The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

These innocent pleasures were sometimes mixed with more base concerns, as a naval rating related:

      ‘… three of us went ashore in Alex to the Fleet Club for a game of tombola and our ration of beer. We still had plenty of time, so we said to ourselves, “Let’s go to Sister Street.” We were young and curious to visit the most renowned of the Eastern Fleet brothels, and wondered what effect it might have on three randy young men.’¹⁰

      Egypt’s reputation as a part of the exotic Orient was certainly enhanced by encounters such as these, but these experiences, although welcome, tended to be short-lived and most soldiers found themselves serving far away from the Delta and its temptations.

      It was the experience of the desert itself that united all the soldiers who fought there. The desert in popular imagination has long been a place of romance and mystery, but British soldiers soon found that the reality was very different. The intense heat, sand, dust and flies soon removed the mystery, and the most widely held belief among British soldiers in the Eighth Army was that, ‘“The blue” was… a right bastard.’¹¹ Living in the desert brought a series of discomforts and irritants that were quite new to British soldiers more used to a green and temperate climate. The first unpleasant shock to be experienced by any soldier was the intense heat of the day and the chill that descended as soon as the sun went down. One veteran remembered that:

      ‘In early July 1917 we found ourselves in the desert of Sinai about eleven miles south-east of Gaza, and there we found that the all-pervading heat… almost struck us physically, so intense was it. There was no avoiding it [and] no shade whatever.’¹²

      In the Eighth Army, during the Second World War, the mark of a desert veteran was to ‘get your knees brown’, which proved that you had been burned by the sun and served in the desert long enough to adapt to its conditions.

      Another feature of the desert conditions was the sheer physical effort needed to march through sand. Marching through the night for the surprise attack on Beersheba on 29 October 1917, one soldier found it:

      ‘…particularly tiring to march through sand… the desert may be romantic but we didn’t see much romance about it that night. We marched and marched and marched through that desert the whole night long.

      The worst feature of all to me I think was the dust. There was choking dust flowing over us from the other columns on our sides. We were perspiring madly [and] the dust settles on your face. I remember seeing my own face next morning when I went to shave – it was nothing but rivulets of dirt or rather clean rivulets amongst the dirt on my face – I wouldn’t have recognised myself.’¹³

      The huge clouds of dust thrown up by the movement of thousands of soldiers were an unavoidable discomfort. Clouds of dust were ever-present, but they probably reached a peak at Alamein in October 1942, when the passage of thousands of tanks and vehicles along a set number of tracks ground the sand into a powdery dust:

      ‘…as much as two feet deep in places. Like fluffy snow upon the ground, it rises into the air and hangs like a thick fog in the darkness. Eyes, ears and noses are filled with it and it nearly chokes a man whenever he opens his mouth to speak.’¹⁴

      These man-made dust clouds were uncomfortable, but could not be compared to the natural khamsin or sandstorm. A member of the first armoured car squadron in Egypt remembered his first sandstorm in 1915 vividly:

      ‘I noticed what appeared to be a great bank of fog, moving towards us from the southward. The Egyptian interpreter who rode in my car cried out that it was a sandstorm, and we ran the cars quickly to the lee side of the fort, while a violent wind arose and swept the swirling sand about us, until nothing could be seen at the distance of a yard. Breathing was almost impossible, and the darkness was eerie, while the grains of sand which were continually whipped against our hands and faces by the hot wind stung like the points of needles.’¹⁵

      Sandstorms could sometimes last for days, making life in the desert a real misery. This unwelcome natural phenomenon reinforced the soldiers’ perceptions of the desert as a harsh, sterile and alien environment.

      However, the main reason for this perception lay in the nature of the desert terrain itself. The character of the desert could change dramatically from soft sand to a rocky limestone bed within a few miles, and each desert, from the Western Desert of Egypt to the Sinai or Sudan, was very different. One veteran of the Western Desert and Eritrean campaigns in the Second World War noted that, ‘The Western Desert was sandy, scrubby and from time to time stony, but there was very little vegetation of any sort… [while] the Nubian desert is just an endless plain of golden sand.’ Even though desert veterans soon learned to recognise the differences between areas of desert, the main impression was still one of a barren landscape filled with sand. One Eighth Army veteran noted his first sight of the desert with disgust:

      ‘By late afternoon we’ve reached our destination, Jerawla, a few miles short of Mersa Matruh. Why anyone troubled to confer a name on the place or what anyone could have found to stick a label on, heaven alone knows – there’s just miles of blank sand in every direction.’¹⁶

      Soldiers found that places marked on the map were often just that – names on a map. The featureless nature of the terrain meant that good navigation was essential; as one staff officer commented, ‘You can’t wander around the desert, it’s a dangerous thing to do.’¹⁷ One veteran remembered that his training in Egypt during 1915 placed a premium on navigation, and that the troops:

      ‘…had to learn to cross the desert from one place to another without any maps – there were no maps of the district, the only maps I ever saw out there were signed H. H. Kitchener Lieutenant, presumably made in the 1880s. There were no roads, no charts, no signposts.’¹⁸

      Navigation in the desert with outdated maps, even if they had been produced by the famous Kitchener, was no easy matter. However, one solution adopted in 1917 was the use of wire-mesh ‘roads’, which assisted in both navigation and marching. One veteran remembered that the Battle of Gaza in 1917 was:

      ‘…to me the climax of a walk of about 130 miles across the Sinai Desert – we left the Suez Canal knowing that eventually we were going to meet our friend the Turk again after the Romani scrap – but we didn’t know where it was to be and that crossing was… made possible only because somebody had the simple and brilliant idea of laying wire netting across the loose sand and that helped us considerably.’¹⁹

      While such methods could be useful on an approach march, they were of no help in the Western Desert, where the majority of Middle Eastern battles were fought during the Second World War. By 1940 soldiers did have access to good-quality maps and the sun compass²⁰, which made the task of navigation much easier, but one feature of all the desert fighting was the frequent confusion caused by map errors and the inability to pinpoint a position in the middle of the desert.

      Another reality of desert life was the scarcity of water and the discipline that had to be enforced to cope with a meagre water ration. Ensuring that there was sufficient water for the troops was a major task in both wars. One quartermaster sergeant remembered the effort required to sustain Allenby’s advance through the Sinai in 1917:

      ‘…now there were troops moving for that advance from all directions and they all had to be watered. There were twenty miles of waterless desert to cross and that water was carried by camels. On that particular occasion there were over 20,000 camels carrying water alone.’²¹

      Even with the best efforts of the engineers and the Army Service Corps to bring up water and store it for use, water remained a constant preoccupation for most soldiers. One Australian Light Horse trooper remembered that, ‘Hunger never worried us at any stage of the game but water did.’²² Yet most soldiers found that, with practice, they could survive on very little water. One veteran of Allenby’s campaigns related that:

      ‘Then too there was the question of water and thirst. We had to discipline ourselves to use only two pints of water a day… the troops had to learn to do without it and they did. They can do it and they