Reflections on "The Desert War" by Alan Moorehead

"War has naturally many privileges that appear reasonable even to the prejudice of reason." - Montaigne

May 14, 2025

This past week I finished Alan Moorehead's epic trilogy, "The Desert War," first published in 1945. Fully 900 pages describing the North African campaign during World War II from the perspective of an Australian war correspondent. It's an excellent book and Moorehead is an excellent writer. There are many wonderful turns of phrase throughout the book. This one, in reference to the Shah of Iran, is a favorite:

"The great wealth of the country—much of it from royalties paid by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—was being slowly and steadily drawn into the Shah’s own hands by a network of monopolies and taxation. His wealth was immense and he was spending it with the egocentric vulgarity of a pork-and-beans millionaire on his first trip to Paris."

Unlike many other books written about military history, Moorehead's perspective is as much introspective as it is about military strategy. Having written the book in the midst of the action lends a presence to his narrative that is often weaker when written decades after the events or absent when written by people who weren't there. He captures the experiences of soldiers, commanders, and civilians in a way that reflects their humanity as they struggle through a quagmire of perhaps the most basal of human drives - violent conflict.

The 1940's were different times, indeed. Everyone seemed to understand the stakes and do their bit or rise to an occasion of need whenever it became necessary.

"That night the worst fog in years closed down over the Thames valley. I had accepted two invitations—one for dinner in Battersea, the other for a late party in Kensington—not knowing that most Londoners did not go out at night in winter now because of the sheer difficulty of getting transport. But in my ignorance I set out on this worst of all nights. My taxi got as far as the river before it ran out of petrol and I changed over to a bus that was going vaguely in my direction through the impenetrable gloom. Then I changed over to a tram that ran off the rails on a corner. The passengers with one accord jumped out and lifted the tram back on the rails.

What else is one to do when there is no concept, let alone expectation of a nanny-state bureaucracy to save you or helicopter parent to swoop in and fix everything? People got on with their life as best they could and learned to improvise as necessary just to survive.

"Coming down either from Testour or from Oued Zarga farther up the Medjerda Valley the township still looked like a township, and the peasants were still tilling their farms round about. Right through this campaign the farmers kept on at their land in the front line. When everything in their world was crumbling about them they clung tenaciously and pathetically to their peace-time habits. If the farmhouse was blitzed the peasants lived in the cowsheds. If an army headquarters moved in on the homestead then the farmer stayed right on and fed his chickens among the anti-aircraft guns. If a field had to be ploughed then he simply skirted round the shell craters. The peasants and the Arabs went to ground somewhat when a barrage or bombing was on, but they would not leave their homes.
There was one young British artillery officer whose position was overrun by the Germans. He put an Arab cloak over his uniform, hitched a plough on to his gun-towing tractor and spent all that day ploughing round and round the field among the Germans. In the night he coupled up one of his guns and drove back to the British lines."

On Reporters, Journalists, War Correspondents, and Propagandists

I continue to struggle with the distinction between the various titles given to people and organizations who purport to bring us the "news." There are, of course, codified definitions, but all too often they bear little resemblance to the actions of contemporary people who claim these titles. More than eighty years ago, however, the codified definitions seemed to hold. In the case of Moorehead, as with Ernie Pyle, the title of "war correspondent" applied: "a correspondent employed to report news concerning the conduct of a war and especially of events at the scene of battle." At its root is "correspondence," connoting efforts to report a close similarity or connection to events.

Crafting correspondence that delivers on communicating a connection to events requires direct experience of the events. The conditions Moorehead and his peers endured were every bit as arduous as the soldiers experienced themselves, all while lugging around a bulky typewriter instead of a gun.

"The circumstances in which we wrote were strange. We typed on the backs of trucks, on beaches, in deserted houses, in gun emplacements and tents. We hoisted our typewriters on kerosene cases, on bathtubs and rolls of kit, on humps of sand and the steps of cars, or just perched them on our knees. We wrote by candlelight or lamplight, or with an electric torch shining onto the paper. And in the end we could write anywhere at any hour of the day or night—anywhere, that is, except during a bombardment, for I tried it and failed miserably.
And now, driving through a thickening sandstorm, we groped about in the collection of galvanised huts for a place to sit down and write. We found the Intelligence hut at last, and a corner of the table there, and wrote. That night we slept in another iron shed, dignified with the name of Force Headquarters Mess. Other strays like ourselves had wandered in, and we bedded down around the concrete floor as soon as dinner was done. The wind ripped part of the roof off during the night, sheet by sheet, and rain splashed in. The banging of iron against iron was like an air raid, only more irritating."

Moorehead has an absolutely brilliant description of one of the countless sandstorms he endured. A particular kind of sand storm called a "khamseen." The name has entered my lexicon as a description of any type of long-term barrage of noise meant to bury the signal.

"The khamseen sandstorm, which blows more or less throughout the year, is in my experience the most hellish wind on earth. It picks up the surface dust as fine as baking powder and blows it thickly into the air across hundreds of square miles of desert. All the way through Daba’s tent-hospital base and past Fuka it gathered force along the road until at Bagush it blocked visibility down to half a dozen yards. In front of the car little crazy lines of yellow dust snaked across the road. The dust came up through the engine, through the chinks of the car-body and round the corners of the closed windows. Soon everything in the car was powdered with grit and sand. It crept up your nose and down your throat, itching unbearably and making it difficult to breathe. It got in your eyes, matted your hair, and from behind sand-goggles your eyes kept weeping and smarting. An unreal yellow light suffused everything. Just for a moment the billows of blown sand would open, allowing you to see a little farther into the hot solid fog ahead, and then it would close in again. Bedouin, their heads muffled in dirty rags, lunged weirdly across the track. You sweated, returning again and again to your water- bottle for a swig of warm sandy water, and lay back gasping. I have known soldiers to wear their gas-masks in a khamseen, and others to give way to fits of vomiting. Sometimes a khamseen may blow for days, making you feel that you will never see light and air and feel coolness again. And this, my first, was a bad khamseen. I have been through many shorter and lesser ones since, and some even worse, but I hate them all and I hate the desert because of them."

Today, we have a special adjective for military reporters and journalists. We say they are "embedded." All the other reporters and journalist, particularly those from the News Industrial Complex, file unverified reports sourced second or third hand or from inference, innuendo, supposition, strained extrapolation, or shameless fabrication.

At one point, in a passage too lengthy to quote here, Moorehead describes his transfer from a warship named Exe to a larger ship named Loyal so that he could reach his assignment a month sooner. In rough seas, his transfer was successful, but the experience was harrowing, to say the least. I doubt there's a reporter in America who would willingly undertake such a feat just to stay on task, embedded or otherwise.

Undoubtedly because of the war, Moorehead was acutely aware of the roll propaganda played in the war effort and was fully on-board with its use. In fact, he was frequently frustrated with the abysmal way the British government and high command blundered with their use of it. After a series of spectacular British victories, the Germans had managed to turn things around and force a chaotic and confused retreat by the British army nearly all the way back to Cairo. Moorehead writes:

"Cairo was going through all the spasms of despair, hope, exhilaration and back to despair again. A myopic and confused propaganda was trying to sublimate all these moods and at the same time keep track of this most incoherent of all battles. Little or nothing had been allowed out about our losses or the German gains. A new British victory had been served out to the world’s press and radio each day. The breakthrough [German] had been ignored. Newspapers were encouraged to come out with such headlines as ‘Rommel Surrounded, ‘Rommel in Rout, ‘Germans Desperately Trying to Escape British Net.’
Now, in early December [1941], the amateurs controlling propaganda began to see what a bogey of over-optimism they had raised. Before the battle had fairly begun they had told the world that we outnumbered the enemy in guns and tanks and so any future victory of ours had been discounted in advance and any setback made to appear doubly severe. They had even suggested that the battle might be over in a few hours. Hardly one colourful and dramatic guess had been overlooked. And now all the guesses and easy prophecies were coming home to roost. People all over the world were beginning to suspect that Rommel had been overlong in a state of rout; that just possibly something had gone wrong. Each day a new estimate of the number of enemy tanks destroyed had been made and now people with mischievous minds began to add up the total and find out that each German tank appeared to have been destroyed at least twice. Somehow now the facts had to be given, and given in such a way as to maintain morale and not disturb the public’s faith in the news they had already received.
To those of us who came back from the front at this time, it seemed that we saw the last fortnight’s battle as though reflected in distorting mirrors in Cairo. There seemed to be no sense in it.
I do not suggest that the British high command deliberately put out false information—I am even sure that they did not. I simply suggest that unskilled men who were confused and bewildered by the events had been put in charge of propaganda and that they were painting their rosy pictures not from bad faith but bad judgment. The old bad dictum that you must always give the public good news had been the theory they had fallen back upon in their distress. They were urged to this course in support of all those lightly made prophecies of success with which the troops had gone into battle. Already this strained and artificial policy was finding out its authors. They had not graduated to the realisation that the public of both America and the British Empire was quite able to accept the news of defeats and delays; what the public disliked intensely was having its hopes raised high only to be plunged into the disappointment of reality later on.” (Emphasis added.)

Today, it would be closer to the truth to say the decisions are being made from both bad faith and bad judgement. The public's response to failures of professional ethics on this scale is every bit as true today as it was more than eighty years ago. As we move into Q2 of the 21st century, however, the propaganda machine is vastly more sophisticated and capable of layering on a much more massive and durable crust of deceit in the service of who knows who. When the public does eventually realize what's been happening, the shifts are likely to be much more seismic. To what extent that's happening now remains to be seen.

On Strategy, Tactics, and Leadership

This bit of insight fascinated me:

"More and more I began to see that desert warfare resembled war at sea. Men moved by compass. No position was static. There were few if any forts to be held. Each truck or tank was as individual as a destroyer, and each squadron of tanks or guns made great sweeps across the desert as a battle-squadron at sea will vanish over the horizon. One did not occupy the desert any more than one occupied the sea. One simply took up a position for a day or a week, and patrolled about it with Bren-gun carriers and light armoured vehicles. When you made contact with the enemy you manoeuvred about him for a place to strike much as two fleets will steam into position for action. There were no trenches. There was no front line. We might patrol five hundred miles into Libya and call the country ours. The Italians might as easily have patrolled as far into the Egyptian desert without being seen. Actually these patrols in terms of territory conquered meant nothing. They were simply designed to obtain information from personal observation and the capture of prisoners. And they had a certain value in keeping the enemy nervous. But always the essential governing principle was that desert forces must be mobile: they were seeking not the conquest of territory or positions but combat with the enemy. We hunted men, not land, as a warship will hunt another warship, and care nothing for the sea on which the action is fought. And as a ship submits to the sea by the nature of its design and the way it sails, so these new mechanised soldiers were submitting to the desert. They found weaknesses in the ruthless hostility of the desert and ways to circumvent its worst moods. They used the desert. They never sought to control it. Always the desert set the pace, made the direction and planned the design."

Later in the campaign, when conflict moved closer to the coast, trenches were used. Before then, desert warfare was ambiguous and unfixed. Like the ebb and flow of the tide, occupation of villages, towns, and strategic points would change hands from day to day. With the exception of the line drawn at El Alamein, battles lines were usually bounded at one end by the ocean and completely unbounded at the other, ending somewhere in the Sahara desert. Which meant either side was always at risk of being out-flanked by the other.

The nature of the desert dictated simple strategies and obvious tactics:

"In actual fact neither the winter nor the summer campaign had produced any vital new tactics. It was the old business of making wide sweeps through the desert, of getting round behind the enemy, of striking him at his weakest point and following up fast. Rommel had revealed no genius in planning or timing. Living at the front he had certainly been in a position to take quick decisions, but if there had been any genius at all on the Axis side it had been the genius of the average German soldier for organisation. In all its branches the German war machine appeared to have a better and tighter control than our army. Many believed that this was because the Germans had been so long in training for this war. One of the senior British generals said to the war correspondents after the fall of Tobruk, ‘We are still amateurs. The Germans are professionals.’ One saw this talent for organisation in all directions. The Luftwaffe, for example, had a much closer liaison with the ground forces than we, though we made big improvements in this. Time and again, one would note the steady rhythm of a German attack—first the Stukas, then the artillery, then the infantry, then the tanks, then the Stukas following up again. Once the action was joined, the Germans tended to dispense with coded signals which wasted time at both ends. Rommel’s own voice could be frequently heard on the air ordering his troops to do this, that, or the other thing. By the time the British could make use of this freely given information the action would be over."

In the end, luck, keen observaation, timing, and supplies determined the victor. In 1940-41, after a series of Allied victories, it was the Allies who were unable to solve the challenge off extremely long and brittle supply lines and the Germans, with their robust supply line capitalized on this weakness. By the time the Germans had advanced to El Alamein, a year had pass and it was the German army that was hobbled by an extremely long and brittle supply line. But the overall supply picture had changed dramatically during this time. German war production had been extremely weakened by the demand of a two front war whereas the Allied war production had increased dramatically, especially since America's entrance into the war.

Along with supply issues the Allies were able to soften the highly regimented and hierarchical structure of the German command with much looser hit-and-run attacks. Unlike the German army, the Allied forces, particularly the Americans, had been taught to act as discrete units when necessary, to take the initiative without waiting for orders from senior commanders.

"I remember a pungent little description Mary Welsh wrote for the American magazine Time, of the arrival of the first American troops in Ireland. A bevy of British brasshats had come to meet them. When the troops were lined up on the wharf the American commander gave his order for them to move off. It was ‘Okay, boys, let’s go.’ I simply cannot envisage that order being given by a British officer."

Without clear orders, the German army (with the exception of the paratroopers) simply didn't know what to do and often stopped and waited for orders.

On The Soldiers

I had read in several other accounts that the German military used various drugs, primarily methamphetamine, to enhance the performance of their soldiers. The Allied forces used various stimulants as well, but not to the degree the German military did. After a particularly intense battle, Moorehead had this observation:

"It was in this sector, where the casualties among the falling Germans had been very heavy, that the British found the bodies of the parachutists turned a vivid green a few hours after death. The colour suffused the dead men’s cheeks and arms and chests. Clearly they had been drugged. Already something of the sort had been suspected in Greece, and now an Australian soldier reported he had come upon a packet of the drug and had taken some. His story was that through the next few hours he felt uplifted on a glorious wave of enthusiasm and energy and recklessness. His comrades said that he had shouted and cheered, and they had had to hold him down when he wanted to rush from cover alone upon a position strongly held by the enemy."

The use of drugs was simply a battlefield tactic. There was something much deeper that drove the German soldiers to fight as they did. The years of Nazi indoctrination leading up to the war instilled an undeniably toxic ethic.

Upon the bodies of the parachutists also was found the parachutist’s code. It made a strong appeal to the ideals of late adolescence—and most of these parachutists were boys of twenty or thereabouts. All were volunteers. Here are the most interesting points in the code:
You are the élite of the German Army.
Know everything yourself; don’t leave it to your officers.
Your guns are more important than you; look after them first.
Support your comrades always.
Treat an honest enemy honestly; be merciless with snipers or spies and saboteurs.
You will win.
Drugged or undrugged, they came with a high purpose, these boys.

Those of us who have never experience combat of any sort, who have never been forced into the exact here-and-now by blunt force, we owe our deference to the men who lived in and frequently died in these godawful places and time. It truly is unimaginable, so let's not pretend that we can imagine it.

"One lived there exactly and economically and straightly, depending greatly on one’s companions in a world that was all black or white, or perhaps death instead of living. Most of the things it takes you a long time to do in peace-time—to shave and get up in the morning, for example—are done with marvellous skill and economy of effort at the front. Little things like an unexpected drink become great pleasures, and other things which one might have thought important become suddenly irrelevant or foolish. In a hunter’s or a killer’s world there are sleep and food and warmth and the chase and the memory of women and not much else. Emotions are reduced to anger and fear and perhaps a few other things, but mostly anger and fear, tempered sometimes with a little gratitude. If a man offers you a drink in a city bar, the offering is little and the drink still less. You appreciate the offering and often give it more importance than the drink. At the front the drink is everything and the offering merely a mechanical thing. It is never a gesture, but a straight practical move as part of a scheme of giving and receiving. The soldier gives if he can and receives if he can’t. There is no other way to live. A pity this is apparent and imperative only in the neighbourhood of death."

The final word goes to Moorehead and an observation that is as true today as it was eighty years ago:

"We had not then, nor, as far as I can see, have we yet learned the simple equations—understate your early successes so that your later successes will appear the greater and later failures will seem the less. And—never underrate your enemy whether you win or lose.