On 22 July 1942, the British 23rd Armoured Brigade entered combat for the first time during the fighting around Ruweisat Ridge and El Mreir, part of the First Battle of El Alamein. Recently arrived in Egypt, its crews were committed to an attack undermined by incomplete mine clearance, failures of communication and poor coordination between supporting forces. Revised orders changing the route of advance failed to reach the two attacking regiments in full. Their Valentines struck mines while exposed to artillery and anti-tank fire. Some pressed through to their objectives, only to suffer further losses before withdrawing. Within hours, the 40th and 46th Royal Tank Regiments had been reduced to a handful of functioning tanks.
The following story imagines one crew’s struggle to return.
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it.”
— Robert E. Lee
The High Value Target
Sergeant Michael Bell stood with his head above the Valentine’s hatch, watching the tank ahead disappear beneath its own dust. Somewhere to their right, artillery smoke lay along the ridge. Beyond it was the enemy. Ahead was a passage through the mines. At least, that’s what they had been told.
“Keep some distance. Follow his tracks, Shaw,” Bell said.
Below him, Trooper Eddie Shaw eased the steering levers. Twenty years old, a delivery driver before the war, he had spent the morning complaining about the sand. Everybody complained about the sand. It got into everything, and now it was obscuring the viewing port and periscopes.
The tank clunked and chattered and made all sorts of strange, creaking metallic sounds, but it moved forward at a decent pace and turned quickly when demanded.
Bell watched the ground. Tracks crossed and vanished beneath drifting dust. He searched for something that looked deliberate: a marker, a man pointing, a line he could trust.
An explosion rocked the tank ahead, and it lurched in a brown eruption of sand and smoke. Its rear lifted, then settled crookedly. A length of track uncoiled beside it.
“Stop!” Bell yelled.
Shaw braked hard. Bell and gunner Tom Mercer lurched forward in the small space within the turret.
For a moment, the disabled tank remained perfectly still. Then its turret began to turn.
“They’ve hit a mine,” Mercer said.
Bell looked left. Another Valentine was moving past them. Its commander, upright in the hatch, nodded in acknowledgement and motioned for them to follow his line.
Further left, a second explosion threw dust above a different tank.
The passage was not clear. This area was still heavily mined.
A shell burst behind Bell, close enough to scatter grit across his neck. He ducked, then forced himself up again. Another loud roar came, as if an airplane had flown low over them, followed by a shudder as another Valentine was blown to pieces nearby. The explosion sent metal fragments ringing against the hull.
The commander beside them pointed forward once more. Bell knew him only as the sergeant with the pale eyelashes. They had shared a cigarette two evenings earlier without exchanging names.
“Follow that one,” Bell said. “Keep pace but keep some distance.”
Shaw let the tank dig itself forward through the sand and turned left to follow the other Valentine.
They passed the mined Valentine close enough for Bell to see a man struggling with its hatch. He wanted to stop. Behind him, another tank was coming up, and machine-gun fire was beginning to find the halted vehicles. Bell knew it would be suicide to stop here, and even more so to get out to help. He had his objective.
“Keep going.”
He watched the other commander’s tank until dust and smoke swallowed it. Shaw stayed the course and followed.
***
The ground opened ahead in a way Bell had not expected. It was still desert, still pale and seemingly empty, but the slight fall towards El Mreir broke the view. Vehicles appeared and disappeared behind folds he would barely have noticed on foot.
The two Valentines had drawn away from the others.
Bell could no longer tell whether they had found a passage or had merely been fortunate.
A blow struck the front of the tank, jolting it hard. Inside, it sounded as though an enormous hammer had hit an empty boiler. Bell dropped into the turret. Mercer recoiled, holding his head.
“Eddie?”
“Still here.”
“Steering?”
“Still working.”
Bell tasted blood. He had bitten the inside of his cheek. He checked Mercer, checked the ammunition at his feet, then raised himself cautiously to look again. A fresh scar showed on the forward armour. Nothing was burning.
In front, the other Valentine fired. Bell followed its gun. At first, he saw only a low bank, a smear of dust and something angular behind it. Then came a flash. The shot passed close. He felt rather than heard it.
“There. Left of that pale patch. Long barrel.”
Mercer traversed the turret. “I’ve got the position.”
Bell lowered himself beside him and took a round from its rack. In the turret there was barely room for the familiar movements, yet his hands found them. He loaded.
“Gun ready,” Bell said. He checked the position once more. “Fire!”
The two-pounder cracked. The spent case fell, sharp and hot.
“Short,” Bell said. He reached for another round.
Outside, the other Valentine fired again. Dust lifted around the German position. Bell caught the outline of a shield, men moving behind it, the long gun coming round.
“An eighty-eight,” he said.
Mercer made a small adjustment. Bell loaded.
This time the strike was against something solid. A fragment spun above the emplacement.
“Again.”
The next shot went into the crowded shape behind the shield.
One man fell out of sight. Another scrambled sideways along the bank. Through a brief thinning of the dust, Bell saw that the barrel had sagged and stopped following them. Mercer kept his eye to the sight.
“Have we got it?”
“I think so but keep on it.”
They waited for the flash. It did not come.
Then the other Valentine was hit. The tank stopped so abruptly that Bell thought it had struck a wall. Smoke pushed out near the turret. Its gun remained pointing at the position they had been firing on.
Another flash and boom from two o’clock caused the tank in front to explode in a spiraling plume of flame, dust and smoke.
Un-survivable.
Bell gasped. Beside him, Mercer drew a sharp breath.
They had only a moment before another flash and boom, from ten o’clock this time. A violent blow struck their gun. Through the opening above him, Bell glimpsed a piece of barrel tumbling away.
Sparks snapped inside the turret. Mercer cried out and folded sideways. Bell’s forearm struck a steel edge hard enough to numb it. For several seconds he could hear nothing but a thin, steady ringing.
Mercer was moving. Bell caught his shoulder with his other hand.
“Tom, you okay?”
The gunner lifted his head. Blood ran from a shallow cut above his eyebrow and from his nose.
“The gun,” Mercer said, reorienting himself.
Bell raised himself just far enough to look. The forward section of the barrel was gone, leaving a torn, distorted end. Fresh gouges marked the armour beside it.
Mercer tried the traverse. The turret still moved.
“The pop gun has had it, Sarge,” he muttered.
“Okay. Shaw, back us off.”
The engine rose beneath them. Their Valentine moved.
Bell looked behind. Their tracks curved across a patch of open ground beside the slight rise they had just crossed. There was room to turn there, if Shaw kept it tight.
“Back to that bend in our tracks. Then turn us round.”
Shaw worked the levers. Bell watched the ground until they faced the way they had come.
“Now try to keep us in the tracks.”
***
They headed back the way they had come, moving between wrecks and trying to keep out of sight of the ridge. Explosions surrounded them as guns fired from the ridge and the rim of the depression behind them.
Bell looked for something familiar in the blackened wasteland. Nothing stood out.
Smoke had spread across the ground. The ridge appeared in pieces. There were more wrecks now, twisted, burning hulks of metal. It was hard to believe they had once been vehicles. One had its entire side blown off, as though it had been cut away for an interior display.
Beside a smoking wreck, a man stood with both hands raised. He was bareheaded. One sleeve hung in black strips.
“Man on the right!” Bell shouted.
Shaw brought them alongside.
“Hold,” Bell said.
Shaw stopped the tank.
The man tried to climb and fell. He tried again. His boot found a fitting. He hauled himself onto the hull and crawled towards the turret, keeping low.
Bell caught his wrist, but pain shot through his injured arm and his grip weakened. He braced himself against the hatch, reached with his other hand and helped the man pull himself onto firm footing.
“Any others?”
The man stared. Bell pointed at the disabled tank.
The man shook his head once.
They continued.
A machine-gun burst rattled against the outside of the tank. Bell ducked and heard the rescued man scrambling lower behind him. The tracers were coming from the direction of the ridge.
Mercer wiped his eye with the corner of his sleeve. “The Besa machine gun is still working.”
“Watch the ridge and give them hell. Just keep firing,” Bell said.
The machine gun fired in short, deafening bursts. Mercer paused, searched, then fired again.
***
Shaw drove with his face close to his viewing slit.
“Which way, Sarge?”
Bell searched ahead. He could see an abandoned vehicle, a strip of darker earth, a tank with its turret turned backwards. Nothing he trusted.
“Bear right a little.”
“How much?”
“There. Hold that. Stay in those tracks if you can.”
The tracks in front ended at a large crater. A great inferno roared from the pit. A tank lay completely overturned on the far edge, destroyed, leaking diesel and oil into the flames.
“Okay, Shaw, go around this crater on the right. Don’t hug it too close,” Bell directed.
About halfway around, their right track climbed over something solid. They all flinched, but nothing happened. They continued round, then straightened out and found another set of tracks.
Three soldiers appeared beside a shallow scrape. One was waving a helmet. Another supported a man who seemed unable to stand straight.
“Infantry ahead. Slow.”
“I see them,” Shaw replied.
He stopped with the soldiers beside the hull. The rescued tanker reached down. Together they pushed the unsteady man up, then the other two climbed after him.
“Keep clear of the driver’s view!” Bell shouted. “Hold on wherever you can!”
One soldier nodded vigorously. Another lay flat, his cheek against the dusty metal.
The third sat against the turret. He looked directly at Bell without appearing to see him.
In his right hand he held a mess fork.
Bell stared at it for a second.
“Put that away and hang on.”
The soldier did not move.
His neighbour hooked an arm through his equipment and held him.
“Go!” the neighbour shouted.
Shaw took them forward.
***
They could hear firing everywhere, but Bell could no longer distinguish what was aimed at them.
A shell burst ahead. Shaw turned instinctively.
“Steady,” Bell said. “Don’t swing wide. Try to stay on those tracks. There are mines everywhere here.”
He searched the ground ahead.
“There’s a path through.”
“I see it. Just enough to pass,” Shaw replied.
Mercer fired another burst in the direction of incoming tracer fire.
“How much left?” Bell asked.
“Nearly done,” Mercer replied, traversing the turret as he searched for a target.
Bell bent to look through the sight while Mercer checked the ammunition. The enemy position was a dark interruption in the haze. He could not tell whether anyone remained there.
The Besa fired once more, then stopped.
“That’s it,” Mercer said.
Bell nodded.
The engine and the tracks seemed suddenly louder as Shaw pushed the little tank to its limits.
“All right, Shaw. Let’s get out of here!”
They passed a Valentine with a broken track. Beyond it lay another, burned dark around the hatches.
Bell recognised the first.
“Left of that one. We came up there.”
He looked at the uncoiled track lying like a discarded belt.
“Yes. This is the way.”
For the first time since turning back, he was certain.
***
A man ahead was waving both arms.
The man pointed them through. Shaw drove on.
Only when another soldier ran alongside and shouted for them to stop did Bell realise they had reached shelter.
Shaw stopped. The engine idled roughly.
Nobody inside spoke.
Hands appeared above the hull to help the passengers down. The rescued tanker slid off and sat where he landed. Two men carried away the soldier who could scarcely stand.
The man with the fork resisted when someone tried to take it.
“Leave him that,” Bell said.
The orderly looked up, then nodded.
Mercer climbed out with Bell’s help, blinking in the light. Shaw came last. He walked to the front of the Valentine and stood looking at the scar in its armour. Then he looked at the damaged gun.
“Goddamn miracle,” he mumbled.
Bell sat on the hull. His arm was throbbing now. He tried to turn his hand and stopped. Something was badly wrong below the elbow. He cradled it against his body.
Across the gathering area he could count only a handful of running tanks. Men were moving between them, asking questions, looking into faces.
Mercer lowered himself beside him.
“Did we knock out that eighty-eight?”
“Yes, I think so,” Bell said.
Bell watched the orderly lead the silent soldier away. The fork was still in his fist.
Shaw came back and leaned against the tank beneath them. For a while the three men stayed there, close enough to touch, listening to their engine run.