Who won the Battle of El Alamein?
The British Eighth Army under Bernard Montgomery won a decisive victory at El Alamein in Egypt between 23 October and 4 November 1942. After twelve days of attrition it broke the German and Italian line and drove Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, into a retreat that ended in Tunisia. Churchill called it perhaps the end of the beginning, and it was the turning point of the war in North Africa.
At night on 23 October 1942, along the coast of Egypt west of Alexandria, more than 900 British guns opened fire at once. Behind the barrage, infantry walked forward into the minefields that Rommel's men had sown across the desert, clearing paths for the tanks waiting behind them. Twelve days later the German and Italian army that had come within reach of the Nile was in full retreat, and Britain had the clear-cut victory over the Axis it had sought for more than two years.5
Background: the pendulum in the desert
The war in North Africa began in 1940, when Italy invaded Egypt from its colony of Libya. Egypt mattered enormously to Britain: it held the Suez Canal and covered the oil of the Middle East. The British struck back and drove the Italians deep into Libya, and in 1941 Hitler sent German troops under Erwin Rommel to rescue his ally.6
For two years the front swung back and forth across hundreds of miles of desert. Every advance carried the winner farther from his ports and supply dumps, and every retreat brought the loser closer to his own, so no victory lasted. In the summer of 1942 the pendulum swung hard against Britain. Rommel defeated the Eighth Army at Gazala in Libya and took the port of Tobruk, which had resisted every Axis attack the year before, and then chased the beaten army into Egypt.7 › Siege of Tobruk, 1941
General Claude Auchinleck, the commander-in-chief in the Middle East, fell back across the frontier to a last line at El Alamein, a small railway halt on the coast. Its value lay in its position. Between the sea to the north and the Qattara Depression to the south, a sunken waste of soft sand impassable to tanks, the line could not be turned by a sweep around the open desert flank, the move that had won Rommel so many battles.8 › Battle of Mersa Matruh, 1942
The First Battle of El Alamein and Alam Halfa
There were really three battles at El Alamein in 1942. In the first, in July, Rommel tried to break the line before the British could settle into it. His attacks were stopped in the first days of the month, and Auchinleck answered with counterattacks at Tel el Eisa near the coast and along the Ruweisat Ridge. They gained little, because the infantry and the tanks fought poorly together. But by the end of July the line had held, and Egypt was safe for the moment.9
One of the July actions cost Rommel dearly in a way he could not see at once. On 10 July Australian troops attacking at Tel el Eisa overran the German radio intercept company that had been listening to careless British signals traffic, one of his best sources of intelligence about his enemy.10
In August Churchill flew to Egypt and shook up the command. General Harold Alexander became commander-in-chief in the Middle East. General William Gott was chosen to lead the Eighth Army, but on 7 August his aircraft was shot down by German fighters and he was killed, and the command went instead to Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery. At the end of August Rommel tried once more to break through, sweeping around the southern end of the line toward the Alam Halfa ridge. He ran into artillery and constant air attack, and after about three days he withdrew. Churchill counted this as the second Battle of Alamein; the October offensive he preferred to call the Battle of Egypt.11
Armies and commanders
Montgomery set out at once to transform the spirit of an army that had grown used to defeat. Churchill told the Commons that the new command had an electrifying effect on the troops. Montgomery also refused to be hurried. He would not attack until his army was trained, reinforced and equipped with the new weapons pouring in, among them the new American Sherman tanks, and he resisted Churchill's pressure for an early offensive.12 › Bernard Montgomery
The Eighth Army was a force of the whole Empire and its allies: British, Australian, New Zealand, South African and Indian divisions, with Free French and Greek brigades. Its strength is given differently by each source: more than 190,000 men by the National Army Museum, about 220,000 by the Australian War Memorial and 230,000 by the Encyclopedia of Modern Europe. All agree on the main weapons: over a thousand tanks, some 900 guns and 1,400 to 1,500 anti-tank guns.13
Facing it was Rommel's German-Italian Panzer Army, roughly half German and half Italian, counted at 100,000 to 116,000 men with about 500 to 550 tanks. Rommel was the most famous general of the desert war, a master of mobile battle who led from the front. At El Alamein he could not fight that kind of battle. His supply line ran back hundreds of miles to ports in Libya, fuel and ammunition had to cross the Mediterranean, and British aircraft and submarines, guided by Ultra decrypts of German signals, sank ship after ship.14
So Rommel dug in. His engineers sowed deep belts of mines across the whole front, which his soldiers called the devil's gardens, and his men blasted gun pits and trenches into the rock behind them. The position became, in Churchill's words, a veritable fortress.15
The battle in phases
The break-in, 23 to 24 October. Montgomery chose to strike in the north near the coast, a frontal attack that Churchill called a most forbidding task, and hid his preparations. A deception plan in the south led the Axis to expect the blow there, while XIII Corps made a diversionary attack in the southern sector. The main assault was made by XXX Corps: the 9th Australian, 51st Highland, 2nd New Zealand, 1st South African and 4th Indian divisions, attacking after the barrage on a narrow front: six miles in Churchill's account, 16 kilometers (ten miles) in the Australian War Memorial's. Their task, in the words of Churchill's report, was the reverse of 1918: the infantry had to clear the way for the tanks.16 › 23 October in military history
This first phase was code-named Operation Lightfoot. The infantry and engineers were to open two corridors through the minefields for the tanks of X Corps to pass. Most of the infantry objectives were taken during the night, but the depth of the defenses slowed the advance and the armor could not get through. Tanks jammed in the narrow lanes and were picked off by anti-tank guns.17
The dogfight, 26 to 31 October. Montgomery now settled into what he called crumbling, a battle of attrition to wear down the Axis army position by position. It was brutal close-quarter fighting in heat, noise and dust. Australian troops pushed north toward the coast to threaten the German and Italian units there, drawing Rommel's armor into costly counterattacks, which the British artillery and the Desert Air Force broke up again and again.18
Supercharge, 1 to 2 November. After pausing to regroup, Montgomery launched his second blow on the night of 1 to 2 November, code-named Operation Supercharge. The New Zealand Division, reinforced and with tanks attached, punched a hole through the weakened line, and the armored divisions of X Corps were fed into the gap. Churchill called them the thunderbolt hurled through the gap.19
Turning point: 4 November
By 2 November Rommel's army was running out of fuel and tanks. Two more days of fighting followed, and on 4 November the line finally broke. That afternoon Rommel ordered a full retreat. His motorized German units got away, but much of the Italian infantry, with no transport to escape on, was left behind in the desert to surrender.20
Aftermath
The Eighth Army lost about 13,500 men killed, wounded and missing: 13,560 in the Australian War Memorial's figures, 13,600 in the report Churchill gave the House of Commons a week after the battle. Axis losses are harder to fix. Churchill gave General Alexander's first estimate of 59,000 Germans and Italians killed, wounded and taken prisoner; the Australian War Memorial gives about 60,000 in one account, including some 35,000 prisoners, and 90,000 in another.21
The pursuit was slower than it might have been. Montgomery has been criticized ever since for letting the mobile core of Rommel's army escape. But the Axis would never threaten Egypt again. On 8 November, four days after the breakthrough, American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria in Operation Torch, and the German and Italian forces in Africa were caught between two fronts. The Eighth Army entered Tripoli on 23 January 1943, and in May the last Axis troops in North Africa surrendered in Tunisia, with roughly 240,000 prisoners.22 › Operation Torch, 1942
Legacy and memory
In Britain the news was greeted with joy. Churchill ordered the church bells, long silent and kept to warn of invasion, to be rung across the country on the following Sunday. At the Mansion House on 10 November he gave the battle its most famous verdict: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."23
The National Army Museum calls El Alamein the first clear-cut and irreversible victory of the British Army over the Axis, and it made Montgomery a national hero, a status he did much to cultivate. The museum also notes that its place in British memory as the great turning point of the war may be an overstatement, since North Africa was a sideshow beside the Eastern Front. The Australian War Memorial sees it as one of several turning points of 1942, with Midway, Guadalcanal and above all Stalingrad.24
Many who fought there saw the shadow of an older war. The Australian War Memorial notes that older men on both sides compared the set-piece battle to the Western Front of 1918, and Churchill drew the same comparison in the Commons, measuring Montgomery's barrage against those of the last war. It ranks among the great battles of World War II.25
Test yourself on the war in the World War II battles quiz, or find the desert line in Where Was It Fought?
