Desert Happening

[Dave Homewood]

An amusing article from the Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 40, 14 January 1944, Page 5

DESERT HAPPENING

FANTASTIC OCCURRENCE

HELP FROM AXIS TROOPS

(By a New Zealand Soldier)

One experience I have had in this war which will be worth telling my grandchildren was a fantastic episode last August at El Alamein, where the tide finally turned against Rommel in North Africa. It was the sort of situation one would expect to encounter only in some slapstick comedy burlesque or warfare.

I had been ordered to division headquarters at the battlefront for special duty when the fighting was well under way. They gave me a package to deliver to a headquarters on the coast. I got there all right, but it was night before I could start back to my unit.

I came on a compass bearing and thought myself quite safe. It's easy to think of your battlefront as a dead straight line, and that's what I did. Anyway, in the marsh my truck bogged down.

The driver, a Cockney, with the unusual name of Moretti, got down and dug out the back wheels, then pushed while I took the steering wheel and tried to ease the truck out. No luck. Then some chaps camc over to see what was up. My blood froze. They were Eyeties and Jerries.

"Now, All Together, Boys!!"
I thought my fighting days were over. Not so Moretti. He addressed them in the language which is universally understood by the "perishin' foreigner." They began to help us. "Now, all together boys, 'eave!" Moretti exhorted. And, be damned, they all "eaved."

Out came the truck. Moretti jumped aboard and we drove off as nicely as you please! That was the first part of it. The only explanation I can give for this performance is that there was great confusion among the enemy at that stage and that the Italians thought Moretti a German and the Germans thought him an Italian.

Our machine didn't arouse suspicion because at one time and another they had captured many of our trucks, and when we recaptured them we often found the original British markings still visible.

Swastika Crosses
In any event, after a bit we passed some tanks with swastika crosses. "See those tanks?" I asked Moretti. He said yes, he saw them. But he didn't seem particularly interested. Finally we came to some vehicles which was obviously ours. I stopped. "What nationality did you think those chaps were who pushed us out?" I asked.

"Free French, weren't they?" Moretti replied.

''And what about those tanks with crosses on?"

"Did they have crosses on?" he replied. "I didn't notice." "They certainly did have crosses on," I said,, ''and they weren't the crosses of Lorraine and the blokes who pushed us out were Eyeties and Jerries. Moretti's mouth seemed to drop six inches. "Crikey!" he said.

[davidd]

There must have been many similar instances of this sort of thing happening in the desert; even Rommel was accidentally driven into the midddle of a British camp at some stage, possibly El Alamein, but in the confusion they hot-footed it out of there before the rightful occupants of the camp realized what was happeneing, and who their unexpected visitor was! Similar thing happened to Rommel during the invasion of France in 1940 - that man led a charmed life. Good to see that Kiwis were involved. Incidentally it would appear that the NZer in this instance (subject of first post on this thread) happened to be an officer.
David D

[Dave Homewood]

I have read or heard that the Rommel North Africa incident where he and his men blundered into the wrong camp, that the camp was actually a kiwi camp. Can anyone confirm this?

[davidd]

Dave, I think you are right - it might even have been a medical post - will have to find my Rommel biography.
Dave D

[exkiwiforces]

Yes it was a British Medical Post

[davidd]

ROMMEL’S ANTICS, NOVEMBER 1941.

(Extracted from “Rommel” by Desmond Young, published by Collins, London, 1950, pages 113 – 114).

(This relates to an intense period when Rommel was attempting to finally snuff out Allied resistance at Tobruk, while the British forces were intent on destroying the German/Italian armoured force in North Africa by bringing them to battle in an area of their own choosing, and also chose to make an attempt at relieving the garrison at Tobruk as the bait to draw the Germans into the area. This was better known as Operation CRUSADER. However it turned into a large and confused battle, and Rommel surprised everyone by breaking off contact and charging into the Allied rear when he could see that he might gain more by this strategy than wasting his armoured force in a useless slugging match with minefields, and Allied armour and guns. I thought this was such a good story that Board members might appreciate the full text of the interlude.)

(The extract)
For the Germans as well as ourselves the break-through had moments which are more amusing in retrospect than they were at the time. In the evening of November 24th, Rommel with General Bayerlein and General Cruwell, commanding the Afrika Korps, crossed the frontier wire, Rommel driving ‘Mammut’, the Elephant, his British armoured command truck, a souvenir of Mechili to which he was much attached. It was dark, when they tried to turn back and they could not find the gap in the wire, which marked the gap in the mine belt that guarded it. (I remember giving up the attempt to find that gap myself and sleeping peacefully in my station-wagon, to discover next morning that my two front wheels were in the minefield.) Rommel and his party slept, perhaps not so peacefully, in the middle of the Indian troops and slipped out unchallenged at first light.

The previous afternoon Rommel had visited a field hospital, full of a mixed bag of German and British wounded. Walking between the beds, he (Rommel) observed that the hospital was still in British hands and that British soldiers were still about. It was, indeed, a British medical officer who was conducting him round, having mistaken him, or so he imagined, for a Polish general. The German wounded goggled at him and began to sit up in bed. “I think we’d better get out of this” whispered Rommel. As he jumped into ‘Mammut’, he acknowledged a final salute.

General von Ravenstein also told me how Rommel tried to capture what he insisted was General Cunningham and his staff. “I had had no time to take prisoners”, he said. “In fact when I drove through some British units and numbers of men, seeing the tanks on top of them, they tried to surrender, I had to call out, ‘Go away! I’m not interested in you!’ What could I have done with prisoners? Then Rommel joined me. On a piece of rising ground east of the wire we saw through our glasses a group of staff officers with their maps. ‘General Cunningham!’ said Rommel. ‘Go and take him!’ While I was collecting a tank or two he became impatient. ‘Never mind, I’ll go and take them myself!’ Standing up in his car, his sun glasses pushed up on his forehead, waving and shouting, he dashed off with three unarmoured staff cars and about twenty motor-bicycles, in a cloud of dust. However, General Cunningham (if it was General Cunningham), saw them coming and, being unarmed, I suppose, and without an escort, he and his staff jumped into their cars and made off.”

[phil82]

I have an excellent book,"Alamein:War Without Hate" and it includes the story of the Field Hospital, British, which occasionally was overrun and staffed by both British an German surgeons until one side or the other took over again. The surgeons simply acknowledged each other as they came and went!