Start Digging, You Bastards! Extract

Allen & Unwin
Jul 25
3 min read

Read an extract from Start Digging, You Bastards! by Tom Gilling.

In July 1942, as the relentless heat of the North African desert bore down, so too did the Axis forces under the legendary Field Marshal Rommel. With Cairo and the Suez Canal within their grasp, Hitler’s armies appeared unstoppable. But standing in their way—exhausted, outnumbered, and dug into the dust—were the soldiers of the 9th Australian Division and the 2nd New Zealand Division.

In Start Digging, You Bastards!, bestselling author Tom Gilling captures the grit, fear, and astonishing bravery of these men in one of the most decisive confrontations of World War II. With visceral storytelling and rich historical insight, this is the forgotten ANZAC story of El Alamein—where courage shaped history.

Read on for an extract from this gripping new account of the desert war…

INTRODUCTION

In the last days of June 1942 the Australian journalist Alan Moorehead, correspondent for London’s Daily Express and the pre- eminent reporter of the desert war, was in Egypt to watch the British Eighth Army’s chaotic retreat to El Alamein. In just four weeks the advancing Axis army of German and Italian forces had driven the Allies right out of Libya to the coastal fortress of Mersa Matruh, just over 200 kilometres inside the Egyptian border.

The New Zealand Division, ‘hardened in Greece, Crete and the desert, and by common consent the finest infantry formation in the Middle East’, was thrown into Matruh in a last-ditch effort to halt the Axis offensive. Schooled in what Moorehead called the ‘gospel of the bayonet charge’, the New Zealanders fought a bloody battle on the cliffs around Matruh before being forced back. Not even the fearsome 28th (Māori) Battalion could stop German tanks with bayonets.

The Eighth Army withdrew to El Alamein, 240 kilometres west of Cairo, the last remaining barrier between the Axis forces and the Nile Delta.

Under its mercurial leader, General Erwin Rommel, the Axis army had proved a formidable opponent, outfighting the Allies time and time again. Tricks Rommel had learnt while commanding a Panzer division in the battle for France enabled him to outfox a string of British generals, none of whom was able to master the art of mobile warfare in the North African desert. Rommel’s Afrika Korps had better tanks and possessed, in the 88-millimetre anti- aircraft gun, arguably the single most effective gun of the war. The aura of Rommel’s military genius circulated beyond his own soldiers to those of his enemy: even Winston Churchill conceded that he was a ‘great general’.

It was a critical moment for the Allies. The first half of 1942 had seen Britain lose Malaya, Burma and Singapore; Japanese forces had conquered the Netherlands East Indies and humiliated the Americans in the Philippines. Hitler’s renewed Russian offensive threatened to destroy what was left of a Soviet army that had already suffered more than six million casualties. Defeat at El Alamein, and the loss of Egypt that would almost certainly follow, would (Moorehead wrote) trigger a ‘chain of misfortunes almost too disastrous to contemplate’. Britain would lose the Suez Canal and all its stores; it would be impossible to hold Malta and retain control of the Mediterranean; and Axis forces advancing into the Middle East would threaten the Allies’ supply of Persian oil. In short, defeat at Alamein would throw England back to the ‘dark days of the Battle of Britain’.

While dispirited Allied troops streamed towards the Delta to prepare fallback defences in case the Germans broke through at Alamein, the 9th Australian Division moved back into the line. Rested and re-equipped since their heroic defence of Tobruk, the Australians ‘swarmed everywhere and . . . looked magnificent’, Moorehead wrote. ‘None of us had ever seen such troops before . . . Their reputation was second only to that of the New Zealanders and a very close second at that . . . they were fresh and even eager for a fight.’

A war that had once seemed like a sideshow to the conflict in Europe was set to become one of the turning points of the Second World War, and soldiers from Australia and New Zealand would play a pivotal role in its outcome.

Extracted from Start Digging, You Bastards!

by Tom Gilling