Pipeline to Battle: An Engineer’s Adventures with the British Eighth Army [Illustrated Edition]

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Text originally published in 1943 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

PIPELINE TO BATTLE

AN ENGINEER’S ADVENTURES WITH THE BRITISH EIGHTH ARMY

by

MAJOR PETER W. RAINIER

"BUT WHEN IT COMES TO SLAUGHTER

YOU’LL DO YOUR WORK ON WATER"

RUDYARD KIPLING

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 6

AUTHOR’S NOTE 7

PART ONE — WAVELL’S THIRTY THOUSAND 8

1 - A DESPERATE SITUATION 8

2 - JOINING THE SAPPERS 11

3 - THE BALLOON GOES UP 14

4 - RAILHEAD IN BOMBING TIME 18

5 - LIFE WITH THE R.A.F. 22

6 – THE AFFAIR AT GERAWELA STATION 27

7 - SURGEONS OF BOMBS 30

8 - A JOB OF PIPE 34

9 - A BEDOUIN STRIKE 37

10 - SABOTAGE 42

11 - TANKS—AT LAST 44

12 - THE LAST DRINK 47

13 - VICTORY 50

PART TWO — FRUSTRATION 55

1 - BRIGHT PROSPECTS 55

2 - BASE AREAS 58

3 - BRIGHT PROSPECTS RECEDE 62

4 – THE SUMMER OF 1941 67

5 - A FORTUNATE BUSINESS TRANSACTION 72

6 – THE KNIGHTSBRIDGE BATTLE 81

7 - THE FLAP 90

PART THREE — THE ALAMEIN BATTLES 97

1 – THE HIGH TIDE OF RETREAT 97

2 - LAYING WATER ON TO THE FRONT LINE 104

3 – WE STAGE A PUSH 111

4 – OMEN OF VICTORY 114

5 – PREPARATIONS FOR THE FINAL BATTLE 121

6 – THE DECISIVE OF ALAMEIN 126

PART FOUR — PURSUIT 134

1 - TALLY-HO 134

2 – REPAIRING A PIPELINE AFTER BATTLE 137

3 – THE ROD OF MOSES 142

PART FIVE — THE BEAST IS BROUGHT TO BAY 149

1 – THE BATTLE OF MEDENINE 149

2 – THE TAKING OF THE MARETH LINE 155

3 – THE BATTLE OF WADI ANKERIT 166

4 – THE BEAST IS BROUGHT TO BAY AT LAST 169

SOME OF GENERAL MONTGOMERY’S MESSAGES TO THE TROOPS 176

1 – (On the eve of the German attack of September 5, 1942) 176

2 - (On the taking of Tripoli) 177

3 - (On the eve of the German attack at Medenine) 178

4 - (On the eve of the battle of Mareth) 179

5 - (After the battle of the Wadi Ankerit) 180

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 182

ILLUSTRATIONS 183

MAPS 260

Sources 275

DEDICATION

TO MY COMRADES

WHOSE GRAVES MARK THE ROUTE OF THE EIGHTH ARMY

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THIS BOOK was begun after the Alamein battle and written spasmodically as opportunity offered, throughout the pursuit of the enemy into Tunisia. No official statistics were available for reference. It is therefore inevitable that this record will prove to differ in many minor details from the history of the events recorded, when such history will be compiled. I regard such difference as immaterial because this book is not a history but a record of the impressions, made upon a participant, of a series of historical events of great significance.

PART ONE — WAVELL’S THIRTY THOUSAND

1 - A DESPERATE SITUATION

WHEN THE HISTORY of this war is written, I venture to say that the Battle of Alamein will prove to have been the decisive land battle of the world conflict. On October 24, 1942, when General Montgomery’s long line of British and Imperial infantry moved relentlessly forward into the enemy minefields at Alamein, it carried the fate of the world on the points of those hundred thousand bayonets which glittered coldly in the light of the full moon. Had Montgomery’s Eighth Army failed to halt the enemy drive there, the history of the war must have been indefinitely prolonged by a volume of grim chapters. The Eighth Army would have been annihilated. The vital Suez Canal would have been lost to the enemy and the Mediterranean Sea become an Axis lake. Many authorities think that Turkey would have been forced into the war on the side of our enemies. Russia, outflanked in the Caucasus, would have been battered into a far worse situation than she ever had been, the outcome of which is not pleasant to contemplate. Germany and Japan would have joined hands across the Asian continent. Chinese resistance would have been smothered by the weight of German armaments bartered for the rubber and tin from the empire which had been Holland’s. India would have fallen to Japan like a ripe plum. The United States and the British Empire, alone, would have faced a hostile world in arms. But the enemy’s drive was halted at Alamein. Montgomery’s Eighth Army carried high and safe to victory the sacred burden laid on it.

The Eighth Army came from small beginnings. In the spring of 1940 the German hordes had swarmed from behind their frontiers and were overrunning the Low Countries like marching columns of soldier ants. The British Expeditionary Force in Flanders was reeling backward to the coast with apparently small chance of survival. Italy was poised for a spring, waiting only until the defeat of France and Britain should be sufficiently assured to remove from her active intervention on the side of Germany the least element of danger. With Italy as a certain enemy belligerent, the fate of the whole Middle East seemed sealed. The riches of Egypt, the oil resources of Iraq and Iran, the orange groves of Palestine, even the vast resources of the African continent seemed to lie at the mercy of the Axis powers, undefended, a storehouse from which the enemy could draw in unlimited measure those sinews of war which the British blockade was denying him. But in the Middle East was stationed a tiny force of British regular troops under the command of General Wavell. Ill equipped, pitifully lacking as they were in the tools of war, Wavell flung his little force into the Western Desert, or, as it was called, the Western Gate which Nature had fashioned for the defense of Egypt. So weak were Wavell’s forces that his gesture seemed no more than symbolic, a gallant casting of the gauntlet of defiance in the face of Italian General Graziani, whose well-equipped legions crouched on the Libyan frontier, menacing and powerful. But Wavell’s little handful held off the enemy by sheer bluff till arms and reinforcements reached it, then slowly and with travail built itself into the Army of the Nile, which the world knows better as Wavell’s Thirty Thousand. This was the force which attacked and utterly destroyed the opposing Italian Army of eight times its strength. The Army of the Nile, in turn, nourished by the blood of reinforcement, attained mature stature as the powerful Eighth Army. It was made up of regulars and conscripted citizen soldiers from the British Isles, dark-skinned men from India, bronzed giants from the dominions of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, a symbolic handful from the overrun nations of Europe. These were the men who battled their way to total victory under the standard of the Maltese Cross.

Hardly had the Army of the Nile disposed of Graziani’s Italians when the German Rommel and his Afrika Korps came battering on Egypt’s Western Gate. He was a grimmer foe. During that phase of the campaign, which lasted for fifteen long months, the two embattled armies surged east and west across the limitless terrain of the Western Desert. At the end of that time the Eighth Army seemed to have received its death blow on the stricken field of Knightsbridge. From there the Eighth Army reeled back to Alamein. Battered, frustrated, but still full of fight, they turned on the pursuing Afrika Korps with its attendant Italian legions and drove them in a bitter two-thousand-miles-of-desert pursuit till they crashed in ruin against the American, British and French forces which barred their further retreat in the mountains of Tunisia. There the final annihilation of the enemy was accomplished in the spring of 1943.

At the beginning of that three-year period of campaigning, in the spring of 1940, I was resident in Egypt. Every man seemed needed and my record as an engineer with some experience of war qualified me for a part in the desperate issues then looming. I joined the Corps of Royal Engineers. I served with them continuously on the Libyan front until after the Tunisian victory, being one of the few members of Wavell’s original desert force who survived to witness the final destruction of the enemy in Tunisia. In this book I have tried to present a picture of those three years.

However, getting into the Engineers had not been so easy as one might have thought from the gravity of the emergency. Nearly two years before, I had left my South American estancia, Las Cascadas, high in the Andes, and returned to my native Africa. I had prospered in Colombia, despite my adventures and disappointments in mining emeralds, and had made a place for myself. But the strenuous pace of the life I had been living began to tell and my doctor ordered me to a lower altitude and a less active occupation. Hence I had taken up residence near Cairo. The life hadn’t suited me and Egypt hadn’t proved exactly my line of country, so, when the Empire had declared war against Germany nine months before, I had kicked my swivel chair under my office desk and dashed about trying to get into the show. But I had no luck. Too old had been the chorus when I told them that my age was over fifty. I had to content myself then with another swivel chair in the Censor’s office.

The determination to try again for a job more in line with my long practice of mining and civil engineering came when my wife and I heard Churchill’s speech promising the nation blood, toil, sweat and tears.

My own emotions seemed to drown for a moment the blare of the radio which had just ceased describing the plight of the British forces in Flanders as they fought off the Hun in their drive for the Coast. The broadcast switched to British politics. Then suddenly the radio came clear to my ears again. A name had caught my attention. Churchill! I began to listen as intently as a derelict soul straining his ears for the last trump. By Heavens! He had snatched up the sword which was falling from the palsied hand of Chamberlain. Then he began to speak while Ruth and I hushed our breathing. Thank God for a realist, I thought. At least we should know where we stood under his leadership.

Now, as Ruth and I finished our drinks, I was reviewing in my mind a plan to get into the Army in spite of my age. Handicap be damned. It would be no handicap at all once I got into the field because I was fitter and tougher than most of the younger generation. I had experience too, and an ounce of experience outweighs a pound of youthful enthusiasm in the rough and tumble of the desert campaign I could see ahead.

Ruth read my thoughts. You’re going to try again? she queried and dropped a hand on my knee.

I nodded. The sappers have just got to take me somehow. They’ll need my rough-and-ready kind of engineering in a desert show.

Then why not try Huttie direct instead of going through the regular recruiting channels?

You’ve hit it! I jumped to my feet. Huttie was a brigadier of our acquaintance, Brigadier Hutson of the Royal Engineers. He had just been appointed Chief Engineer of the B.T.E.—British Troops in Egypt.

2 - JOINING THE SAPPERS

BRIGADIER HUTSON WASN’T very encouraging when I got him on the phone. He listened patiently while I explained my wish to join the Corps of Royal Engineers, but even the unemotional instrument in my hand seemed to convey a current of discouragement which increased my exasperation at this Army of ours. Even in disaster it persisted in trying to hold its door closed against all but its own military clique.

Not much chance, came his courteous voice when I had finished listing my qualifications which covered a moderate experience in most branches of engineering but did not qualify me as an expert in any. Better stick to the job you’re doing.

I’m damned if I will. There must be some way I can get into that blasted Army of yours.

You’ll find the sappers hard to get into without Chatham training, unless of course you’ve had some railway experience. We’re forming a railway company and have vacancies for an officer or two. If you had known anything about railways it might have made up for your not having been through ‘the shop’ at Chatham. Railway experience! By God, I had forgotten to tell him about that! There was that little Moshannon Railway I had built twenty years before in the States when Bill Bitard and I had snatched a choice piece of coal land out from under the nose of the great steelmaster, Charles M. Schwab. But I do have some railway experience. I didn’t tell you about it because it wasn’t very much. How much experience was it? The courteous voice, no longer bored now, had an eager note in it.

I once built a railway.

"You once built a railway and didn’t tell me about it when you were listing what you could do!"

It was only a very little railway.

Great Scott! The ejaculation was fairly spat into the phone. Come up and see me.

When?

Now. I’m waiting for you.

B.T.E. Headquarters was still small enough to be housed in a Cairo downtown apartment building. As the war months passed, it was, with its complementary organization of Middle East Headquarters, to overflow and fill the huge Semiramis Hotel, to overflow again and fill a dozen towering apartment buildings in the Garden City area.

I found Huttie’s suite of offices and was greeted by the Honorable Bobby Philimore, one of his aides-de-camp. Bobby was a well-known figure round the Cairo night clubs and had he been a generation or two older he might have stood for the dashing guardsman hero of one of Ouida’s novels. Tall, slender and handsome, with a drooping, fair mustache, he looked to be in the best guardsman tradition. But appearances are deceiving. Bobby was to prove himself desert-worthy indeed in that bitter retreat from Cyrenaica which came nearly a year later. He ushered me into a room where Huttie sat at a desk overlooking the placid waters of the Nile, studded with the brown sails of feluccas. Huttie was a short, thickset man with a jaw that looked square enough to plow its way through any amount of Army red tape. I was to find that the jaw did not belie him. Huttie had the gift of thrusting direct to the heart of any matter in hand regardless of Army regulations. Like most regulars he looked fit and hard.

Huttie explained the situation to me. It seemed that Headquarters had doubts of the ability of the Western Desert Railway employees to stand fire should hostilities break out with Italy. As a break with Italy loomed nearer each day, the belated decision had been reached to form a railway company to operate the Western Desert line should the Egyptians cut and run when things got hot. There’s still one vacancy for an officer, that of Junior Subaltern. Will you take it?

I am afraid I grinned a bit at the question. It did strike me as funny. I had handled some big affairs in my time, but the best the Army could do for me was what they did for youths just out of school and still wet behind the ears.

I know it’s not much of a job. Huttie’s tone was apologetic. But there’s the question of establishment, you know. Only so many officers to a company, and the higher jobs are filled.

Of course I’ll take it. When do I start?

Huttie’s fingers drummed on the table. You’ll have to pass the medico first, of course. By the way, how old are you? Forty-nine. I knew by my previous experience that one had to be under fifty to get a commission in the Imperial Forces. Huttie glared at me in doubt. Let’s see your passport.

That wouldn’t do any good. The age on my passport is wrong.

The Honorable Bobby saved the situation for me. Why not let the medico do his stuff on him, Sir? He stroked his long silky mustache. If the medico says he’s fit we might forget to check his age and take his word for it.

Huttie burst into a roar of laughter. It’s the first time I ever had to argue with a Junior Subaltern as to whether his age were forty-nine or over. Get across with you to the medico and then come back here.

They had evidently phoned the doctor while I was walking across the street to Kasr-el-Nil barracks. I found that sawbones waiting for me with blood in his eye. For half an hour he put me through the most grueling vetting that any of his profession had ever given me. When he had done his worst and I was putting on my clothes, I asked him if I had passed.

Passed! If you’ll dye your hair and swear that you’re under thirty I’ll pass you into the R.A.F. as a pilot.

My thoughts went back two years to that doctor friend in a far-away Andean city. If you’ll get back to sea level and live soft for a year or two, you’ll be as fit a man as you ever were. I thanked God I had followed his advice.

Once back in Huttie’s office I swore the oath and was presented with an order to draw my equipment. My uniform would be purchased at my own tailor’s. That list of equipment for a sapper officer was long. Tin hat, whistle, pistol, compass, field glasses and a host of other items. I hoped to God I’d never have to carry them on my back very far across the desert sands. I needn’t have worried. The issuing officer at the base depot went through my list, item by item, putting a cross against most. There’s damned little equipment in the country, he remarked, but we’ll do our best.

Out of some dozens of items their best proved to be a tin hat, a whistle and a revolver lanyard. I was to go forth armed for war with a tin hat that didn’t fit, a tin whistle and a bit of cord to secure a non-existent revolver round my neck. It makes me laugh to think of it now, but I had no thought of laughter then as I drove my car home through the crowded Cairo streets. In very truth the Empire had her back to the wall if there was no more equipment than I had drawn with which to arm her soldiers.

Down to the south of us, at the other end of that wide blue river Nile which divided Cairo, were the Italian colonies of Abyssinia and Eritrea with a reputed garrison of a quarter of a million well-equipped soldiers. To the west of us, across those sandy desert stretches which began by the Pyramids and the Mena House Hotel, were a quarter of a million more. That made half a million well-armed foes whose power-maddened leader was only waiting for the safest moment to jump on our backs. By the trend of the news, that moment could be at most a few weeks ahead.

And what had we in Egypt with which to meet that force? There was popularly supposed to be a fairly strong contingent of British regulars in the Western Desert to hold that vital Western Gate against the enemy, whose first objective would be to cut off the Suez Canal and thus sever the most important of the Empire lines of communication. How strong that force was I did not know, but I could guess from my own experience within the hour that it was miserably equipped.

Against the Italians from the south we seemed to have no defense at all. True there had recently arrived in Egypt a brigade of New Zealanders and in Palestine a division of Australians, grand, upstanding chaps, worthy sons of those stark Anzac fighters of Gallipoli fame. But both New Zealanders and Australians were known to be waiting for equipment, and my judgment told me that they were liable to be waiting a long time for it. I think it was in that black half hour while I drove home with a whistle in my pocket and a bit of flax cord in the tin hat beside me that there first dawned on me the full enormity of the guilt of those men who had governed Britain and the Empire during the last generation and the full enormity of our Empire’s peril. I had wandered in that Empire more than most men and I liked the things it stood for.

3 - THE BALLOON GOES UP

WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS of having taken the oath I had joined my company at Daba, a railway supply depot halfway between the main base at Alexandria and the fortress railhead of Mersa Matruh. There was a native settlement at Daba consisting of a couple of dozen hovels whose dried-mud construction was eked out by a plentiful proportion of rusted metal made of flattening the empty tins in which the Army received its petrol. In the desolation surrounding this civic center were widely dispersed bell tents pitched haphazard over the dun, tussocky wilderness of the surrounding desert. In these lived our personnel. At the time of my advent the company consisted of two other officers and about forty other ranks. Its full establishment of 500 officers and men lay somewhere in a nebulous and uncertain future. The company was only a few days old when I joined, but it was composed entirely of long-service regular personnel and, small as it was, already prided itself on a discipline as rigid as the Brigade of Guards.

I presented myself at the orderly room to report to my commanding officer.

The Company Sergeant Major who had met me at the station preceded me into the orderly room. He saluted the officer commanding with a quiver of the saluting hand which I have noticed on parade when the Guards are trooping the colors or going through some other ceremonial display. The Junior Subaltern reporting for duty, Sir. The C.S.M.’s tightly waxed mustache bristled with the enormity of the occasion. He was a shrewd judge of men, used to sizing them up at a glance and treating them accordingly. He couldn’t have risen to the exacting rank of senior non-commissioned officer of a company without that qualification. But I felt that I had him beat and that he resented it. He could have sized up at a glance any callow young subaltern from the shop. But a gray-haired Junior Subaltern who looked as tough and hard-boiled as did the C.S.M. himself—that was something beyond his ken. Good old Sammy Smart. I haven’t met him for years. He got his commission after the Eritrean show and last I heard of him he was running a railway out Palestine way. Many a time before he left we joked together about that introduction of mine to the — Railway Company, R.E.

The Commanding Officer, Major Isaac Edge, sat behind his six-foot-by-three-foot standard Army table in the tented orderly room and surveyed his Junior Subaltern. Isaac was a slender youth of about twenty-eight years. He gulped once when he saw me. Then he rose to his feet and held out his hand.

A little later in the mess tent I met the second in command, Captain Jerry Duke. Jerry was about the same age as the Major.

I lay low that first meal in mess. In joining a regular outfit I had fully expected the officers to high-hat a rough-and-ready colonial like me, so I was careful to adopt a modest attitude and only spoke when spoken to. When I left the mess to go to my tent Jerry handed me a pamphlet, an official Army communication entitled Hints to Young Officers. I glanced at the title. The first admonition which sprung to my gaze was: Never draw your sword in mess. A glance around showed me two perfectly expressionless faces covertly regarding me. I thought of my sole weapons—tin hat, whistle and revolver lanyard—and burst out laughing. In a moment the three of us were shrieking in chorus. I might as well go on record that I never met two more lovable youngsters than these two seniors of mine. Isaac looked and was clever, a deep thinker and a fine soldier. If his career hadn’t been cut short in the Eritrean campaign he would have made his mark in the Army. Jerry, on the other hand, looked and acted like a fool. He was generally known as The Dissolute Duke. His brain worked along unconventional lines, but it worked overtime. Here and there in these pages he will crop up doing some brilliant stunt in an unconventional way. Last I heard of him he was a Colonel.

Our first problem was to increase the size of our company. Italy might declare war at any minute now. Italian bombers might come droning down the iron thread which, because of our shortage of road vehicles, was our chief line of communication between our base at Alexandria and the frontier fortress of Mersa Matruh. The moment those bombs began to burst along the railway, the Egyptian employees would almost certainly stampede, and our company would have to take over operation and maintenance of the railway. To operate 200 miles of railway with less than our full establishment of 500 men would be an impossibility. We needed 500 men urgently and we had fewer than fifty. We decided to circularize all the other units in the Middle East asking for the transfer of any in their ranks who might have had railway experience in civil life. This, we knew, was asking for trouble, human nature in the Army being much what it is among civilians. I could imagine every Regimental Sergeant Major in the Middle East scanning that circular of ours. Imagine the triumphant bristle of their mustaches as they digested its purport. Transfers requested for all other rank personnel with any experience of railway work. The R.S.M.s’ minds would run rapidly over the rosters of their darlings, the dozen or so incorrigibles, whom even a crack regiment can do nothing but deplore; commanders usually scrutinize with suspicion an offer to transfer personnel. Those R.S.M.s would move heaven and earth to get rid of their darlings. The men could refuse transfer, of course; it was their right. But no Sergeant Major’s darling ever refused transfer yet if someone could be found to have him, on the principal that life under the next Sergeant Major couldn’t possibly be as hellish as life under the last. Any darling would immediately claim a wide experience of railroading if only to get away from the regime which his own delinquencies had made vindictive. The next Sergeant Major might condone unpolished boots or even look the other way from an unshaven face on early morning parade. Such legendary miracles did have some credence in barrack-room gossip, although no one had ever been lucky enough actually to serve under a Sergeant Major like that. Yes, we were asking for trouble with that circular, but we were desperate for men. Trouble came in due course—about 150 troubles in the shape of as many infantrymen. Rather to our surprise some of them actually had worked on railways. Most of them turned out well and made useful platelayers, engine drivers, stokers, guards and stationmasters, giving their officers gray hairs in the process.

Young Isaac Edge was keen on training. All regular officers are. A grand thing training is—before the battle starts. However, training courses in the theory of war are usually under the control of officers who wear out the leather seats of chairs at the base. The mentality at base is apt to lose its sense of proportion, and men are sometimes withdrawn from their units on the eve of battle to take a course in some quite irrelevant subject. I remember once, more than two years later, on the eve of the last battle of El Alamein—we always called it simply Alamein—I was ordered to send my experienced driver away for some course or other. I protested on paper. Back came a reply by dispatch rider that the driver must ‘proceed forthwith as ordered unless I could advance valid reasons for his not doing so. I dashed off my valid reason by the same Don R (dispatch rider) to the effect that my driver had driven me about the Western Desert for two years and I could trust him to fetch up at any point on the map that I showed him, that operations were impending and that I couldn’t be sure of a new driver. Again the Don R’s motorcycle stopped before my dugout. By this time the battle was already bellowing its threats of dissolution and those of us whose duty permitted were sleeping underground. This time the letter adduced that, my reasons were not valid" in that the only valid reason for a man missing a course was for him to produce a doctor’s certificate that he was unfit for duty. In high exasperation I got through by phone to the powers concerned and told them frankly that I was damned if I was going to risk my neck in a desert battle with a green driver who might well drive me by mistake into the enemy’s lines, instead of our own. That settled it. My driver missed his training course, much to his glee, and I heard no more about it.

But in those early days in the Western Desert there was a kind of training of which I highly approved. That was