Battle of Alam el Halfa

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Alam el Halfa lasted just seven days, from the 30th of August to the 5th of September 1942, and yet it settled the fate of the entire Axis campaign in North Africa. Fought south of El Alamein in the Egyptian desert, it was the last major offensive Rommel's Panzerarmee Afrika would ever launch. The question hanging over those seven days was simple but enormous: could Erwin Rommel shatter the British Eighth Army before Allied reinforcements made that impossible? And could a British general who had only just taken command turn a desperate defensive stand into something that would change the whole direction of the war?

• 2. Rommel's Gamble

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  By the end of August 1942, Panzerarmee Afrika was running out of time. German intelligence had warned Rommel that an Allied convoy of a hundred thousand long tons was bringing new vehicles to Egypt, and reinforcements would tilt the balance of advantage permanently against the Axis. Rommel demanded six thousand short tons of fuel and two thousand five hundred short tons of ammunition from the Italian Comando Supremo in Rome before he would attack. By the 29th of August, over fifty per cent of the supply ships from Italy had been sunk. Only fifteen hundred short tons of fuel had reached Tobruk. The main supply ports of Benghazi and Tobruk sat eight hundred miles and four hundred miles from the front respectively. Tripoli, twelve hundred miles away, was almost useless. After Albert Kesselring agreed to lend some Luftwaffe fuel, Rommel had just enough for one hundred and fifty miles per vehicle with the troops. A quick victory was the only option left. Rommel planned a night attack timed to put his forces well beyond the British minefields before sunrise. The 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions and the 90th Light Division would punch through the lightly held southern sector, swing north, and cut the Eighth Army's supply routes. If it worked, the road to Cairo and the Suez Canal would lie open.

• 3. Montgomery's Trap

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  On the 13th of August 1942, Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery took command of the Eighth Army. He visited the front, then ordered the destruction of all contingency plans for defending Alexandria and Cairo. He would hold Alamein, full stop. Montgomery knew through Ultra signals intercepts exactly where Rommel intended to strike. The southern sector, a twelve-mile front from the New Zealand Box to Qaret el Himeimat on the edge of the impassable Qattara Depression, would be left deliberately thin. The gap would be mined and wired, covered by the 7th Motor Brigade Group and 4th Light Armoured Brigade, who were ordered to withdraw when necessary and let the Axis forces come through. The attackers would then find themselves turning north straight into the bulk of British strength dug in around Alam el Halfa Ridge, twenty miles behind the front. The 22nd Armoured Brigade with ninety-two Grant tanks and seventy-four light tanks waited there, supported by six-pounder anti-tank guns and the artillery of the 44th (Home Counties) Division and the 2nd New Zealand Division. Montgomery issued a critical order that broke with everything that had gone before: the tanks were to hold their positions on the ridge and act as anti-tank guns. There would be no charging out to meet the enemy in the open desert.

• 4. The Attack Unravels

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  The assault began on the night of the 30th of August under a full moon. From the first hours, disaster accumulated. The Desert Air Force spotted Axis vehicle concentrations and launched repeated air attacks. Fairey Albacores of the Fleet Air Arm dropped flares to illuminate targets for Wellington medium bombers. The minefields that Rommel had counted on being thin turned out to be deep. General Walther Nehring, the Afrika Korps commander, was wounded in an air raid. General Georg von Bismarck, commanding the 21st Panzer Division, was killed by a mine explosion. Despite these losses, Rommel's forces were through the minefields by midday on the 31st of August, but they were already hours behind schedule and had been pushed further west than planned. At 13:00, the 15th Panzer Division set off toward Alam el Halfa Ridge, the 21st Panzer Division following an hour later. The Axis forces brought approximately two hundred gun-armed tanks in the two Panzer divisions to bear on the ridge. The Germans had ninety-three Panzer IIIs and seventy-three longer-barrelled Panzer III specials, plus ten Panzer IVs and twenty-seven Panzer IV specials carrying long seventy-five millimetre guns. The Panzer IV F2 tanks opened fire at long range and destroyed several British tanks. But when the Germans closed in, the dug-in brigade fire hit them hard. An attempt to outflank the position was stopped by anti-tank guns. With night falling and fuel critically low, General Gustav von Vaerst ordered the Panzers to pull back. The Germans lost twenty-two tanks that day; the British lost twenty-one.

• 5. Air Power and Withdrawal

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  The night of the 31st of August brought no relief for the Axis forces. Albacore and Wellington bomber combinations returned, concentrating on Axis supply lines. Allied action had already sunk over fifty per cent of the five thousand long tons of petrol Mussolini had promised Rommel. On the 1st of September, the 21st Panzer Division sat almost entirely inactive, almost certainly starved of fuel. On the morning of the 2nd of September, Rommel acknowledged the offensive had failed. In his message to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, he cited the lack of fuel, Allied air superiority, and the loss of surprise as the reasons for abandoning the attack. That same day, armoured cars of the 4/8th Hussars attacked three hundred Axis supply lorries near Himeimat, destroying fifty-seven of them. The Desert Air Force flew one hundred and sixty-seven bomber sorties and five hundred and one fighter sorties on the 2nd of September alone. The Afrika Korps retired under persistent air attack; on the 5th of September, when the DAF flew nine hundred and fifty-seven sorties in twenty-four hours, the Axis units were back almost on their starting positions. Rommel later attributed the defeat to British air superiority, unaware that Ultra had given Montgomery his battle plan before a single shot was fired. Rommel adapted to Allied air dominance by ordering his forces to disperse, a change that would shape how Panzerarmee Afrika operated in the months ahead.

• 6. Operation Beresford

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  As Rommel began to withdraw, Montgomery authorized the 2nd New Zealand Division under Lieutenant-General Bernard Freyberg and the 7th Armoured Division to pursue, on the condition that they avoid excessive losses. The 7th Armoured Division managed harassment raids. The New Zealand operation, code-named Beresford, became a costly failure. Beginning at 22:30 on the 3rd of September, it combined the experienced 5th New Zealand Brigade, the newly arrived 132nd Infantry Brigade under Brigadier C. B. Robertson, and tank support from the 46th Royal Tank Regiment. The Axis defenders had been alerted by diversionary raids by the 6th New Zealand Brigade under Brigadier George Clifton on the right flank; the 132nd Infantry Brigade arrived on their start line an hour late. In the darkness, the Valentine tanks of the 46th RTR became lost and ran onto a minefield, where twelve were knocked out. The 90th Light Division inflicted six hundred and ninety-seven casualties on the 132nd Infantry Brigade and two hundred and seventy-five on the New Zealanders. Robertson was wounded. Clifton was captured by a patrol of the X Battalion of the Italian 185th Infantry Division "Folgore." Freyberg advised that another attack would not succeed and recommended withdrawal. Montgomery and Horrocks agreed, and the troops pulled back on the night of the 4th of September.

• 7. Aftermath and Reckoning

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  Allied casualties across the entire battle came to one thousand seven hundred and fifty. Axis losses reached two thousand nine hundred and thirty. For the first time in the desert campaign, there was no great disproportion in tank losses, a measure of how completely the battle's shape had shifted in Britain's favour. Critics later questioned whether Montgomery should have done more to trap the Afrika Korps while it was strung out between the minefields and Alam el Halfa. Friedrich von Mellenthin, in his book Panzer Battles, described Panzer divisions paralysed by lack of fuel and awaiting an assault that never came. Montgomery's answer was straightforward: the Eighth Army had received new and untrained units and was not ready for a full offensive. His army was equally unprepared for the sixteen-hundred-mile pursuit that any breakthrough would have required, a logistical trap that had broken both sides before. He chose to keep his forces intact. Rommel, frustrated, complained to Kesselring that the British general simply was not attacking. Montgomery accumulated supplies and prepared for the offensive in October that became the Second Battle of El Alamein. With the failure at Alam el Halfa, Axis strategic aims in Africa were no longer achievable.