At first light, when the sand started to turn pink and the cold harshness of the night softened into a growing warmth that would in a flash turn into the heat of a furnace, a courier brought us the order from regimental command: ‘proceed immediately to the deployment area, heading south’—which is to say, straight to hell.
The self-propelled group had to join the units already operating of the Littorio division, which, for a few days, had been moving toward the southernmost edge of the Italo-German front. Alexandria was just over 100 kilometers from our vanguards, who kept pushing to break through the Alamein bottleneck.
We had already swallowed, since the day of the landing in Benghazi, over 700 kilometers of grueling roads and dusty tracks. The route to follow, the ‘Palificata,’ ran almost parallel to the front for more than 60 kilometers of relentless sand, beaten and re-beaten by the tracks of tanks and the worn tires of many vehicles, and starting from the coast road, we would reach the edges of the impassable El Qattara depression .
By now we knew that our eight selfpropelled 75 guns were the only ones capable of countering the enemy Sherman and Grant powerful 75s, and the Littorio underarmed tanks urgently needed our fire support.
Even though we were a bit upset about having to leave the sea and the little nativity scene made up of the white houses of Sidi Abd Rahman, we eagerly prepared to… step into the antechamber of hell.
The time had come: ‘Crew to the tanks! Group ready to move! Engines, engines! Go!’
By D.Beretta’s ‘Batterie semoventi alzo zero’
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