War on Film: The Desert Rats (1953)

This article is from Military History Matters issue 123

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The see-saw war in North Africa went back and forth after Mussolini ordered an initial incursion from Italian Libya over the border into Egypt in September 1940. The next round went to the British under General Richard O’Connor, whose troops advanced 500 miles in two months and captured 130,000 prisoners, 400 tanks, and 845 guns. At home, cinema audiences cheered the newsreels showing long lines of Italian prisoners winding off into the distance.

Then Hitler appointed his most daring general, Erwin Rommel, to come to the aid of his Italian ally. With just two German divisions at first, he pushed the British back towards Egypt. But behind his advance, he left the Libyan port of Tobruk in Allied hands. Here, Australian, British, and other troops, reinforced and supplied by the Royal Navy at night, held on grimly from April 1941.

Rommel tried repeatedly to capture Tobruk, as he could not advance into Egypt without using the port to supply his army. But the defenders fought fiercely and maintained the siege despite the odds. In a period of the war that did not bring many British successes, it was a lone story of courage and grit.

In 1951, Twentieth Century Fox made a film about Rommel, The Desert Fox (director: Henry Hathaway), starring James Mason. The film portrayed Rommel in a favourable light and proved very popular at the box office. But there was anger that Hollywood was making a hero out of a German general.

Partly to counter this criticism, but partly to follow up on the success of the Rommel film, Twentieth Century Fox decided to make a sequel about an Allied victory in the desert. They bought the rights to the book, The Siege of Tobruk by Gregory Rogers, and adapted it into a screenplay by an American, Richard Murphy, who had worked with Australian soldiers in the Pacific War.

Filming began in December 1952, with James Mason again playing Rommel, who this time was presented less sympathetically. A 27-year-old Richard Burton was cast in the leading role of a British officer in command of an Australian company.

Burton was well respected in Britain as a Shakespearean theatre player but had just moved to Hollywood to play in My Cousin Rachel (director: Henry Koster) with Olivia de Havilland. This performance won him a Golden Globe Award as the New Star of the Year. The Desert Rats was his second Hollywood enterprise and his first war movie.

No location filming took place in North Africa. All the desert scenes were shot in California near Borrego Springs. But the film extensively uses archive shots from the great British propaganda film Desert Victory (director: Roy Boulting, 1943; see MHM May 2016). This was a documentary compilation film produced by the Army Film and Photographic Unit, dedicated to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and factory workers who had delivered the crushing victory at El Alamein.