Saint Menas

I am sharing with you a discussion that my sister and I had yesterday. This is Saint Menas, a Egyptian officer at the end of the 3rd century. He left the army and went into the desert to practise asceticism. Perhaps things got a little dull because he went into town and crashed a pagan festival declaring himself to be a Christian. (I figure that he was either foolhardy or lacked commonsense, but perhaps he wanted to be killed.) He was subsequently martyred. He was quite a popular saint in Alexandria until the Arab Moslems took over and then few people ever heard of him - until the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1942 when Montgomery and the Allies defeated the Germans and Italians. Saint Menas turned up and fought the Germans wearing his Roman armor armed with his sword. Apparently he had a bunch of camels with him. It unnerved the Germans and the Allies won. My question is did he join the fray of his own volition and did someone in the Allies call him up - unlikely perhaps, but nevertheless what happened? A number of Germans swore they saw a Roman soldier fighting and the camels in the thick of the battle.