#desertwarfare

Daily Life in the WWII Desert Campaigns

The desert campaigns in North Africa during the Second World War (1939-45) provided soldiers on all sides with a set of particular challenges. Scorching day temperatures, freezing night temperatures, sand and flies getting everywhere, the rationing of water, a poor and monotonous diet of tinned food, and the serious risk of being killed or injured by a projectile fired by an enemy one could not even see were just some of the challenges that had to be endured.

The desert theatre of war was also unique for the almost total absence of civilian involvement; who else would choose to be here? The harsh conditions did ensure a certain camaraderie developed as everyone faced the double challenge of surviving the war and whatever the desert could throw at them. In this article, we look closer at daily life in the North Africa campaign through the words of those who experienced it.

Afrika Korps Soldier

German Federal Archives (CC BY-SA)

Desert Conditions

Temperatures in the desert could reach up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) – one could literally fry an egg on any metal part of a vehicle exposed to the sun – but the nights could be freezing, and men died of exposure. Soldiers were warned to stay out of the sun, indeed, in the British Army, not wearing a shirt and getting sunburnt was a punishable offence. With few natural features to hide behind, troops had to become adept at camouflage and concealment, especially to avoid enemy aircraft or mobile patrols. Away from the coastal towns, there were no people except occasional groups of Bedouin nomads.

It was not easy to know where one was or where one was going in the often featureless desert – here more often than not hard-baked flatlands strewn with small rocks and a thin layer of sand rather than the giant sand dunes of the Sahara Desert further south. It was just the sort of terrain to play havoc with a vehicle's tyres. Sand was everywhere, and when the wind blew, there was no escape from it. Vehicles and aircraft had to be fitted with special filters to try and keep the sand from entering and damaging the engines. Sandstorms were, of course, the worst, and these could last from two hours to two days. Sand thrown about in high winds could wear away the skin and literally sand-blast vehicles clean of their paintwork. Men escaped the fury as best they could, as here described by Private Tom Barker:

One bloke who had been cleaning his gun hurriedly put it all back together and others who had been chatting suddenly grabbed trench spades and shovelled at the sand like gophers desperate to get away from a predator. Once they had a hollow dug that would accommodate their body they dug into their pack and got out their cardigans to act as an air filter, then pulling a groundsheet over themselves they hunkered down to wait for the sandstorm.

(Layman, 20)

British Soldier Shaving in the Desert

J.T.Silverside - Imperial War Museums (CC BY-NC-SA)

Troops, or at least somebody within any one group, had to be able to navigate using a compass, the sun, and the stars. Maps did improve as the war went on and numbered barrels were used to help identify the otherwise unidentifiable stretches of desert tracks that criss-crossed North Africa. The sheer scale of the area of battles and lack of recognisable landmarks baffled many of the participants, even confusing such figures as General Erwin Rommel (1891-1944), who once wrote to his wife back in Germany:

I have no idea if the date is correct. We've been attacking for days now in the endless desert and have lost all idea of space or time.

(Allen Butler, 215)

While fighting could be intensive, it was often of short duration. At other times, especially for those troops in defensive positions, overcoming boredom became the greatest challenge. Italian Lieutenant Emilio Pullini remembers:

There were some things we did not like very much, flies mainly and a very hot sun which was above us all day long. It was very uncomfortable to spend all day lying in foxholes from sunrise to sunset just covered in flies and doing very little else because we had no chance of doing anything else.

(Holmes, 271)

British Soldiers in North Africa, 1940

Imperial War Museums (Public Domain)

The British writer Laurence Durrell (1912-90) recalls the feeling that the fighting was always somewhere else in the vast expanse of the desert:

It's a very funny thing, a battlefield, it's extraordinary how inanimate the whole thing seems. There was a little bit of an action going on in the right-hand corner of some sort, for the rest there were people lying about smoking. It's one of the very singular things that films and books don't bring out…where nothing seems to be happening, the action is always somewhere in another corner and it's a decisive thing. And then they ask you if you were there.

(Holmes, 275)