'You didn’t have time to get frightened'

“Now this is not the end; it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

- British Prime Minister Winston Churchill

John Wade turns 100 in November, but he remembers the sound of 1,000 guns going off at the start of the Second Battle of El Alamein as if it was yesterday.

“When the big push came on there, the guns started at 10 o’clock at night, and they all went bang,” Wade said. “That’s a lot of guns, and a lot of noise, I can tell you … You didn’t have time to get frightened. You just did what you had to do automatically.”

The West Australian farmer was one of 23 veterans who visited the Australian War Memorial and attended a Last Post ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of the battle.

Named after a small railway stop in Egypt’s Western Desert, the Second Battle of El Alamein proved a watershed in the war in North Africa and significantly boosted Allied morale. Fighting began in the El Alamein area in July 1942 when the British Eighth Army, which included the Australian 9^th Division, managed to stop Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s advance.

On the night of 23 October 1942, a massive artillery barrage heralded the beginning of the main Allied offensive. Allied infantry successfully captured most of their objectives, however the tanks were unable to follow through. With the Axis forces holding their lines, Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery ordered the Australians of the 9th Division to switch their attack northward. A week of fierce fighting followed, with the Australians grinding their way over well-defended enemy positions, weakening German lines and preventing Rommel’s army from taking control of Egypt and the Suez Canal.

“1942 was a year of turning points in several of the theatres and El Alamein was the main turning point in the North African theatre,” Memorial historian Craig Tibbitts said.

“From that point onwards the Allies forced the Axis forces - the Germans and the Italians - back, and they never really were able to regain the initiative.

“Once the Allies realised they had decisively beaten Rommel’s forces, and that they were in full retreat, they realised it was a significant victory, and it looked like the Allies had finally turned the tables on him. They could see a path to ultimate victory, but there was still a long way to go, and more fighting to do in Europe.”

But the success at El Alamein was not without cost. In the battles there between July and November, the Eighth Army suffered 30,000 casualties, of which the 9th Division suffered 5,500 casualties, with more than 1,200 dead.

“Of any of the battles, it’s one of the highest for casualties,” Tibbitts said. “The second battle went for almost two weeks, so it was pretty gruelling, intense, continual fighting, and that’s why the casualties are high … In many ways it was like a First World War Western Front battle. It was a bit of slugging match really.

“Montgomery saw the 9th Division as a very important part of his Eighth Army because they were a good experienced fighting division and they were successful. He knew they’d bore the brunt of that fighting, particularly in late October and November, and he was very appreciative.

“They were already highly regarded after Tobruk, and they enhanced that reputation at El Alamein.”

Montgomery paid special tribute to the fallen of the 9th Division when he visited their graves in El Alamein cemetery on the 25th anniversary of the battle.

He later told a friend: “The more I think back, the more I realise that winning was only made possible by the bravery of the 9th Australian Division in holding the road against counter-attacks and slowly pushing forward despite increasing casualties. I do not know of any [other] Allied Division who could have done it.”

The son of dairy farming parents, Wade had been working as a truck driver in the gold fields north of Kalgoorlie before enlisting during the Second World War.

“I enlisted in a place called Leonora. They came around with a recruitment drive, so 25 of us joined up,” he said. “Why? Patriotism, or whatever you like to call it, I suppose.”

Many were allocated to the 8th Division and were sent to Singapore before being taken prisoner. But Wade was sent to the Middle East, spending a number of months in Syria as part of the occupying force following its liberation from the Vichy French forces. After serving in Syria, Wade was sent to Tobruk as a reinforcement, and later to Palestine for training before the battle of El Alamein.

“We were doing exercises when the word came through that Rommel was headed down to Cairo again, and that’s where we met him, at El Alamein,” he said. “He used to play the fool up and down that bloody desert.”

Wade served in the 2/28th Infantry Battalion as a gun layer on an anti-tank gun, tasked with knocking out enemy tanks. He was wounded in action during the attack on Ruin Ridge in the July battle and was lucky not to be taken prisoner.

“They lost the battalion I was in and they were all taken prisoner,” Wade said. “I was in the 63rd British General Hospital in Cairo from wounds from the first attack on Ruin Ridge, so I was lucky … I got a few little scratches, and then it was back into the fray again.”

Wade was later promoted to corporal and went on to serve in New Guinea, fighting in the actions at Lae and Finschhafen.

“There were good times and the bad, but life’s full of them isn’t it?” he said. “No matter whether you’re in civilian life or army life, there are the ups, and downs.”

This is the first in a series of articles with El Alamein veterans.