60 years on, veterans leave hatchet buried at El Alamein
EL ALAMEIN (Egypt), Oct 19: Old veterans from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Italy paid homage in the Egyptian desert on Saturday to the tens of thousands who died 60 years ago during the decisive World War II battle of El Alamein.
Scores of octogenarian ex-soldiers paid tribute to their own and the other side’s war dead at Italian, German and Commonwealth cemeteries, the latter with gravestones standing in neat columns in the sand, cultivated with cactus and other desert flowers.
Their old enmities were long buried with the dead.
“We’ve got no animosity whatsoever toward them. No, in fact, the Germans we admire very much,” said Ken Beamish, 80, an artillery gunner for the Ninth Australian Division, which delivered some of the key blows in the allied victory at El Alamein.
Beamish admired the bold Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who led the estimated 90,000 German and Italian troops, as a “clean fighter, he was a good soldier, and after all, the Germans were doing what we were doing, fighting for what they believed was right.”
The estimated 150,000 Commonwealth and allied forces were under the command of the cautious and meticulous Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, whose son Viscount David Montgomery was attending the ceremonies.
Returning to El Alamein for the first time in 60 years, the Perth resident strolled into the Commonwealth cemetery after several Italian veterans had laid a wreath at the graves of the Commonwealth troops and allied Polish and Greek soldiers.
He looked out over the cemetery and the desert beyond, recalling the old battlefield as it was, with tanks deployed, artillery guns dug in, and trucks stirring up dust.
When 1,000 British guns opened the battle on the night of Oct 23, he had a “bird’s eye view” from his artillery observation post, where he manned a radio. It was like “a tremendous fireworks display,” he recalled.
Though it frightened him, “it must have been a lot worse at the end where the shells were landing,” said Beamish, a robust and lively man who wore a blue pin-striped shirt and a broad-brimmed white hat like the other Australians.
As the allies advanced, he saw the carnage the offensive had left.
“I went over to the lines where the Germans had been, and oh, it was a mess there, I tell you. Thousands of shells landed... The sun is not very kind to bodies, and we buried some. (It was) terrible there,” he said.
Beamish later stood silently by the headstone of a dead comrade, then took a photograph.
Keith Hansen, another of the 10-member delegation of Australian veterans, spoke of an enormous sense of loss as he searched for four friends whose names were written down on a white piece of paper he clutched.
“It’s a lot of wasted life, when you look at it, but it was a job that was necessary” at the time, said Hansen, who was a ground controller in the Royal Australian Air Force during the two-week battle, when the allies enjoyed air superiority.
Jean Perry, a nurse in the 2/7th Australian General Hospital unit, recalled how brave the young wounded soldiers were, because they worried more about their comrades left on the battlefield.
“Their main concern was for their mates,” said the 82-year-old Perry, a resident of Beaumaris, Victoria.
The commemoration was taking part over two days, at the Commonwealth cemeteries on Saturday followed by an international ceremony on Sunday.
The battle at El Alamein, a culmination of two years of successive advances and retreats by the two sides in north Africa, proved a decisive allied victory, helping to establish control in the Mediterranean and securing the Suez Canal, the link with the east and Middle East oil supplies.
The victory led to the final expulsion of the Axis forces from North Africa in April 1943, and was one of the most intense battles — involving almost 2,000 tanks — fought until that time.
The battle proved how crucial logistics were to fighting the war, as the allies were succesful in scuppering Axis shipping, preventing Rommel from getting badly needed supplies.
Church bells rang in Britain for the first time in the war, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said later, “Before Alamein we never had a victory, after Alamein we never had a defeat.”—AFP
