The Riddle Of The Third Mile

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In which a veteran of the ElAlamein offensive finds cause to recall the most tragic day of his life.

There had been the three of them-the three Gilbert brothers: the twins, Alfred and Albert; and the younger boy, John, who had been killed one day in North Africa. And it was upon his dead brother that the thoughts of Albert Gilbert were concentrated as he sat alone in a North London pub just before closing time: John, who had always been less sturdy, more vulnerable, than the formidable, inseparable, and virtually indistinguishable pair known to their schoolmates as “Alf ‘n’ Bert”; John, whom his elder brothers had always sought to protect; the same John whom they had not been able to protect that terrible day in 1942.

It was in the early morning of 2nd November that “Operation Supercharge” had been launched against the Rahman Track to the west of El Alamein. To Gilbert, it had always seemed strange that this campaign was considered by war historians to be such a miraculous triumph of strategic planning, since from his brief but not unheroic participation in that battle he could remember only the blinding confusions around him during that pre-dawn attack. ‘The tanks must go through’ had been the previous evening’s orders, filtered down from the red-tabbed hierarchy of Armoured Brigade to the field officers and the NCOs of the Royal Wiltshires, into which regiment Alf and Bert had enlisted in October 1939, soon to find themselves grinding over Salisbury Plain in the drivers’ seats of antique tanks-both duly promoted to full corporals, and both shipped off to Cairo at the end of 1941. And it had been a happy day for the two of them when brother John had joined them in mid-1942, as each side built up reinforcements for the imminent show-down.

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