Lieutenant-Colonel D.L.A. Gibbs
1/6th Battalion, Queen’s Royal Regiment
2nd Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment

I think this was one of the biggest shocks one sustained up to that period of the war. I had seen soldiers die and soldiers wounded; I had been at Dunkirk. I had amongst many, both military and civilian refugees, been the target of German dive-bombing, but, somehow, nothing had affected me so personally up till then as those one or two deaths in September 1942 at Deir-el-Munassib, perhaps, partly, because it was my ‘command,’ and the deaths within it were part of me.

(Quoted in Bryn Hammond, El Alamein, 2012, 145)

Born on 5 October 1905 in Abingdon, Berkshire, Denis Lucius Alban Gibbs was commissioned with the Queen’s Royal Regiment in 1926 after graduating from Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Following prewar overseas service in India and Sudan, he attended staff college and participated in the Dunkirk evacuation. In January 1942, he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in command of 1/6th Battalion, Queen’s Royal Regiment.

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