Alamein to Zem Zem

Keith Douglas

3 ideas

1. Staff officer who drove himself into battle

   When the Alamein offensive opened in October 1942, Douglas held a staff post at divisional headquarters. Without authorisation he took a truck, drove forward and reported to his regiment, the Sherwood Rangers, who were short of tank commanders, and he fought with them in the advance until a mine wounded him in Libya. He rejoined the regiment in Tunisia only after that fighting was over, and the episode shows an officer who chose combat at the cost of formal insubordination.

2. From inside, battle is fragmentary and incoherent

   From a tank turret a commander sees only a narrow slice of the field through dust, smoke and vision slits, and hears the battle mainly as confused wireless traffic. The coherent shape that maps and official histories give a battle does not exist for the participant. His experience is a sequence of disconnected local episodes, misidentified targets and sudden losses whose larger meaning he learns only later, if ever.

3. Hunting and sporting idiom in a tank regiment

   In Douglas's portraits, the officers of the Sherwood Rangers kept the manners of a county yeomanry regiment after they moved from horses to tanks. They used hunting and cricket slang, amateur gentlemanly codes and a sporting casualness about danger. Their talk treats lethal mechanised warfare in the language of field sports.

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