After the battle of El Alemein Winston Churchill said ``this isn`t the end, it isn`t even the beginning of the end.....but perhaps it is the end of the beginning``.
Thirty years ago when I was in Alexandria, Egypt last .....I wanted to visit the El Alemein battlefield.
It's about an hour west of of Alex....back then the roads were horrible...and everyone I asked said there was nothing out there...no hotels or restaurants and when the bus dropped you off another might come by the next day or maybe not!
I had been backpacking for close to three years by then...and had travellers fatigue...so reluctantly I said ``stuff it``....I wouldn't go...but spent the next thirty years regretting my decision.
Now unbelievably I was getting what most of us don't.....a second chance...this time on my visit to Egypt I was going out there no matter what.
The plan was to hang a week or so at Kim's apartment planning the campaign....I would take the Metro down to the station.....train to Alex....get a hotel room there for a couple of days.....and then somehow go out to El Alemein for the day...back to Alex for another night...then home...away for maybe three or four days...
But I'm also a great believer in waiting around to see what happens...something usually does and something did!
Kim came home from school one afternoon and said the teachers of the history department are planning a day trip to El Alemein on Thursday...and said you can go along if you want.....I wanted. It was 150 Egyptian pounds (about 25 dollars Canadian) we'd leave at seven in the morning from the school and return at seven in the evening.
Travel time to the battle site three and half hours ....three hours at the site...a meal along the way...then home. Perfect!
Kim wanted to go as well....so I froze a big bottle of water overnite...and packed up some sandwiches and trail mix....and of course a couple of tall boy cans of beer.
I was hoping for a nice big travel coach to take us there with seats that kind of flattened out with a dunny in the back of the bus.....no such luck...
What greeted us was a little Mercedes 20 seater with strait back benches and not much leg room....but I wasn't about to complain....I was just glad to be a part of it all.
We of course had a driver....and to my surprise a tour giude....bonus!
Off we go....almost an hour of the three and half hour trip is just getting out of Cairo.....obviously a city of twenty million people is huge and we must have passed a five thousand large and small apartment buildings some finished ...some under construction...some abandoned...just about everyone is Cairo lives in an apartment...all the room they have is a few kilometers on either side of the Nile.
Out we go....so almost another hour on the what the call the Great Desert Highway through a canyon of buidling construction...this the guide knew about....they`re building another city just outside of Cairo to take the pressure off the old city, either side of the hiway for kilometers and kilometers is road and building construction...I don`t know where they get the money....the last I heard Egypt owed about ten billion dollars to just about everybody.
Whoosh we go in our little bus....dodging two and three lanes of slower traffic...out into the desert. But here they Egyptians have discovered how to sink wells thousands of meters into the desert bringing up water they use mainly for irrigation....on either side of the highway for many more K`s vast fields of market gardens....valuable fruit and vegetables for the city.
Then the desert itself...as Doctor Phill says ``there`s a lot of gone between here and there``to the south nothing but desert into the heart of Africa.....
The hiway is not that bad a little bumpy and after narrowly avoiding a hi speed back end crash with semi truck we made our way into El Alemein. Thirty years ago there may have been nothing here...but ``the time`s they are a changing.The upper middle class has discovered the Mediterranian Sea.....the beaches sweep far east and west along the impossibly blue Mediterranean water....so developers are busy putting in hundreds of condos and a few elite resort hotels for the well heeled Egyptian consumer....this is a fairly new development and not much of it is ready yet.....but when it is I think it will be something.
There were actually two battles of Al Alemein.....one in July of 1942...when the vaunted ``Africa Korp``led by yes the notorious``Desert Fox`` General Irwin Rommel...which up to this point had chased the British army across the desert of North Africa so that the British..Australian and New Zealand troops had their backs to the wall....if defeated here the next stop for Rommel would be Cairo and the riches of all Egypt...
But the British who in General Bernard Montgomery ``Monty`` had a new commander and what he lacked in flair he made up for dogged planning.
So that when in July, Rommel threw his army against the Commonwealth forces....they were ready and threw him back.
For the next few months....stalemate.... while Monty built his strength up..the Afrika Korp waited for the inevitable ....running out gas and ammunition and time.
The Allies attacked in late October...and a vicious where no quarter was given and none was expected 13 day battle ensued....when it was over fifty thsouand men were dead or wounded and Rommel had finally been beaten....but not broken.
The first stop our historical tour took us was to the memorial of the fallen German soldier...a beautiful but austere rotunda which when you entered gave way to an open roofed area that allowed the sun to stream in lighting up the crypts ......walls stamped in steel with he names of the thirty thousand poor bastards who were killed in this virtual hell hole of a place.
Kim poses in front of the German "wall of death" the names of German soldiers stamped in bronze and laid in the wall.
Kim found the name of ``Rudolf Kramer``on the wall (her last name) I took a picture of her next to it. The guide though he tried hard...I think he was used to guiding people like Japanese and Koreans who didn`t understand English very well....and when I found out he didn`t have a clue what he was talking about I walked outside and took in the unbelievably hostile environment these soldiers had to fight in...the heat the flies every drop of water gallon of gas every bullet every morsel of food would have had to dragged over thousands of kilometers of desert..as always you have to wonder what it was all for...
Cemetary for Coomonwealth soldiers.
Brent at the memorial to "Commonwealth" soldiers who wee killed in the battle of "El Alemein"
The beautifully tended cemetary to fallen Allied Commonweatlh soldiers.
The next stop...just a few kilometers closer to El Al town....the Commonwealth Memorial..... an achingly beautiful monument to the 13 thousand or so casualties of the battle.
Ten thousand British....22 hundred Aussies and Kiwi`s...the diggers came a long way to die.
About 30 Canadians...all airmen.
There are rows of thousands of graves neatly tended with lots of shade and two huge sand stone monuments all in about twenty acres.
It was the nicest thing I`ve seen in Egypt so far.....some one is taking this thing seriously!
I wandered out to the desert again and looked around..the Med to the North the desert to the south and two armies stuck in between.
I have read about this battle in history books and historical novels probably thirty times....and thought about getting back here for thirty years....now standing here trying to take the nothingness of it all in....imagining always imagining.
We went to the museum where they wanted 20 pounds admission....yeah okay...plus another twenty pounds if you want to take your camera....ya right....I wonder which of
the guards at the gate thought that one up...
The museum and had a display room for each army and what the weapons were like and what the guys wore...like I say it was tough for them.
They had a small scale mock up under glass and and a recording to explain the battle that sounded worse then PA system at the airport...so that was usless.
Brent in front of a German 88 millimeter "howitzer" ......arguabley the most fearsome and feared weapon of the second world war...
Outside was an interesting array of the heavy weapons used by both sides...all the tanks including the dreaded German 88 millimeter canon...perhaps the most fearsome weapon of the war.....it was the first time I`d ever seen one....that in itself was worth it....
That was basically the end of the tour we climbed back into at this point the fly blown bus....and cracked open a cold tall boy...
We stopped into one of the crazy Egyptian hiway rest stops for a meal....that was bad but really expensive and the long journey back home.
We got back to the school at seven....which fortunately is only a couple of blocks from our drinking club....where we retired for a few cool ones...and congratulated ourselves on a day
endured for the right to cross another one off the bucket list.....but for me it was actually a lot more.
*****
``Before the battle of El Alemein we didn`t have a victory....after the battle we never had a defeat``....Winston Churchill
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The next installment: Cairo Drinking Clubs and the one eyed Nubian whore.
Wow good story Brent. OD
ReplyDeleteEnjoying your blog, especially the "Akhmed" references.
ReplyDeleteMaurie