinleck felt like a loser, and he sacked him

and I think he was dead right.

In his shake up of leadership in North Africa,

Churchill appoints General Harold Alexander as Commander in Chief

and, as head of the 8th Army, the controversial Bernard Montgomery.

Sir Bernard Montgomery was a pretty nasty piece of work,

and I think that was one of his foremost qualifications

for taking over 8th Army.

That the British Army always suffered

from having far too many officers and gentlemen in its upper reaches.

Really nice guys, who played a decent game of cricket

and walked when they were LBW.

You don't need people like that to run your armies in war.

You need tough bastards.

Montgomery is a fitness fanatic and commits his troops

to weeks of rigorous physical training, day and night.

I've no intention of launching our attack

until we are completely ready.

Our mandate from the Prime Minister is to destroy the Axis forces

in North Africa.

It can be done and it will be done.

We will stand and fight here.

If we can't stay here alive, then let us stay here dead.

Montgomery's forces are bolstered with the delivery

of 300 of the new Sherman tanks from America.

And amongst the reinforcements

are the men of the 51st Highland Division,

who've been training in the desert since mid-August.

They called us pinkies.

The sun burning your face and that, we were all red.

They referred to you in the derogatory.

Not all of them, you know, but some of them pass a comment,

"There's the pinkies," you know. They didn't think too much of us.

In many respects, they were a green division.

They hadn't seen combat, they'd trained very hard, both in Scotland

and in England before they embarked for overseas service.

But there's a great deal of difference between training

and doing it for real.

In as much that they were strangers to war,

they had the memory of the defeat at St Valery,

and the burning desire to get back at General Erwin Rommel.

Rommel's defensive preparations for the Battle of Alamein

can be summarised in three words...

Mines, mines and even more mines.

This is Rommel's infamous Devil's garden.

Hundreds of thousands of mines and other deadly booby traps.

Montgomery decides to focus his main attack in the north,

whilst staging diversions in the south.

And he put a huge effort into an elaborate plan to fool the enemy.

It involves first of all the construction of tracks,

a whole track system, which leads nowhere.

False camps actually built in the desert.

All the activities, which one would expect

of an army preparing for a major attack, are seen to be taking place.

From the German observation posts,

it appears that there are hundreds, if not thousands of trucks,

concentrating forces on their southern flank.

With the Axis forces now focused on the south,

Montgomery assembles his troops for a massive offensive

through Rommel's minefields in the north.

The attack will take place on the night of October 23rd.

For the tens of thousands of men concealed in forward positions,

it's a long day's wait.

Some chaps I noticed took a swig of whisky before the start.

I was offered. I said, "I don't want that kind of courage."

When I assumed command of the 8th Army, I said

that the mandate was to destroy Rommel and his army

and that it would be done as soon as we were ready.

We are ready. Now.

At 9.40 Egyptian summer time, the loudest sound ever heard

in the desert erupted on the northern sector.

All hell breaks loose.

A thousand British guns open up.

It was fantastic. You know, I look back

and could see the skyline just a mass of flame.

And the whole sky was alight.

Crikey, it was a magnificent sight, really.

The order of the day before the Battle of Alamein was started

was "tonight, we are going to hit the enemy for six."

If any comrades are lost in your advance,

any comrades get shot or wounded, you don't stop to pick them up.

You keep going.

They stepped out and the pipers out in front blowing the pipes.

They made you feel like you wanted to jump up and join them.

And even though fellas were falling, they still kept going,

just straight ahead.

You can't use words satisfactorily

to tell somebody who wasn't there

what it was like, walking through

shelling and machine guns.

You just went on.

I mean, if these three divisions hadn't gone on,

it would have been a bloody fiasco.

Every tenth bullet was a tracer

and when those Spandaus were firing,

the tracers were right up against one another

and you had to realise there was nine more bullets in between.

You see men dying and your mates getting hit.

I remember George Morrison was lying beside me on this occasion,

and we were chatting away,

waiting for the guns to go forward,

and suddenly George went (INHALES SHARPLY)...

..and...

George was dead.

Out in front of the waves of infantry, guide parties,

mark the centre lines of the advance.

Engineers get to work, clearing a path through the enemy minefields.

Lieutenant Peter Watson is leading a small group of men

behind an artillery barrage.

You went forward at a sufficiently slow pace

to make sure that when guns started firing behind you

to give you support, you didn't get mixed up with them.

Using, of course, a prismatic compass,

because we couldn't use anything else in the dark.

Holding it in my hand and, all of a sudden, I was hit.

The CO found me on my front.

He said, "Peter, you've got to go back.

"You're covered in blood. You're no good to us now."

I said, "I don't want to, sir."

He said, "No, back you go."

And when I went finally into hospital, they said,

"We won't take that shrapnel out because you'll have no bum left

"if we did," which I thought was rather amusing.

The infantry is suffering.

But it's even worse for the tank crews.

Our job was to act as bait

to draw 15 and 21 Panzer down from the north

to give the infantry and the armour up there a chance to break through.

The order was, go through gaps in the minefields

made by our own Royal Engineers.

Oh Christ, they've sighted us.

Take it up about 20 yards.

Miss, damn it!

There was a frightful crash.

Christ! Everybody out! Bail out!

We bailed out and got down into the marks in the sand.

We knew we could crawl back on those tracks without getting blown up.

And I think we lost every tank in my squadron

in that gap of that minefield.

Montgomery knows that the first phase of the El Alamein battle

is not going according to plan.

The expected breakthrough has not occurred,

and enemy defences are much stronger than Montgomery had anticipated.

Montgomery needs to think again.

In a provocative move, he orders the Australian Division to push north

to cut off Rommel's coastal forces.

And this is what Montgomery refers to as the dog fight.

The Australian Infantry are going to go in,

they're going to bring down the German armoured reserves

on top of themselves.

It will create the weakness that Montgomery needs to exploit

and let his armour loose.

For the Australians, it's the start of a week

of bitter and bloody fighting.

They are walking into the most heavily fortified sector

on the German line.

Rommel becomes obsessed with this divisional battle.

He makes the decision to move his best armoured formations,

the 90th Division, the 15th Panzer Division,

up to the north to counter-attack the Australians.

And now the Australians have attracted to themselves

virtually the entire Afrika Korps.

The Australians created the weakness that Montgomery needed to exploit,

but it was a very costly success.

Battalions being reduced from hundreds to tens.

There was dust and smoke and shells.

Oh, God it was a mess!

And then I saw this coming out of the dust.

And there was a little bit of a breeze.

The dust and the smoke was sort of going up in the air and coming down.

And this figure that was coming towards me,

sometimes it looked 12 foot high

and sometimes it was down about three inches.

And I thought "Jesus, I've gone round the bend for sure."

Tom.

And who should it be but old Tom Duncan,

my old mate from West Wyalong.

God, was I pleased to see him.

Just then we saw some Yankee planes coming over.

You little beauty! Give it to 'em!

Oh gee, Tom, they're not going to miss us by much.

He said, "They're not gonna miss us at all!"

And then he started to curse the Yanks.

Well, he used language I'd never heard before

and in the finish I started to laugh. I was hysterical too.

And that settled us down a bit when I started to laugh.

I said, "You know, Tom,

"we should have been dead three or four different times.

"I think we've lived three lifetimes in the last 24 hours."

By 1st November,

9th Division has taken very, very heavy casualties,

but they've succeeded in their objective.

They have drawn upon themselves the entire German reserve.

Then at midnight, 1st and 2nd November,

is the beginning of Supercharge.

British Artillery, massed, opens up.

For Rommel, this is one front too many.

Eventually, the German line begins to crack.

It's one of the most decisive battles in the desert war.

Within days, the desert is littered with hundreds of burning Axis tanks.

Rommel sends a message to Berlin, requesting a retreat.

Hitler responds by ordering the Desert Fox to stand fast.

"As to your troops", he writes,

"you can show them no other road than that to victory or death."

But Rommel has never obeyed orders,

and he certainly doesn't intend to obey this one.

On 4th November, Rommel gives the order to withdraw.

Rommel is beaten, and writes of his despair to his wife.

"Dearest Lu, we are facing very difficult days,

"perhaps the most difficult a man can undergo.

"The dead are lucky. It's all over for them."

7th Armoured's intelligence officer, Peter Vaux,

can finally send a report

he's wanted to write for a very long time.

CHEERING

The Panzerarmee is no more.

While those with fuel and transport flee back to Libya,

the rest are abandoned to their fate.

CHURCHILL: Rommel's army has been defeated. It has been routed.

It has been very largely destroyed as a fighting force.

CHEERING

The strategic significance of El Alamein cannot be underestimated.

As Churchill said famously, after the battle of El Alamein,

"This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end.

"But it is perhaps the end of the beginning."

It will take another six months of fighting

before the Axis forces are evicted from North Africa,

and the Allies can truly celebrate the end of the desert war.

But El Alamein marks a turning point in the Second World War.

Churchill writes in his memoirs,

"It may almost be said, before Alamein, we never had a victory,

"after Alamein, we never had a defeat."

In Europe, Erwin Rommel continues to fight for Germany

until his death in October, 1944.

Implicated in the July plot to kill Hitler,

he's given the choice of a court martial or suicide.

Fearing his wife and son will be punished if he's found guilty,

he chooses the latter.

The Nazis keep the myth of the Desert Fox alive,

giving him a state funeral.

In nearly three years of fighting,

the North African desert has been transformed.

Millions of tonnes of military hardware litters the landscape.

Tens of thousands of men are buried in its pitiless sands.

And lives have been changed for ever.

There's no glory in war.

Men are faithful until death.

They are the he...

HE FIGHTS TEARS

They are...

They are the true...true heroes.

The 51st Highland Division fight with distinction

until the end of the war.

In September 1944, Field Marshall Montgomery gives them the honour

of retaking the town of St Valery,

where four years before,

the original division had been forced to surrender.

The men of the 51st finally get their revenge.

That's my war.

Yes, well, it's probably the last time

that I shall ever talk to anybody about it.

But never mind.

I started to wake, but I hadn't opened up my eyes,

and there's absolute silence.

It was weird, and I thought, "Oh God, I must be dead."

And then I heard a voice say, "Corporal Madeley, wake up.

"Wake up, Corporal. Wake up, Corporal Madeley."

And I opened my eyes, and there was a nurse bending over me.

And I thought she was the most beautiful thing

I'd ever seen in my life.

And there was a beautiful perfume,

and all we'd had before that, of course,

was the smell of gunpowder and dead bodies and goodness knows what else.

And I was so clean.

I was washed, there were clean sheets

and I had a pillow with a pillow slip and I was in clean pyjamas.

And then I realised, of course, that's right, I got wounded,

and it all came back to me then.

In the next bed to me was Tom Duncan,

my old mate, from West Wyalong.

HE LAUGHS

Yes.

Gosh, what a...what a feeling.

Yeah, it was marvellous, it was marvellous.

I'm sure heaven's no better.

HE LAUGHS

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd