My essay from this week's lesson in one of my classes.
North Africa, autumn, 1942. Warm. Windy. Dusty. And, oddly, steamy. This close to the Mediterranean beaches, the baking sun and constant breeze pull water into the air by the liter [or Imperial gallon, depending on which side you represent. Of course, I must confess that I have never been to North Africa to explore coastal atmospheric conditions in person. This includes being totally remiss and not getting to Morocco to visit my daughter when she was at university there a couple years ago. However, I have been to the Red Sea coast of Jordan at Aqaba and the Arabian Gulf in Kuwait, and been shocked at how moist the air is near the water. Of course, it only takes a kilometer or so inland to drop all that moisture out and leave you back in the bone-dry desert. The best place to observe this effect, of course, is in California. There you can see the almost vertical face of the fog banks as they roll in from the Pacific and meet the dry terrestrial air]. I imagine, though, that for many soldiers, the environment of the northern Sahara was more comfortable than, say, the cold wastes of the Russian steppe or the claustrophobic green of New Guinea jungle. And it might have seemed healthier, as well. No months-long nightmare of muddy Ukrainian fields. No dripping, leech infested Solomon Islands forest paths.
But of course the tankers and foot-soldiers weren’t disease ecologists or public health specialists. Well, except for a few of them. And those few made an enormous difference in a campaign that helped set the course for the entire European conflict.
The war in North Africa was a tidal affair. Axis armies pushed the allies back into Egypt, then the allies swept the Axis back and away, then the Axis took the desert back. They traversed, often fought over, the same ground repeatedly. In general military terms, the Axis had every advantage. Better hardware, more experienced soldiers, shorter supply lines. Yet as the campaign wore on, the biggest sea change was the decline of Axis competence and the rise in that of the Allies.
This was partially due, of course, to brute-force military exigencies. Germany had a lot to deal with geographically. Italy proved an unreliable source of first-rate military assets. The U.S. bootstrapped its own butt into gear to provide more and better hardware. Allied soldiers gained skill and experience.
But there was another factor at work, one that contributed cryptically but powerfully and directly to the decline of the Axis forces in North Africa.
Dysentery. The depressing, discomfiting, exhausting, dehydrating diarrhea. Your gut rumbles. You can’t eat. You can’t function. If you’re moderately healthy and have access to medical care, it doesn’t usually kill you. But it can leave you wishing it did. And in war, it can sap your strength and concentration so that you’re more susceptible to dying from other causes.
The Wikipedia entry for dysentery at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysentery
provides a pretty well balanced and referenced entry-level discussion. The bottom line is that severe “intestinal disturbances” of whatever source—parasitic nematodes, protozoans, bacteria, viruses, inflammatory autoimmune illnesses—are categorized as “dysentery”.
At El Alamein in the autumn of 1942, dysentery proved to be a huge differentiator.
The British 8th Army, forced out of Libya earlier that year, came back with powerful friends in the Operation TORCH landings in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in November. The UK forces, with insights from centuries of tropical empire, obsessed over hygiene. Very particular specifications were provided for the location (away from other facilities) and structure of toilets, pit depth, hygiene protocols, and a simple and ingenious cloth cover on each privy to reduce the production of flies.
The Afrika Corps, on the other hand, not so much. Per the DOD course material provided with this week’s lesson, “Their campsites were filthy. Large amounts of feces lay on the surface of the ground.” About 2.5% of the British forces were admitted to med stations for dysentery. Of the Germans, the figure was 20%, and nearly half of those were front-line combat troops.
Bottom line is, it’s hard to fight effectively when your biology is out of wack. Rommel attributed the German defeat in large measure to the dysentery that affected his troops. Of course, it is worth remembering that he was himself being treated for dysentery in Germany when the battle began.
There are a number of sources for the material on the North Africa campaign. History Channel has a documentary on rotation with an excellent presentation of the issues, and that is where I learned about the cloth fly cover. I include with this week’s upload package some (badly formatted) material I slurped from the web that appears to be an undated and unattributed U.S. Defense Department course in military diseases. It is pretty cool, you can find the whole course at:
http://www.tpub.com/content/armymedical/MD0152/MD01520005.htm
I would like to be able to cite and credit this material, so if any of you can find information that would allow me to do so, please let me know.
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