Desert Rats Division

In every army that fought the Second World War, certain formations stand out as particularly hard-fighting. The Americans had their “Big Red One” and “Screaming Eagles,” the Germans their “Vienna” Panzer and “Edelweiss” Mountain Divisions, the Italians the 132nd Ariete and the Soviets the 1st Moscow Motorized.

But the outfit that seems to continually appear in our games is the British 7th Armoured Division, known as the “Desert Rats.”

Desert Rats parade in Berlin, July 1945.

The 7th Armoured began in Egypt as a collection of independent tank, motorized and armored car units created from the former Cairo Cavalry Brigade and known as the Mobile Force. In September 1938 the force became the Mobile Division and received a new commander, Maj. Gen. Percy Hobart (who would later create the 79th Armoured Division of specialized assault vehicles).

Hobart used the new division to test out his own theories of armored warfare, organizing it into a heavy tank brigade, a light tank brigade and a support group. The division trained in the Western Desert through the summer of 1939, moving up to the frontier with Italian-ruled Libya when war broke out in September. Italy did not immediately join the war, and the division continued its desert maneuvers though Hobart was forcibly retired.

The division adopted its famous “Desert Rats” shoulder flash in February 1940. It fought the Italian in the initial frontier battles and in the counter-offensive of November 1940. These are shown at the tactical level in two of our Panzer Grenadier series games, Afrika Korps and Desert Rats. In February 1941 the Desert Rats raced across the Cyrenaican desert to catch the retreating Italians unaware at Beda Fomm, inflicting a decisive defeat from which Italian arms never truly recovered.

The 7th Armoured then withdrew to the Nile Delta to refit, and was not at the front when the German Afrika Korps bundled the British back out of Libya in the spring of 1941. It did take part in the battles around Tobruk that summer, and suffered heavy losses in the bloody battles during Operation Crusader in November.

The division refitted during the early months of 1942, but was in the front lines again by May for the Gazala battles, as shown at the tactical level in Desert Rats and at the operational level in our new Gazala 1942 game. The division fought well here, but so did the Axis forces, and the Desert Rats suffered serious losses. Afterwards the 7th Armoured refitted and reorganized into three brigades, two tank and one of motorized infantry as British organization finally started to recognize the shortage of foot soldiers in their armored divisions as compared to similar German or Italian formations.

The 7th Armoured also plays a key role in our proposed Alamein game. Alamein was a large battle, and so is our Alamein a large game. The Desert Rats lead the breakthrough, and pursued the shattered Axis armies across Egypt and Libya. The divisional armored car regiment, the 11th Hussars (one of the very few units still left from the old “Mobile Force”) captured Tunis in May 1943 to end the North African campaign.

While the Desert Rats did not fight in Sicily and so finally miss one of our games set in the theater, they did land at Salerno in September 1943, a few days after the assault, and fought in Italy until November of that year. They appear in our Invasion of Italy, though at this time the division had been reduced to two brigades, one each of tanks and infantry.

A Cromwell of the Desert Rats’ 4th County of London Yeomanry
crosses the Orne River, Normandy, 1944.

Withdrawn to England, the division once again re-equipped and re-trained, and fought in Normandy in June 1944. Our Beyond Normandy game does not include the 7th Armoured’s sector, focusing instead on the fighting by 15th Scottish, 43rd Wessex and 11th Armoured Divisions. After advancing to the Dutch border, in March 1945 the Desert Rats crossed into Germany, and fought a number of heated engagements before capturing Hamburg on 3 May, just before the German surrender.

Invasion of Italy is our oldest game, and the Desert Rats division is not carrying its distinctive Jerboa symbol. This needs correcting, and so we’ve provided a set of more attractive tank battalion breakdown counters for the division. This is also the style of counter that will be seen in the proposed Alamein game, with attack and defense factors not separate if they are the same (the 3-12 here is the same as a 3-3-12 in the older game).

You can download the new Desert Rats division here.