Remembering: The Seven Nation Army

At our recent Australia and NZ SitaWare User Forum, Dr Ian Langford, DSC and Bars, delivered an excellent Remembrance Day address to the 80-or-so guests. He has kindly agreed to allow us to share his remarks.

Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Friends, I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land upon which we meet, the Ngunnawal and pay my respects to the past, present and emerging leaders today.

I’m delighted to be here at the Hotel Kurrajong today to talk about one of the pre-eminent battles of the Second World War, on its 80th anniversary, the battle of El Alamein which took place throughout the period 1-27 July and 23 October- 4 November 1942. In so doing, I also want to recognise and express my appreciation for what you all do right now to contribute to a safer planet; it is no small thing, when I think about current real world events, that companies such as Raytheon, Lockheed, Systematic and others are effectively the difference between victory and defeat in Ukraine right now. The quality of material and technology that you all produce is the current critical factor in the current fight against a totalitarian state and the criminal intent that it harbours. Just like in 1942, the arc of allied victory in Europe can in part be traced by a nation’s capacity to wage war through its defence industry, to effectively make war. Today is no different.

El Alamein is one of the great battles of the Second World War and is frequently described as a turning-point of the European conflict. Critically, losses in excess of 50% of Rommel’s 110 000 strong army guaranteed the landing of American forces in North Africa as part of Operation Torch paving the way for their ultimate entry into Europe and subsequent destruction of Germany in three years later. Australians fought in the battle, alongside six other nations, including Greeks, New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, Free French and British forces. Upon delivering the traditional Prime Minister's address to the Lord Mayor's Banquet at the Mansion House on 10 November 1942, Winston Churchill spoke at length about the recent victory of the 'men of British blood' culminating in the famous claim that: 'This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.' I should note that these lines also include a classic amendment, demonstrating both the language and rhythm of Churchill’s speeches. He added by hand to the original final draft the characteristic declaration, 'I have not become the King's Minister in order to promote the liquidation of the British Empire. For that task someone else will have to be found.'?This important moment gave the Allies their first decisive victory and Churchill’s expressed public confidence in the war effort that followed was critical to sustaining British solidarity in their darkest hour.

Australians constituted about 10% of the 8th Army's strength, and suffered about 22% of total casualties in the battle. More than 1200 Australians were killed at Alamein across both battles, in addition to the earlier losses of around 750 personnel killed throughout the 1941 defence of Tobruk.

The purpose of my speech today is not merely to commemorate this significant moment in Australian and Allied military history. It is to also think about the battle in the context of those lessons and insights that still matter today. One only needs to read the daily newspaper to understand that warfare remains a tool of foreign policy. Indeed, while it seems to be the case that large scale conventional war briefly went out of fashion at the end of the Cold War, it is now obvious to one and all that this logic was pure folly, or as eminent American Lawrence Summers recently noted that “the holiday from history is now over”. For this reason Alamein provides unique insights into future warfare and its inherent complexity as well as the importance of the human aspects of war and conflict.

We see parallels in Ukraine today. The wall-to-wall coverage of the Russo-Ukraine War in the world’s media has brought home the significance of conventional warfare as a tool of statecraft. As an aside, it seems as if anyone who has as much as sniffed a military uniform now has an opinion on the conflict, as broadcasters seek out more and more obscure “experts” and allow them to vent their worthy opinions via the airwaves. Yesterday’s COVID expert is today’s key commentator on the War.

What is important, notwithstanding the mix of observations, opinions and insights are some of the re-affirming lessons from the history of warfare, demonstrated both at El Alamein and in Ukraine. I’ll offer some views on this in the latter part of my talk today, but first to the battle at-hand. As is almost always the case, history is highly instructive and in the context of modern warfare, El Alamein remains an enduring example of the importance of allies and joint warfare, combined arms teams, military technology, logistics in war and operational manoeuvre.

El Alamein is located 240 kilometres west of Cairo. In 1942 the Allies had many troubles in Europe. Germany had launched Operation Barbarossa; German U-boats were dominating in the Battle of the Atlantic and it seemed like western Europe was fully in Nazi Germany’s grip. North Africa was vital to the Allied war effort, for if lost they would lose one of the last ways to get supplies across from the United States into Europe. Additionally, the potential loss of the Suez by the allies would have also given the Germans unlimited access to the oil reserves of the Middle East, further undermining the allied ability to fight in Europe.

The first battle was part of the Western Desert Campaign and was commanded by General Claude Auchinleck against Axis forces consisting of German and Italian units known as the Panzer Army Africa (Afrika Corps) led by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. This first battle would result in a tactical stalemate in that it halted the advance by the Axis powers towards Cairo and would set the stage for the second and more decisive battle which my comments will focus on today.

The second battle, commanded by Bernard Law Montgomery (incidentally he was born and partly raised in Tasmania), began by a focus on deliberate planning, concentration of forces, improvement to morale and effective training. Importantly, was the attention given to integration and the standardisation of command and control protocols across what was now Montgomery’s ‘seven nation Army’ of more than 150 000 allied personnel. To quote Monty, “I have no intention of launching our great attack until we are completely ready; there will be pressure from many quarters to attack soon. I will not attack until we are ready and you can rest assured on that point.” Note that he also said in the same speech, “I understand there are people who often think I am slightly mad; so often that I now regard it as rather a compliment. All I have to say to that is that if I am slightly mad, there are a large number of people I could name who are raving lunatics!”

Having now assembled and prepared his powerful multinational force, Montgomery launched his offensive on the night of 23 October with a massive artillery?barrage. In the early hours of 24 October, British infantry and engineers began Operation Lightfoot, a painstaking and hazardous process of creating two channels in the minefields through which the armoured forces were to advance. To again quote our illustrious commander, “here starts our great offensive; it will be the beginning of a campaign which will hit Rommel and his Army for six right out of Africa.”

The allies then established a forward line from where the Axis forces would be engaged and destroyed. This battle of attrition, euphemistically termed ‘crumbling’ by Montgomery, involved brutal close-quarter fighting in which the soldiers were tested in a maelstrom of heat, noise and intense combat action. During this phase, Axis counter-attacks were beaten off despite the allied offensive efforts being severely hampered as armoured forces were held up in minefield breaches, suffering punishing losses from Rommel’s anti-tank guns as a result.

Despite challenges and set-backs, Montgomery maintained his offensive momentum. He exploited his superior combat power and pressed home the attrition of enemy forces by launching follow-on diversionary attacks intended to commit Axis reserves. His final attack, codenamed Operation Supercharge, on 1-2 November, broke through the Axis lines on 4 November. Allied forces subsequently pursued Rommel back into Libya and Tunisia. At that point, victory to Montgomery was assured.

From an Australian perspective, the Australian 9th Division, led by Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead, played a key role in this battle, to some degree, the decisive battle in terms of forcing Rommel to commit his armoured main effort and reserve forces, mainly comprising German Panzer Divisions. ?

Critically, during the night of the 23rd of October, Montgomery, worried that his offensive was becoming bogged down changed his main effort from the drive west by ordering the 9th Division to switch their attack direction northward. After completing this complex change of direction, the Australians ultimately ground their way forward over well-developed enemy positions, rendering German positions untenable. Their gains so worried Rommel that he diverted his strongest Panzer units to stop them. Thompson’s Post, the Fig Orchard, the Blockhouse and the Saucer became an inferno of fire and steel and synonymous with this battle as the Division fought and won intense infantry and armoured battles supported by over 80 of the 880 artillery guns in action at that time.

With Rommel’s attention firmly on the Australians in the north, his line weakened further south, and, as a result of the Australians actions, on 2 November British tanks broke through and collapsed the German line. The Axis suffered crippling losses and Rommel was forced to order a general withdrawal or face total annihilation.

According to Australian infantryman Ken Pantlin, a veteran of the battle “if it hadn’t been for the fighting by the Australian battalions on the coast that forced the break-out,” the battle would have been lost. Reflecting on the battle, Montgomery assessed that Rommel hadn’t counted on the tenacity of the Australian infantry which had initially punched through the German line and secured a breach. After that, in Pte. Pantlin’s words, “the tanks went through and that was it, because it was the Australian 9th Division battalions that did the hard slogging.”?Monty would go onto state: “one of the proudest achievements of my career was to have commanded the 9th Australian Division. I could not have won the battle of El Alamein in twelve days without that magnificent force.” Such was the contribution of these units is partly the reason why the battle is such a storied component of the Australian history.

Turing to current events now, and we are about 9 months into Russia’s 2022 conventional force invasion of Ukraine. Throughout the world and among our partners and allies, countless teams are forming to study the tactical and operational lessons from this recent act of Russian aggression. Those teams will focus on how Russia fights a conventional war, its new tactics, its operational approaches, and how it integrates its equipment. These lessons will take time to develop and be understood. In my opinion however, we need not wait that long. A common maxim in the military is that war’s nature is enduring, and its character is constantly evolving. To that extent, my sense is that we don’t need to wait for this conflict to end in order to able to derive lessons and insights; history is our guide, and to this degree, the anniversary of the battle of El Alamein demonstrates an opportunity to consider the current conflict in Ukraine. Events in 1942 and 2022 have parallels which militaries and those who support militaries would be well served by paying attention. Allow me an indulgence to highlight what I think both military actions provide insight into.

The first of these is that numbers count. “the first with the most” may well be the fundamental?diktat?in warfare, and victory usually – though not always – goes to the big battalions. Despite taking a battering from the Ukrainians, the Russians are still able to continue because of their overwhelming superiority in numbers of men and materiel. They do two things well: a capacity to literally vomit artillery and manpower greater than anyone else in Europe. I’m not giving them a compliment, rather, I’m pointing to the obvious point that their capacity to sustain their war effort is critical to their capabilities overall. It appears that the Europeans have also taken notice of this, Poland, for example, a NATO country, once again opposite a resurgent Russia is now executing a plan to grow their Army from 143 000 to over 300 000 in the next five years. Imagine a similar direction here in Australia, to double the fulltime Army from 32000 to 64000 by 2027; do you think we could do it?

And it is not just manpower that is vital in this regard. Materiel sustainment as a critical factor applies equally at El Alamein as it does in Ukraine; Montgomery had access to an uninterrupted supply chain and drew on his superior on-call manpower and equipment as a constant strength, underpinned by enigma-informed intelligence; Rommel had none of this and suffered accordingly. In Ukraine, there has been frustration in that home forces can only access 5-6,000 Soviet-era 122/152mm rounds per day, in contrast to 8000+ Soviet era shells raining down from the Russians, exclusively manufactured inside their home country. As a result, Ukraine relies heavily on foreign military aid in order to sustain their offensive actions; indeed in the case of this conflict, defence industry perhaps matters more to Ukraine and its war effort than perhaps the solidarity of non-combatant European states. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin to some degree, have done more to damage Russian Forces than Germany or France; this is not to suggest their intentions are not genuine, it just rather speaks to the critical role of access to materiel in moments of national emergency. If I were to extrapolate the broader point, then it is also clear that capital reserves of essential equipment is fundamental to maintaining tempo in modern warfare; note critically the resupply of 300+ Sherman tanks prior to the second battle of Alamein. Reassuringly perhaps, it is worth noting that current US capital stock of existing military equipment is almost twice to four times the size of its nearest competitor- and you can guess who that is.

The next lesson from both conflicts is the need to be able to secure air superiority, even if only temporarily in time and space. At El Alamein, it was the RAF who firstly nullified the Luftwaffe and then harassed German supply lines in ways that gave Montgomery a decisive advantage. In the case of Ukraine, it will be one of the enduring questions of this conflict why Russia seemingly ignored its own doctrine and forwent the need to establish air superiority prior to launching operations in late February; in both conflicts it remains true to state that: he who controls the air controls the battlefield. Incidentally, the last time Australians were attacked from the air was in the Korea conflict on 27 April 1953. Defence from the air is a critical component of joint warfare and we would be wise never to forget it. Not now, not ever. This is especially so given the novel and deadly evolution of the threat as we see it in the form of Unmanned Aerial Systems and their ability to defeat air defence systems in Ukraine. I suspect our Army will be tested on its air defence systems in the next conflict; there will be no excuse if we are not ready.

The next major lesson is the need to train and operate combined arms formations as a function of joint warfare. Worth noting the comment from Auckinleck regarding Dominion troops at the end of the end of the first battle. In a letter to Field Marshal Brooke on 25 July, he complained that despite their ‘magnificent material’ they were ‘very hard to teach’.:

‘They are apt to think that once they have been in battle they have little to learn and are on the whole suspicious of any attempts to teach them. Some of them say quite openly that we are incompetent ourselves and so unfit to teach them or anyone else. They are not alone in this, of course.

We understand that the battle preparation conducted, at the insistence of Montgomery, is one of the decisive features of his command. Imagine shifting a Divisional axis of advance, post-H from west to north as the 9th Division indeed had to do. Without battle drills, rehearsal, doctrine and training, this could be disastrous. In the context of joint warfare, it doesn’t matter whether you are Australian, British, American or Russian, what matters most is that the components of these organisations – tanks, infantry, artillery, engineers, air defence, medical staff, logistics and so on – must have trained together and must be familiar with each other before being thrown into operations for real. A current example is best demonstrated by earlier Russian attempts to secure Kyiv, or at their more recent attempts to cross the Siverskyi Donets River in the Donbas; you do wonder whether they have ever attempted such operations before in training.

We have also been reminded of the very real requirement for deception and camouflage from the strategic down to the tactical level. People sometimes talk about the “transparent battlefield” and this at first might seem to have been borne out in the current war. At the beginning, even before the Russian invasion of February 24th, satellite imagery was showing the build-up of forces both in Russia and in Belarus. It was clear then that Putin’s “special operation” was on the cards.

The same satellites then followed the course of the unfolding invasion, as did a bourgeoning number of intelligence gathering airborne platforms from NATO and other western allies, provided accurate and much-needed information and intelligence for Ukraine. Add to this the all-seeing drones and UAVs which constantly patrol the battlefield and it would seem that there is no longer any hiding place for troops manoeuvring on the ground.

Well yes, but not completely so. El Alamein demonstrated the enduring benefits of deception: think of tanks disguised as lorries pre-battle, misinformation campaigns as well as feints and ancillary manoeuvres prior to H-Hour. These actions demonstrated subterfuge and deception on a grand scale. The question, from both Alamein and Ukraine is: do we practice it nowadays? While nobody has started shooting satellites down, we know it can be done. Airborne sensors can be jammed and deceived. Camouflage is still an effective counter-measure, thermal imaging and IR notwithstanding, and decoy or spoof equipment and positions also can assist in the development of operational level deception. And it is also true that Electronic Warfare has been critical in both theatres both for the purposes of deception as well as an aid to targeting and neutralising command and control networks.

And while we are on it, let’s now talk about command and control. Montgomery’s insistence on standardisation and what we now term as ‘interoperability’ is just as critical today as it was in 1942. Consider the requirement in 1942 to be able to shift the main axis of assault in contact during a multi-divisional, corps-level manoeuvre. Now take that complexity and apply to today. While the technologies are different, the challenge largely remains the same. In the case of the current conflict, I would submit that Ukrainian access to, and use of the Starlink satellite communications system has allowed their forces to be able to effectively operate on a distributed, low power, secure modular network that has enabled command, control, intelligence logistics and targeting systems to work effectively in part by avoiding easy detection and the massive Russian artillery response that typically follows once a system starts actively emitting. Thinking about our own situation in the West as it applies to C4I, the real-world issues of secure cloud, operational security, access to open source material, as well as the active employment of misinformation only underscores the importance of effective command and control networks that are essential for operational success in modern war. I would also add that these systems must be comprehensive, easy-to-use, ?support military and civilian data exchange standards and be open in architecture if they are to be easily adopted and employed by militaries and coalitions that have the added pressure of receiving, staging, on-forwarding and integrating with foreign and indigenous forces of all stripes. An integrated C4I system that allows all levels of command to have shared situational awareness and coordinate operational actions is the same holy grail from El Alamein that we are pursue today.

My last insight relates to the importance again of combined arms teams. In both El Alamein and today, it is obvious that if there's any weak link in a combined arms team, the whole system is likely to fail, and so you need a complete system if you are going to be successful in war. Rommel’s systemic weakness was a lack of effective air power, reliable logistics, and accurate intelligence; Putin’s weakness is a lack of effective air power, reliable logistics, and actionable intelligence. Funny that. War’s nature tells us that at some stage, forces will need to compel their opponents through close combat and it is at this point that combined arms systems will be tested to the extreme. The aim is to make it less vulnerable to disintegration and destruction than the other side.

The above list of lessons ?learned and historical insights is hardly exhaustive and I suspect others will be able to add from their own areas of expertise. For the western allies however, Ukraine has come as a timely wake-up call to what matters in military capability, especially as fiscal pressures reduce the size and scope of military expenditure and the size of forces to an all-time low.?The time to reverse the slide is now and in my assessment, responsible governments have understood this and are in the process of remediation. The obvious challenge of course, is to do so in a timely and somewhat urgent manner.

Ladies and Gentlemen in conclusion, the 80th anniversary Battle of El Alamein is an important moment to reflect on the service and sacrifice of those upon who we owe so much. I thank them for their service. The same applies to you in the same spirit of selflessness and the way you serve in the capacity in which you offer it. We live in dangerous times. Good people need to stand up for what is right; resist appeasement, be principled and defeat evil. Drawing on the lessons of the past and the insights of the present is critical if we are to be anticipate and ultimately prevail in whatever next comes our way.

11 o’clock…