In a recent video I happen to mention an extraordinary
action that took place during World War Two in which a Lieutenant Colonel,
a Lieutenant and a Sergeant using just one anti-tank gun were able to do an
extraordinary amount of damage to the enemy. And in this video (which has been sponsored by
The Great Courses Plus, but more of that later), I'm going to expand on this extraordinary action that took
place in North Africa as part of the Second Battle of El Alamein. If you want to look it up, it's sometimes
known as the action of Kidney Ridge, or more commonly it's known as the Snipe action. And the hero of this story is one
Lieutenant Colonel Victor Buller Turner. He had a tough act to follow, his brother who'd won the
Victoria Cross in World War One, alas posthumously. Victor himself became an officer in 1918,
too late to do much in World War One. But in World War Two he came to the fore. And on this day, which is the 26th of October, 1942,
the fourth day of the ... Second Battle of El Alamein ... If someone just says the "Battle of El Alamein",
they mean the Second Battle of El Alamein, which is far more significant than the first.
It was a big turning point in the war. The Commonwealth forces had fought back and forth,
and back and forth, across the North African desert, but this was the time when they finally ... at least
the beginning of the end for the Axis forces. Churchill himself said, "Before El Alamein we
never had a victory, after, we never had a defeat." That's not exactly true. But if you look at the graph of things going quite well, badly, quite well, badly,
there was a definite downward trend. And then you had El Alamein and then things ... So I think What Churchill was talking about was
... the best-fit lines of the two parts of that graph, with El Alamein at the trough. So. Montgomery, General Montgomery, is now in command.
A lot people will say that he wasn't really the architect of the defeat of Rommel, and that he was just the lucky guy
who happened to be holding the baton, the guy who just happened to be in command when the inevitable final victory of
the Commonwealth forces took place, his predecessors having
done all the groundwork for him. But anyway, that's not what this video is about. So ... our man is being briefed about what
he's going to have to do, and it's a tough brief. And he realises that this might be a bit of a death-or-glory,
down-to-the-last-man-and-the-last- shell operation. And others seem to be in agreement,
this could be not far off a suicide mission. But well, it was the task that he was given,
so he was going to do his best. He was ... commander of the ... Prince Consort's Own
(I always find that difficult to say), Rifle Brigade, 2nd Battalion. Or "2 RB" as he
normally referred to it for short in his reports. So, you need to know a little bit about the Battle of
El Alamein, which I do mention some of my other videos, including one about military deceptions. (No, sorry, I should point over there,
shouldn't I? I always get it wrong because I'm the wrong way around, you see,
in the monitor. Anyway.) In order to get forward, the large forces attacking in the
north had to get through ... a huge enemy minefield. And the plan was to do this by creating just thin lanes, and Turner's Battalion was given the
task of keeping one of these lanes open. And that's what they'd been doing all night.
There was an intense artillery barrage, and people had gone forwards to clear these paths, and then they had to get queues of troops and
equipment through these narrow lanes, all at night. And of course all under
enemy observation and fire. So it was a very difficult task, but they had managed it, they'd created the lanes and they'd got
a very large number of forces forward. But it's night-time, and people are
not really sure where everyone is. And Turner himself was crucially not sure where an
armoured brigade that was meant to be supporting him was, or the 51st Highlanders, a very significant
and experienced division of the British army that had done a lot of fighting in North Africa. They were meant to be
around somewhere, doing something. But where exactly were they, doing exactly what?
What were their orders? And he was just not sure enough of his positions.
So he sent his second in command to get the guys moving forward,
bring them up to the start line, whilst he went to Brigade HQ to find out
exactly what the ... blinking flip was going on. And it seems that when he came back
he was really not all that much the wiser. But he was told that there'd be a creeping barrage
that would give him cover going forwards. And that he was to follow that creeping barrage. It was meant to go along a particular line, at a
particular angle and it didn't, it was over 30 degrees out. But his orders were to just go
and follow it anyway. So he did that. And he could hardly see a thing,
because not only is it at night, but also, in his words, the top 18 inches of soil
were fine dust that just got stirred up by his passing column into a pea-souper fog,
so you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. And he was trying to read the odometer,
the ... clock as we call them in Britain, that measures distance of his jeep, and ... use that as a gauge
for how far they had gone along the compass bearing. And so he was supposed to be at this
position that was code named "Snipe". Now there's a lot of shooting in this action, and you may think
that Snipe as in "sniper", as in you're meant to be shooting. And that the ... word sniper means
a man in the army who camouflages himself, waits for a long time, and then makes
very difficult long distance shots. Actually no. That snipe was simply the water bird,
a waterfowl, it's a type of thing with a long bill, it's a wader. It lives in marshes and amongst reeds and so forth.
And they are notoriously difficult to hunt. So people would hunt them for sport. So if you were
a sniper, someone who was capable of hunting snipe, then you are a man to be reckoned with. Because you have to
be very good at camouflage, you have to be very patient, and they fly very erratically, they're very difficult to hit,
so you have to be a damned fine shot. And indeed I recently read that in the
American Scouting Association they used to get boy scouts to go on snipe hunts,
knowing that they would almost certainly fail. But it was a rite of passage. It's a character building thing
to try to do something that's extraordinarily difficult. And experiencing failure, ... it's
character building, so do that a bit. So there you go. Ah, there's a wonderful quote, "He's so wet, you could shoot snipe off him."
I love that, Anthony Powell, "A Question of Upbringing". I've adapted it slightly. "Wet? Is he wet?
Swans keep landing on him by mistake." I suppose I'm going to have to explain now
what wet means, as well as sniper. So a sniper is actually someone who hunts snipe,
which you do for sport because they're not for eating or whatever.
They're not a horrendous pest or hazard. There are not gangs of snipe terrorising
the world that have to be wiped out. No, you do it because it's difficult. And if you are wet it means ...
you dampen the enthusiasm of others. So if you've got some firebrand who says, "Hey everyone, come on, we could do this thing.
Let's all go. It'll be great! What do you say?" You get the wet guy who says, "Oh, well, I'm not sure. I don't think
we're really supposed to do that. And by the time we get there
it might be quite late, and there might not be time to do all that much,
and it's very expensive, and ... " "Oh well, don't be so wet!"
You see that's ... the wet person. Although, you know, I could say, "Don't be wet."
But maybe this world needs wet people, otherwise, it'll be run by the firebrands and tinderboxes
and we'll all be on fire. Anyway a bit of a digression there. So Snipe is a code name based on a bird. So there was another feature in the area that was
called Woodcock, for instance, that was to the north. But was he at Snipe? He couldn't really see a lot.
His navigation was difficult. They were being attacked, they were being bombed
by the Luftwaffe and they suffered some losses. Two of the portée lorries crashed into each other.
And they were carrying anti-tank guns, so that was two of his guns that he wasn't
going to be able to get forward into position. He had a motorised battalion, and this
was not many men, it was only about 90 men. But he had a lot of firepower, crucially he had
a full complement of 16 6-pounder anti-tank guns, (these were now the latest anti-tank gun
being used by the British army), as well as Vickers guns, and he had a couple of scout
platoons of carriers armed with Bren guns and the like. Carriers as in Universal Carriers,
little armoured fully-tracked vehicles. So there are not very many men, but this
little unit had a lot of firepower, a lot of punch. And attached to it were another 11 anti-tank guns
and some sappers of the Royal Artillery. And his task was to go forward,
find this area, Snipe, and fortify it. Turn it into an all-round
island of defence, which would then act as what they called a
"pivot of manoeuvre" for a tank attack. Which would then use it as a sort of
safeguard on one flank, and sweep round and ... win! That was the plan. But they didn't realise quite how many
enemy tanks ... there were in the area. Anyway, after he'd gone about a mile and a half
he reckoned, in roughly the right direction, he spoke to ... his OP, that's what he referred to. Which I think stands for Observation Post, it's what
most people would call a Forward Observation Officer. A man who's in contact with the Royal Artillery.
And they are presumably zeroed in somewhere, they know where they are on the map,
and so they can accurately fire at Snipe. ... If they know exactly where they are,
they can look at where Snipe is meant to be, and do the calculations
and fire one smoke round to land on Snipe. And this he ordered, and the smoke round
went off only about 300 yards from him so he thought, "That's good enough." So he got his Very pistol, a little flare launcher, put in the
colour of flare which signals success, and fired that off. So he had signalled (this was shortly after midnight),
"Success, I have found where I'm supposed to be." It later turned out that he probably was about
1,000 yards out of where he was meant to be. But what the hell, you could say that
wherever he was, that was Snipe. So what was it? Well, it was a feature about
1,000 yards by about 350, roughly kidney shaped, that was made up of very soft sand. And it had
been used by the Germans as an engineering dump and it had a bunker, which they converted
into ... an HQ point, that was fairly useful. And it was very easy to dig in,
because it was soft sand. But it didn't afford a great deal of cover. There was
soft cover, the camelthorn bushes and tamarisk tussocks. But there was no hard cover, there were no great hard
rocks to hide behind, or big ridges and folds of the land. It's described as a depression. But you can see from this sketch map that he deployed
his anti-tank guns pointing in all different directions you see. So ... there aren't many anti-tank guns
pointing in any one direction, because this had to be an all-round defence. But there are ones deployed quite near the centre of
that depression, and 6-pounders are not huge guns. ... This is a 6-pounder, it's not a tall gun by any means.
And they're digging them in, down, so ... if you dug in a 6-pounder and you can still see
from the middle of a depression out of that depression, it's not much of a depression. He does in his accounts say that the "deluge"
(that's the word he uses), of enemy direct fire mainly passed over their heads,
so they were just a little bit down. But crucially, very well camouflaged. And they were able
to dig in quite quickly because of this soft sand. So that was all good. On the other hand,
this soft sand was very difficult to move around in. It was very soft and
you kicked up great clouds of dust. So there you are, staggering around in this soft sand
trying to avoid thorn bushes and the like, and you were a very conspicuous target to the enemy. You couldn't move stealthily at
any speed through this landscape. But that's what they had,
so that's what they made use of. So they created their pivot of manoeuvre. And pretty soon they heard the chug-chug-chug
of enemy tanks out there in the darkness somewhere. Now there was a scouting mission sent out,
... C Company's carriers went out and they encountered ... about 15 Italians
who promptly surrendered. And then after bit they met 150 ... Italians
who it seems also were very keen on surrendering. But they were quite far out, they were about
a mile and a half away from their own lines, and they are just a few carriers,
so they had to say, "I'm terribly sorry, but we just don't have the facilities
to accommodate you all. But do try again later." And then they carried on scouting, taking their
first smaller number of prisoners with them. And they came across what they referred to as a "leaguer",
I think most people would say "laager" these days, but anyway a big military carpark of German vehicles,
including lots of tanks, that they then started shooting up
with their Bren guns. After a while the Germans got annoyed
and started shooting back. And they were forced to withdraw
because they set fire to a number of lorries, which then lit up the landscape with the blaze.
So then their positions were revealed to the Germans and the return fire started getting a bit accurate,
so they got out of there. And it seems that some of the Italian prisoners,
I'm afraid to say, got caught in the crossfire and shot. Anyway, they withdrew but they
reported their findings to Turner, who realised, "Oh, there are really quite a lot of German tanks
really quite close to us then. That's not good news." Anyway, these tanks came on in the darkness,
about 20 of them or so, in line ahead. And I haven't found any source that
identifies what sort of tank they were. Presumably it was really dark, nobody could see.
So tanks of some sort, about 20 of them, in ... line ahead. And they held fire until
the enemy was 30 yards away. ... Can you imagine: a column of tanks coming ... at you, you've got an anti-tank gun and you hold fire. And obviously darkness is one of the reasons, you don't want to fire too early on
and miss in the darkness. But 30 yards. I would have thought you could aim
just using your ears at that distance. Anyway, they opened fire. Boom!
The first tank immediately ... bursts into flames, which presumably again
illuminates the landscape a bit. They are then firing at about 200 yards,
they knock out a self-propelled gun. I think most of the self-propelled guns were 38(t)
chassis with captured Russian guns mounted on them. And they saw off this attack in the darkness. So someone bailed out of that lead tank
and found a trench to get into, and for the next several hours was
sniping through the night at their position. Until one of the ... British riflemen crawled out there
and silenced him with a grenade. So that was the first attack in the darkness. But it was to be the first of many. They were already down to just 17 anti-tank guns. Not
because they'd had anti-tank guns knocked out in action, ... 27 anti-tank guns had set out,
19 had now got to the position and dug in. The others were lost, crashed into
each other in the darkness ... were somewhere else. So with these military operations you've got
to factor in that a lot of forces ... so they've lost about a third of their anti-tank guns
already, before a shot has actually been fired. Just getting into position in difficult terrain,
in darkness, with inadequate navigation, meant that they'd lost a third of their forces
before they'd even fired a shot. So. The carriers realised that they were too vulnerable out there,
and they pulled back into the position and joined everyone else. He's got Vickers machine guns supporting him
and some rifleman too, but not very many. The anti-tank guns are the
principal defence of Snipe. ... Now, it took them about three and a half hours to
unload all the lorries. Most of the lorries then departed because when the light was to come in the morning
the lorries would have been hideously vulnerable. Not armoured, and would have
stuck out like sore thumbs. And so they almost all got out, leaving them in this island where
they would not be supplied for quite some while. So they would have to last ... on what ammunition and
food and water they had. And information of course. And they had with them just the one OP,
just the one Forward Observation Officer. In the accounts of this action I read again and again
of tanks withdrawing not completely out of range, nor completely out of sight,
but just to hull-down positions a way off. And it seems that they
felt themselves reasonably safe. Anyway that's what the enemy did, they withdrew to
some hull-down positions some way off in the darkness. And there they were definitely safe. And then the moon came out
and more observations were made, and they could see that there
are really quite a lot of German, particularly German, but also Italian, vehicles
to the north which was somewhat disconcerting. The sun came up around 06:00 hours
and they took stock of their position, and realised that a lot of their
guns were not very well sited. They were in horribly exposed positions, and were
going to have to be moved and dug in somewhere else. So they got on with that pretty quickly. The enemy, meanwhile, were
observed on the move to the north. And it seems that the enemy had not spotted them,
hadn't really worked out where they were. They were therefore presumably pretty well camouflaged,
and they opened fire with their anti-tank guns. And at this point they knocked out 6 enemy tanks,
damaged a couple more. And then there was another action on the
other side of Snipe firing off in the other direction, and they managed to knock out another 8 tanks,
and maybe 2 self-propelled guns, and so that was quite a feather in the cap. And so now their position is
surrounded by burning wrecks of the enemy. This is quite significant
because they then started getting shelled, and some of this fire was coming from the Germans,
but they realised after a bit that, "No, this isn't all German fire.
Some of this is incoming from the east." They'd heard more tanks turn up, and they thought, "Ah, that'll be the 24th Armoured Brigade
turning up to the right. They're our guys." They are mainly in Shermans,
there are some Crusaders, mainly Shermans. And unfortunately it was what today is called
a friendly fire, or 'blue on blue' incident. And in his account Turner says (and you have to
admire this sort of turn of phrase), "There really was every excuse for this." You see, there they were, surrounded
by enemy tanks (admittedly knocked out tanks), and there had been some 88mm shells being fired
eastward, roughly from that sort of general direction. And so it was a reasonable conclusion
that the fire was coming from Turner's position. And the friendly Shermans
started shelling their position. And at this point he lost 3 anti-tank guns knocked out, and at this point also the
Observation Post goes out of action. ... In Turner's account it seems that he
was killed because of the bombardment, but in other accounts he went to do some scouting
independently, and was just never seen again. Was he killed? ... There's one version where he was killed,
there's another version where he was captured, there's another version of the story where he actually found
another position with another unit somewhere else entirely. But then surely he would have turned up
the next day or the day after that, wouldn't he? Anyway, the Forward Observer disappeared,
and his loss was to be sorely felt by Turner. And more than once he signalled,
"Our crying need is for an OP." Some artillery cover would have been very useful, but unfortunately he had no artillery cover
... to be guided, to be called in on targets of his choice. So he's already suffering more casualties and it's
only the morning, and he's going to have to last all day. Now there were supplies in a convoy of
more food, more water, more ammunition, and they were supposed to come to him
but they didn't. All day they were back there to the east,
safely out of artillery range of the enemy. And it was deemed just too dangerous to send
a column of vulnerable lorries to resupply him. So he was going to have to make do
with just what he had for at least one day. Surely he could hold out one day, right?
How much have the enemy got? And how much would the enemy commit
to attacking his one small position? Quite a lot as it turned out. Now at this point I would like to say a few words
on the topic of the British 6-pounder anti-tank gun. And they are these: it was pretty damn good. And I'm absolutely sick of hearing that
this British gun or that British gun was rubbish, because, well, the argument seems to run that,
"It was British and therefore it was rubbish." And that some other gun was brilliant
because it was German, and somehow that seems to be reason enough. Well, I'm here to say that
the 6-pounder gun was very good. In fact, it outperformed the 75mm gun on a Panther.
Yes, a Panther, I'm going to say it again: yes, on a Panther. Now, of course there were several different
types of ammunition that the Panther gun could use, and several that the British 6-pounder could use. The British were developing more and more and better
and better armour-piercing shells for it throughout the war. The later version had a higher velocity
and a [muzzle] brake and so forth. And later they got the discarding
sabot round that was really amazing. Although possibly not at all that accurate,
but its penetrating ability was just amazing. But yes, broadly speaking, the 6-pounder
performed better than the Panther gun. And it also performed substantially
better than the 75mm gun which was its replacement on a lot of vehicles,
like the Churchill tank for instance. Although the British continued putting
6-pounders on Churchills right until the end of the war, because the armour-piercing capability of that gun was
so much better, yes, I'll say that again, so much better, than the 75mm American
compatible multi-purpose gun. Now the reason that the Churchills went
over to the 75 was that it had a really good and effective high-explosive shell, which the 6-pounder did not. If you want a really good effective
high-explosive shell, then just more calibre, just a bigger shell, a wider,
thicker bore is really very useful. And you were never going to get anything
brilliant into the 57mm of a 6-pounder. But as an armour-piercing round, as an anti-tank gun,
the 6-pounder was good, damn it. So there! And I can go further. The first time the Western Allies
ever encountered the Tiger, that was in the desert, and both the two Tigers that they encountered
were immediately knocked out by, yes, you guessed it, 6-pounders that were portée
(or on the back of a lorry). So there you go, a lorry with a 6-pounder
on the back of it bested two Tiger tanks. So there! And when the Western Allies first
encountered the Panther, that was in Italy, the same thing happened: 6-pounders, boom!
Took out those Panthers. So let's not hear ... any more of this
"6-pounders were rubbish" nonsense. Anyway, back to the story. So things are not looking good
at this point for Lieutenant Colonel Turner and the lads of 2 RB. They're surrounded by the enemy, and they're being shelled
by their own side, quite disappointingly effectively, in fact. And these people cannot be raised on the radio
to call off the barrage, so what do they do? Well, they get an Intelligence Officer, load him into
a Universal Carrier, a little armoured battle taxi, and send this zipping off through the desert,
I imagine weaving around a bit to avoid being hit, to get to the Shermans and call off the attack. The Intelligence Officer manages
to get there and says that, "Of course it's a completely understandable
mistake, anyone could have made it, and there's absolutely no hard feelings at all.
But could you please stop killing us." And his request is granted. And at just this point
a new danger is noted because about 1,500 yards away, that's not very far,
to the south-southeast are 25 incoming tanks. And these tanks are not any tanks,
these are Mark IV Specials, as they were known then. Today we would probably call them a Panzer IV F2.
The F2 was the first with the long barrel. This one has the [muzzle] brake at the end. The early
ones had the bulbous [muzzle] brake, it looked like that. This was the most fearsome
tank gun in North Africa at the time. A 75mm high-velocity, armour-piercing
(but it could also fire high explosive) gun. And so they've got that lot now coming at them,
and what are they going to do now? Well, ... I'm going to leave you in suspense,
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lot of the time like this, threatening a scholar's cradle. And you could say that maybe when they're
just touching like this, this is a form of scholar's cradle. But I noticed he had a particularly unique
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Thank you very much for sponsoring me. And now back to the action
in the deserts of North Africa in 1942. So, they're being attacked, this time by F2s,
which are quite formidable tanks, so naturally they're going to
want the help of those Shermans. And the Shermans charge forward, and there is
a confused battle that ... goes on for about 25 minutes. Both sides fire smoke, and of course
the tanks are stirring up huge amounts of dust. And so visibility is a
major part of the problem for both sides. And I have read that the Germans it seems were using
a new tactic. Exactly how well it worked I don't know, but they were using a new tactic which was to fire
smoke rounds directly from a tank at an enemy Sherman to blind it. And then several tanks ... having seen
one of the enemy tanks marked, would fire into that patch of smoke. I suppose the idea is they're completely blind
because we've put smoke right on them, and admittedly we can't really see where the tank is
anymore, because it's surrounded by smoke, but we can see a patch of smoke,
so we're not as blind as they are. And we are several, all co-operating,
firing into the smoke. Anyway, after 25 minutes 7 Shermans
were knocked out and on fire. And, very sensibly according to Turner, the rest of their unit
withdrew back to the ridge, back to a hull-down position. So that was an expensive exchange,
and it showed just how vulnerable those tanks were. Because as soon as you move you draw
attention to yourself, as soon as you get out there, you're a big high-sided target
that just attracts fire. Whereas the anti-tank guns could be well camouflaged,
stay still, stay low, pick your targets. And you can see better, because you've got eyes that
are looking through air rather than through periscopes or little slits, so finding targets and
judging distances and so forth is easier. Yes, the tanks proved very vulnerable,
and 7 of them were wrecked. And again Turner was radioing, "Our crying need is for
a gunner, send us a new Observation Post." And he was told that one was on its way.
Unfortunately, though it is thought that he did set out,
that gunner never arrived. So, the convoy still won't resupply. And at this point the cries of the wounded
are being a bit distressing, so three carriers are sent back with
some severely wounded on board. And on the way one of them takes a direct hit
from a 75mm shell ... and keeps going. So there you go, it's possible to hit a carrier
with a 75mm shell directly, and not knock it out. I can see how that's possible, a lot of
the back end is just slab-sided space and so the shell could have ...
It must have been a pretty nasty moment, but they were able to get back
with those severely wounded. And the 24th Armoured then
withdrew to hull-down positions again. So we're back to the situation
of a few hours previously. The next attack came from Italian infantry,
or rather ... it would have done. Now, there are so many observations
being made of the enemy around that ... it's quite clear that the
land must have been fairly flat. Not completely, because people are using
the folds of the land to make various attacks. But they're able to see troops massing for attack. And they observe a load of Italians
that were going to come at them. So rather than wait to be attacked (and if you're largely anti-tank guns, then being
attacked by infantry is actually quite a major threat) the carriers were sent out there. And the carrier platoon went out there with Bren guns
and broke the attack up before it got going. So the Italians are massing for their ... attack, and then
suddenly they're being Bren gunned from little armoured taxis, and that's it, the fight
goes out of them and they scarper. And the Bren guns were also able to brew up
a couple of lorries which were towing, yes, 6-pounder anti-tank guns that had presumably
been captured off the British not long before. I haven't read anywhere that they were
able to salvage any of the ammunition for those guns, I think they probably just thought,
"We've done enough here, let's get back." So that attack was broken up
really before it got anywhere at all. ... Now there are two major attacks
from tanks coming next. One from the north was 13 M13s,
13 of this type of tank called the M13. The M13 is very similar to the M14, and the
significance of this is that there's one of those at Bovington Tank Museum, and I was there
and I did shoot a little bit of footage about the M14. The Italian M14/41. I don't, I must admit, know a
huge amount about Italian tanks. The first thing that most people learn
about Italian tanks is that they were rubbish. Now of course if you've got tanks, and the Abyssinian
natives that you're up against don't have tanks, then you don't have to have very good tanks
for them to think, "Oo wow! They've got tanks." However, as soon as one of these comes
across something like a Valentine or a Matilda, then you'd much rather be
in the Valentine or the Matilda. The Valentine and the Matilda were
more reliable, much better armoured, although actually for firepower it was about parity. This is a decent gun, and you can see it's got
two forward firing machine guns in the hull. The armour on this is not just thin,
it's also just bad in almost every way. The plate, the quality of
the metal that it's made out of is bad, the way it's all bolted and riveted
together is rather rickety. And these had a reputation for cracking. If something
fairly big, if the armour was 'over-matched' they say, that is to say it's hit by a shell that has a
greater calibre than the thickness of the armour, which is pretty much anything that's going to hit this,
then it had a tendency to crack. And that's very disconcerting for the crew. By and large, the harder a piece of armour is,
the more likely it is to crack if over-matched. And the same thing, this should be said,
happened to a lot of German armoured cars. Small German armoured cars often had case hardened
very, very hard, very brittle, very effective armour. It's really great at getting bullets to ping off and
small things, but as soon as anything really big ... hits it, then it fails catastrophically. And sometimes the
entire side of an armoured car could shatter off. These went up against Matildas, and, well, they lost. Now, it's very fashionable to say that
the Italians were just rubbish soldiers. And it's also more recently fashionable to say, "No actually a lot of people think the Italians were rubbish,
but actually we know they were really, really good." I strongly suspect that both of these things are true in that some
Italian soldiers were competent, and fought very, very hard. But an awful lot of them did things
like surrender in large numbers. And ... when I was a small child, the joke was that Italian tanks
had one gear going forwards and five going backwards. Oh, hilarious. No, that is just a joke.
It's really a conventional tank that was not quite up to the standards of its day when it went up
against the cutting-edge tanks that the British had. I say cutting-edge. Unfortunately, the British of course
later met the German tanks, and realised that perhaps their cutting-edge tanks
weren't quite so edge cutting as they had hoped. So the Italian tank: not all that good,
but not so terrible either. Oh, yes, it seems I really didn't know
very much about Italian tanks, that was almost all a digression about
thin case-hardened armour and over-matching. No matter, that tank I was standing next to there
was the M14, which is the upgraded version of the M13. It had slightly better armour, a slightly better engine,
but really it's basically the same sort of tank. Passable gun, and you couldn't say
that it was hopelessly outdated, they'd only come out a year or two before.
They just weren't all that great. (But they weren't all that bad either,
I think I made that point.) Anyway, there were 13 of those coming at the British. And they had to swing a couple
of guns around to meet this attack, and in so doing those poor blighters
drew attention to themselves. As soon as you stood up and tried to
move a gun about, you started stirring up dust, drawing attention to yourself
and the incoming fire was pretty nasty. And there was an officer and
three other ranks killed at that point. But even so, the attack was seen off fairly easily, and 4
of those Italian tanks were busily burning away at this stage. But, this it seems was a covering attack,
it was a two-pronged attack. There were Germans to the south attacking
at the same time, 25 to 30 tanks involved now. And they were attacking the Shermans
who were to the east. This, it turned out, was a tactical blunder. Now, they were moving eastward towards the Shermans,
but they received so much effective fire from Snipe to the north that half of them were then ordered
to peel off and attack Snipe. Now the Germans are
attacking in two different directions. And Turner refers to a bridge term, a "crossruff", you know, where you lead to a void and then trump,
and then lead back from there to another void and trump. So it's a bridge move, and he said that
it was a crossruff because the ones that were going towards the tanks were
broadside on to the anti-tank guns, and therefore easy targets. And the ones going on towards the anti-tank guns were
broadside on to the tanks and therefore easy targets. I say easy targets, you can imagine takes a
certain amount of faith in your fellows though that they're going to ignore the guys who are
actually threatening them and are much closer, and they're coming at them right now. And instead
shoot at the further targets that are broadside on. So you have to rely on them to keep you safe
while you will keep them safe. But it seemed this happened,
and again German tanks aplenty are brewing up,
as they used to say in the desert. And this crossruff happened at about 1,000 yards,
and 8 of the tanks are knocked out. But the British in Snipe are still suffering. They're down now to 13 guns, and they're getting
very dangerously low on ammunition. So much so that the risk is taken,
they put some ammunition in a jeep which, in order to get to all the various guns,
drives out of the soft area of sand and then drives around delivering ammunition
to the various guns, driving around the perimeter. But this of course attracts fire,
and the jeep miraculously got away with this. But there were bullets skipping around the ankles
of the guys delivering ammunition the whole time. So that was a pretty hair-raising thing to have to do. And during this action 6 out of the 9 carriers
in C Company have been put out of action. So C Company's carriers are now
not a very effective force anymore. It's clear that Snipe is being attacked by very large,
and unexpectedly large, forces of the enemy. And the division commander, Major General Briggs,
had a very difficult decision to make at this point. Should he send relief?
Should he launch the attack? He wanted to launch the attack.
If you remember it was meant be a pivot of manoeuvre for this
big sweeping attack that was going to win. But it seems that there are now
so many German tanks out there that that seems like a very
expensive and risky thing to try. And it's also very difficult to send out a column to
extricate them, to get them out of danger from Snipe. And he thought about it, and he came to
the reluctant and difficult conclusion that the best thing to do was actually sit tight
and not do anything to rescue Snipe, nor launch the main tank attack at this point. So the gunners at Snipe were just
going to have to last some more attacks. Now at 13:00, that's one o'clock in the afternoon,
another nine M13s attacked ... from the southwest. And perhaps they were lucky, or perhaps
they had taken very careful observations. You've got to remember that the anti-tank guns
are pointing in all directions, so an attack from any given direction
will only be met by a small number of anti-tank guns. And from this particular direction there was
only one anti-tank gun in a position to stop them. And this was manned by one Sergeant Calistan. Now our man, our hero,
Victor Turner was the man on the spot. He'd been moving around all over the place, and
he made sure that he was where the threats were coming. And so he managed to get to that gun
and found Calistan on his own. The rest of his crew were either
wounded and in a trench, groaning, or had been sent away to fetch more ammunition. So he's got an anti-tank gun, one anti-tank gun,
to stop an attack by 9 tanks, and he's on his own. So what does the commander do? He steps up
and he becomes the loader, "So I'll load for you." So you now have a Lieutenant Colonel
acting as loader on an anti-tank gun. And he says, "No, wait, hold, let them come, let them come, hold your fire.
Aim for that lead tank. Hold your fire, wait for it, wait for it. A Lieutenant turned up who was the commander
of that particular platoon of anti-tank guns, he turns up to help out as well. "Hold your fire, hold your fire."
So now there are three guys on the gun. He waits until the enemy is 600 yards away,
this is in daylight don't forget, 600 yards away. That's pretty scary, because you've got a gun
that's effective much further than 600 yards, but let's make this first shot count. Anyway, Sergeant Calistan fires at 600 yards,
and boom! The first tank brews up. Flames everywhere, guys bailing out. And the Vickers machine guns,
and various Brens and rifles also in Snipe, are not being merciful with
bailing tank crews at this point. There were times in the war when if
you saw an enemy tank crew bail out, you might give them a wave,
"Oh bad luck, try again later." But at this point they're not
sparing bailing out tank crews, and so they're gunning down
the guys who are bailing out as best they can. Brutal, but I suppose necessary
at this stage in the war. Anyway, Sergeant Calistan takes aim
and fires again, boom! And again, boom! He brews up one, two, three, four, five, six of the
enemy tanks are now knocked out and ablaze. An absolutely astounding piece of shooting
I think you'll agree. And you would imagine that 6 out of 9 tanks would
cause the 3 remaining tanks to break off the attack. They'd think, "Okay... " But no, they didn't.
They were pressing ahead. Is that because they hadn't noticed that
the other 6 had been knocked out? I don't know, but press ahead they did. Which was a big problem because there
were 3 enemy tanks coming at them, and they only had two rounds left. At this point, it was Lieutenant Toms
I think his name was, he said, "I know where there's some ammunition." And he turned
and he has to make his way across this very soft sand, 18 inches of dusty sand, coming up to your knees, get
through the thorn bushes, to a jeep that was 100 yards away. And he knew ... there were some anti-tank rounds
in boxes strapped to the bonnet of that jeep. And he managed to get to that jeep,
he managed to get it to start, and then wrestled it through the horrendous ground,
and taking machine gun fire the whole time. I believe he was wounded. And the jeep was hit by so much
machine gun fire that it burst into flames. So he's now driving a burning jeep
on horrendous ground, and ... it's burning. And I imagine if it's burning it's probably the front end
burning, and that's where all these anti-tank rounds are. But he managed to get it to within 10 yards of the gun, and then had the unenviable task of getting a load of
anti-tank rounds off the front bonnet of a burning jeep. And unstrapping, it must have been
pretty thoroughly strapped on I would have thought, and then getting them to the gun and ... Sergeant Calistan fired 3 more shots.
Every one a coconut: boom! Boom! Boom! He had knocked out all 9 of the attacking Italian tanks.
"A hat trick!" shouted (which is a cricketing term, lots of sporting
and gaming terms in his vocabulary) cried ... Lieutenant Colonel Turner. So that attack by a small miracle had been stopped. Sergeant Calistan was actually
... recommend for the VC for that action. I think he ended up getting the DSO. So, that attack had now been stopped miraculously,
but that wasn't the last, no. At 16:00, 70 tanks were observed milling around in
various locations in the area, German and Italian tanks. They did not have the ammunition to see off 70 tanks. So things were looking more and more grim. At 17:00 an attack was launched. And this was by German tanks, largely Panzer IVs, and Turner concluded that they
were probably the 21st Panzer Division. He didn't know this, he couldn't see
from where he was the markings on them, but he concluded that it was
probably the 21st Panzer Division because of the way they behaved,
which was somewhat incompetently. Now the 21st Panzer Division was not itself an
incompetent unit, but it had just arrived in the area, and so he concluded
that they hadn't been told about us. Because 7 of them passed by the Snipe position
broadside on at only 200 yards range. Just making stupidly easy targets of themselves. And he thought, "Well, if they don't know we're here,
we're going to take advantage." And so they started firing at them. And again boom, boom, boom. A 6-pounder will
make easy work of a German tank at 200 yards. And they're knocking them out quite easily,
and in 25 minutes the action is all over. And he makes another I suppose you could call it
a sporting reference, it's a little bit grim. If you're hunting rabbits you may know that a rabbit,
when it comes out of its burrow, tends to pause, and look about just as it's coming out of its burrow,
and that's an opportunity for a hunter to shoot the bunny. Well, he said that the Vickers gunners got a lot of hits because ... rather than the Germans bailing out
by opening the hatch and diving out and running, they would open the hatch, pause a second, and then
look out to see what the situation is before bailing out. And in ... that hesitation
they were then shot by the British gunners. So the Panzer Division is losing crewmen to that
moment of hesitation at the mouth of the burrow. So how many were knocked out?
Well there were multiple claims, ... the Royal Artillery units towards the
eastern end of ... Snipe were firing away. And it seems that there are claims from both units, so it's thought that about ... 9 tanks were knocked out
in that engagement. It lasted about 25 minutes. But that still wasn't the end of it, they got attacked again.
This time ... 15 Panzer IIIs were attacking. And these are described
in Turner's account as hesitating, and in others they're described as making very good use
of every little fold in the land, making observations, weaving their way in, getting as close as they can,
exposing themselves as little as possible. So these are competent tankers, but still they've been
quite clearly given the orders to attack this position, which the Germans clearly are convinced
is a very important one. So you've got 15 tanks coming at you, and again from the angle that you
can only get a few guns to bear. In fact, there were just two, manned by
Sergeant Hine and Sergeant Miles. And ... later ... they were able to swing a third one round
and get 3 guns into action against this attack. So these are Panzer IIIs, another good workhorse tank,
admired by many people. I've done a video in fact. Here we have the Panzer III... No, no, no, no, we didn't have time for that now!
But if you want to find out more about the Panzer III, there's another video entirely
that you can watch about that. I'm talking about this particular
attack on the Snipe position. Now this was quite a competent attack,
and it seems that the Germans now had a pretty shrewd idea
about where a lot of these anti-tank guns were, and they were firing their machine guns
quite effectively at those positions. And Sergeant Miles was hit and
managed to make it back into a trench, at which point Sergeant Swann, who was about
30 yards away ... his gun having been knocked out, he was near the HQ. He then crawled out with
machine gun bullets whizzing close over his head, managed to get to the gun, managed to load it,
and popped up, and bang! Knocked out the lead Panzer III that was attacking. And this then stalled the
German attack for a moment, the machine gun deluge of bullets
coming in ebbed a little bit, and then buoyed up by this some of the gunners
who had been hiding in slit trenches nearby they got out and re-crewed the guns,
and the attack was seen off. One of the other Panzer IIIs was knocked out
by all three of the 6-pounders who were now firing, all hitting it at the same time.
And I can imagine this must happen a lot. And it's something which has cropped up
in ... games that I've played. You've got, oh, I don't know,
maybe you are playing some fantasy thing, and there are three orcs charging
three, I don't know, elf archers or something. And it's this elf archer's turn,
and the player for that elf archer says, "Oh, I'm going to shoot that orc." And he rolls some dice
and he shoots the orc, and the orc falls over. And then it's the next guy's turn,
"Oh, I'm going to shoot that orc." But in fact what's going to happen in reality is that
one of those orcs is the mean, fast looking one, who's coming right at you with an axe, and all 3 of them
will go "Ah!" and they are going to shoot at the same one. So you've got one orc down with three arrows,
and then the other two orcs then close with the archers. Well, that's what happened here.
They all picked the same "Ah!" threatening tank and destroyed it much more thoroughly
than was entirely necessary. Fortunately though, the attack
was seen off. And during it, and there are a number of accounts
that mention this quite definitely, there was a 6-pounder shell that went in
through the front armour of a Panzer III, all the way through the Panzer III,
out the other side and hit the tank behind. Frustratingly, I haven't found any source which says
what this "hit the tank behind" actually means, but I get the impression that it knocked out the
tank behind, so a single round took out two Panzer IIIs. Because otherwise, how would they know
that they'd hit it? And how is it of any consequence? Under those circumstances if you're
a gunner and ... you're looking down the sight and you shoot all the way
through a tank that's in front of you, you wouldn't know what happened
to the shell as it came out the back, unless perhaps the tank behind
burst into flames as well, "Oh, wow, we must have hit it, two for one!" Anyway, the tank came to a halt,
and that was pretty handy, because the anti-tank guns
only had three rounds left each. So what were they going to do
if they got attacked ... again? Well, the Panzer IIIs withdrew, only about 500 yards away,
doesn't seem to me to be very far away, got to hull-down positions, still kept up some machine gun fire, but weren't any
more aggressive than that for the rest of the time. So, at this point things seemed absolutely hopeless
for Turner, and he gives the order for all code books and secret documents to be burned. Which itself was a code to HQ to understand that
that meant that he was going to withdraw. Once he'd burned all the code books, they then couldn't
use any of the codes in their radio transmissions. So instead they got by with
what he called "veiled language". So when for instance they were discussing when
relief might come, or when they might pull out, they were saying things like, - "Oh, ... at dinnertime."
- "Oh really? Early dinner or late dinner?"
- "Oh, the fashionable time." (9 o'clock.) And hoping that any listening Germans
wouldn't understand what this "veiled language" meant. But there you go, the richness of British culture
made it possible for a certain amount of "veiled language" to get across a lot of the
crucial pieces of information that were necessary. So, 19:30 hours came,
and the enemy mercifully pulls out. They thought that another attack was coming
for sure. And if another attack had come then he thought he's going to be overrun, but they pull out. And actually 19:30 was around sunset, and this
was a really bad choice of timing for the Germans because the sun tends to set in the west,
and so they were heading west and they were beautifully silhouetted
against the setting sun. And these anti-tank gunners,
who had just three rounds left thought, "Well, we're going to be pulling out anyway,
might as well just fire off a few shots." I mean, they're a long way,
they're about 2,200 yards away at this point, so this was just considered to be a gesture of relief
rather than any serious intent to cause casualties. But do you know what? They brewed up a tank,
they brewed up another German tank at 2,200 yards. Normally you wouldn't even bother
attempting a shot at that distance, but they thought, "What can we lose?" Well, they scored another victory from the jaws of,
I suppose you could call it a defeat. So at 21:00 hours they thought, "Right, we're not being
relieved. We're going to just send out the wounded, the most severely wounded, in what vehicles
we can scrape together that are still working." About five of the carriers were still working,
a couple of jeeps were still working. Miraculously, there was a lorry
that had been there all day. No one knew why it hadn't left earlier. And the thing was riddled with
machine gun bullets, but what do you know? It still started and the
wheels still went round and round. So they used that as well, and they
got the non-walking wounded out. And they were still waiting for relief. And when
they realised that it was 22:30 hours they thought, "Okay, relief isn't coming. So guys,
we're going to have to leave all the dead here, sorry, and anyone walking wounded, you help each other out.
And we're just going to have to walk back. And a few of the men didn't make it back
and died in the slog back across a mile and a half of open country
back to friendly lines. The next day, the infantry that was supposed
to have relieved them was found miles to the south. But there you go, fog of war,
people end up in the wrong position. It had happened for the people involved in Snipe, so they couldn't really blame others
for being in a similar situation. And there was a divisional board of inspectors
put together ... a few days later to look at the area, count all the wrecks,
and try to work out just what had happened here, and just how much damage
has been done to the enemy. And they estimated that between 52 and 58
enemy vehicles had been knocked out. 15 to 20 had been knocked out
and towed away by the enemy. But even so, they reckoned that that one day's fighting
around that one unit of anti-tank guns had destroyed 10% of Rommel's tank force in North
Africa. It was an extraordinarily successful action. There was of course a price to be paid for this. When they were walking back they were carrying
the sights and the breech blocks of these six remaining anti-tank guns, which they had
no transports to move so they were just abandoned. So ultimately they lost, I suppose you could say,
all of the anti-tank guns. ... Maybe some of them got recovered later, I don't know. And they lost 2 officers and 12 other ranks were killed,
17 officers and 30 other ranks were wounded. But that's far less than the enemy had lost. And you'll notice as well the
disproportionate number of officers amongst that, it's the way with the British army. The
British army, because of the way the officers behave, a lot of them don't like ducking and
they suffer disproportionately high casualties. Now ... Turner ends his report with this quote,
which is an interesting one I find, because it's drawing attention to his modesty. So is he boasting about his modesty? Because
... modesty is not something you can boast about. So ... he seems to be ... trying to have it both ways here. But his account is still modest in a number of ways. He completely neglects to mention, for instance,
that he won the Victoria Cross. He completely neglects to mention, for instance,
that he'd taken 40 prisoners of the enemy as well. He completely neglects to mention that
when he was crewing that anti-tank gun he got hit and severely wounded
in the head by a chunk of shrapnel, and refused treatment until the action was over. And then later in the day, back at HQ
in the bunker, he was hallucinating that ... he was in command of a harbour
being attacked by enemy ships, and was reported as at one point
shouting, "Sink that destroyer!" Before he pulled himself together later. Yeah, he didn't mention that in his account. So, a modest enough guy, it seems. So there you go, a VC won, 10% of the enemy knocked out,
and the 6-pounder shown that it was a flippin' good gun. [ What use do you think Sgt. Calistan's
crew found for the burning jeep? ] Lindybeige! [ They used it to make tea, of course! ] [ Rommel really never stood a chance. ]
Hi guys first post on this sub, I just wanted to share my favorite youtuber Lindybeige, he does videos related to war, archaeology, history, human nature/psychology etc. All his videos are personally very interesting as Loyd is a man of extensive knowledge, I generally like to watch his videos with a long meal or in parts with a snack in hand.
Nice, i can use it for my meal prep as well since its an hour long.