Second Battle of El Alamein

• 1. Introduction

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  At 21:40 on the 23rd of October 1942, a thousand guns opened fire simultaneously along a 40-mile front in the Egyptian desert near the railway halt of El Alamein. The Second Battle of El Alamein had begun. Over the next 13 days, Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army would crush the Axis Panzerarmee Afrika and drive it from Egypt and Libya all the way to the borders of Tunisia. It was the first major Allied victory since Operation Crusader in late 1941, and it ended the Axis threat to the Suez Canal, the Middle East, and the oil fields of Iran. But the outcome was far from certain when the guns first fired. Rommel's defenders had laid around half a million mines across a field of interlocking fortifications they called the Devil's Gardens. A shortage of fuel had the Panzerarmee fighting on empty. And Montgomery's plan required breaching those minefields at night, in choking dust, under artillery fire. How a 13-day grinding battle of attrition finally broke one of the most formidable defensive systems of the Second World War is a story of intelligence failures, individual heroism, and a force bled almost to exhaustion before it finally broke through.

• 2. The Intelligence War

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  Until June 1942, Rommel had been reading the Allies' mail, almost literally. Colonel Bonner Fellers, the United States military attache in Cairo, sent detailed reports on British strength and movements to Washington, and Italian military intelligence had stolen the American code after a covert operation at the American Embassy in Rome the year before. Despite British concerns, Washington kept using the compromised code until the end of June. The intelligence advantage shifted only after the 9th Australian Division captured the German 621st Signal Battalion in July 1942, confirming that the code had been broken. From that point forward the British held the upper hand. Ultra intercepts and local sources revealed the Axis order of battle, its supply situation, and its intentions. Intelligence identified which supply ships were headed to North Africa, their routes, and in most cases their cargoes. That information allowed British forces to attack those ships with devastating precision. By the 25th of October, Panzerarmee Afrika was down to three days' supply of fuel, and only two of those days' worth lay east of Tobruk. The historian Harry Hinsley, writing in 1981, quoted a German assessment that the Panzer Army did not possess the operational freedom of movement it needed, given that a British offensive could begin any day. Rommel had long understood this. Before leaving for Germany on sick leave on the 23rd of September, he sent a long appreciation to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the armed forces high command, outlining exactly what his army needed. His only real hope was that German forces fighting at Stalingrad would defeat the Red Army quickly, then sweep south through the Caucasus to threaten Iran, drawing British reinforcements away from Egypt and buying time. Stalingrad would not go the way Rommel hoped.

• 3. The Devil's Gardens

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  Rommel designed his defences knowing that fuel shortages would prevent him from fighting the mobile battle in which he excelled. He created at least two belts of mines roughly five kilometres apart, connected at intervals to form enclosed boxes. The forward face of each box was lightly held; the interior was unoccupied but filled with mines, explosive traps, and covering fire from surrounding positions. His main defensive positions lay at least two kilometres behind the second mine belt. The Italians added a cunning detail: they dragged an axle and tyres through the minefields on long ropes to create what looked like well-worn tracks, luring Allied vehicles to their destruction. To stiffen his infantry, Rommel alternated German and Italian formations along the line. Because the British deception operation, called Operation Bertram, confused the Axis as to where the blow would fall, Rommel departed from his usual practice of keeping armour concentrated in reserve. He split his tanks into a northern group and a southern group. The 15th Panzer Division in the north held 125 operational tanks; the 21st Panzer Division in the south had 121. Rommel kept the 90th Light Division further back as a strategic reserve. His instinct was sound: once concentrated, the Panzerarmee could not move again. There was simply not enough fuel. Operation Bertram, meanwhile, was a masterpiece of misdirection. The Eighth Army spent weeks building dummy ammunition dumps from discarded packing cases under camouflage nets in the northern sector. When the Axis observed these without any subsequent attack, they stopped paying attention. That inattention allowed the British to replace the rubbish with real ammunition, petrol, and rations at night, right under the enemy's nose. A dummy pipeline was also constructed to suggest the offensive would come much later and much further south. Tanks headed for the northern battle were disguised as supply trucks.

• 4. The Break-In

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  The 882 field and medium guns were calibrated so that their first shells would land simultaneously across the entire front. After twenty minutes of general bombardment, they switched to precision targets to support the advancing infantry. By the end of the five-and-a-half-hour fire plan, each gun had fired around 600 rounds, a total of approximately 529,000 shells. Four infantry divisions of XXX Corps then stepped off into the dark. The plan called for engineers to clear two lanes, each 24 feet wide, through which the tanks of X Corps could follow in single file. The engineers had to clear a five-mile route through the Devil's Gardens. They did not achieve it. The Axis minefields were deeper than anticipated. By 04:00, the lead tanks had entered the minefields, where they churned up dust so thick there was no visibility at all. Traffic jams formed. Tanks bogged down. Only about half the infantry reached their objectives, and none of the tanks broke through that first night. By 08:00 on the 24th of October, Miteirya Ridge in the south had been secured, but at heavy cost. Morning aerial reconnaissance showed little change in Axis dispositions. Montgomery pressed on. What compounded the Axis difficulty was what happened to their command. General Georg Stumme, who had taken over from the sick Rommel, went forward to see the battle for himself on the morning of the 24th, suffered a heart attack, and died. Temporary command passed to Major-General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma. Hitler had already decided Rommel should leave his German sanatorium and return to Africa. On the first big tank engagement, which broke out at dusk on the 24th near the Kidney feature, over 100 tanks were involved and about half were destroyed by nightfall, with neither side gaining ground. Montgomery overruled his corps commander and ordered the night attack to proceed anyway.

• 5. The Action at Snipe

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  On the night of the 26th of October, 2nd Battalion the Rifle Brigade was ordered to seize a position called Snipe, south-west of the Kidney feature. They followed the shell-bursts of their supporting artillery through the dark and dug in when they believed they had reached their objective. What followed on the 27th became one of the most celebrated single-day actions of the entire battle. The heat was described as making the desert quiver. Thirteen six-pounder anti-tank guns from the battalion, plus six more from the 239th Anti-Tank Battery, held off successive German and Italian armoured attacks. At 16:00, Rommel launched his major assault. The Rifle Brigade destroyed 22 German tanks and 10 Italian tanks while on the point of being overrun more than once. When it was finally over, the battalion was withdrawn in error without being replaced, and only one anti-tank gun, from 239 Battery, could be brought back. The regimental historian of the Rifle Brigade described the action at Snipe as the most famous day of the regiment's war. Lieutenant-Colonel Victor Buller Turner, commanding officer of the battalion, was awarded the Victoria Cross. The heroism at Snipe illustrated a pattern that was repeating itself across the battlefield: Rommel's forces were fighting with extraordinary tenacity from fixed positions, but each engagement was consuming fuel and armour he could not replace. By the 28th of October, the Eighth Army still had 800 serviceable tanks. The Panzerarmee day report for that same date, intercepted and read by Eighth Army the following evening, recorded 81 serviceable German tanks and 197 Italian. And on the 26th of October, Bristol Beaufort torpedo bombers had sunk the tanker Proserpina at Tobruk, carrying 4,500 tonnes of fuel. Three Wellington torpedo bombers had destroyed the tanker Tergestea at Tobruk the same night, carrying 1,000 tonnes of fuel and 1,000 tonnes of ammunition. The Panzerarmee's last hope of refuelling was gone.

• 6. Operation Supercharge

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  By the 2nd of November, Rommel was signalling Hitler that the army's strength was exhausted after ten days of battle and that an orderly withdrawal of his non-motorised forces appeared impossible. Hitler's reply, received at 13:30 on the 3rd of November, ordered him to stand fast and yield not a yard of ground. Rommel later wrote that for the first time in the African campaign he did not know what to do, that a kind of apathy took hold as orders were issued to hold all positions. But the decisive blow had already been struck. Operation Supercharge began at 01:00 on the 2nd of November, led by the 2nd New Zealand Division under Lieutenant-General Bernard Freyberg. Freyberg had tried to free his men of this task: the division had lost 1,405 men in just three days at El Ruweisat Ridge the previous July. The attack plan called for the 9th Armoured Brigade, with 132 tanks at the start of its approach march, to breach the Axis gun line on the Rahman track before dawn, accepting, if necessary, 50 per cent casualties. Freyberg passed on Montgomery's position: Montgomery was aware of the risk and had accepted the possibility of losing 100 per cent of the 9th Armoured Brigade to make the break. The brigade attacked at 06:15-30 minutes before dawn, silhouetted against the rising sun. German and Italian anti-tank guns, including 24 of the 88-millimetre flak guns, tore into the advancing tanks. The 94 tanks that began the attack were reduced to 24 runners. Of the 400 men involved, 230 were killed, wounded, or captured. The exchange that followed between Brigadier Gentry and the exhausted Brigadier Currie, who gestured at the handful of tanks remaining around his stretcher as his armoured regiments, captured the cost of that morning. The counter-attack Rommel launched against the 1st Armoured Division at 11:00 that day cost the Afrika Korps around 100 tanks. By nightfall, General von Thoma reported that he would have at most 35 tanks available to fight the following day, and his artillery and anti-tank weapons had been reduced to one-third of their strength at the start of the battle.

• 7. The Pursuit and Its Limits

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  Rommel did not wait for Hitler's permission to retreat. At 17:30 on the 4th of November, unable to delay any longer, he gave the order. A 19-kilometre gap had been torn in his front, through which British armour was streaming west. He telegraphed that his forces in the north faced encirclement by enemy formations he estimated at twenty times their number in tanks. Due to lack of transport, most of the Italian infantry formations were abandoned. Their fate illustrated what Hitler's insistence on holding ground had cost: any earlier move might have saved them. General von Thoma was captured. The Ariete Armoured Division was destroyed fighting a rearguard action, encircled south of Bir el Abd. Rommel's diary quoted the Ariete's last signal: enemy tanks had penetrated south of them, they were now encircled, five kilometres north-west of Bir el Abd, their tanks still in action. Rommel wrote that in the Ariete they had lost their oldest Italian comrades, from whom they had probably always demanded more than those troops, with their poor equipment, had been capable of performing. Colonel Arrigo Dall'Olio, commanding the 40th Infantry Regiment of the Bologna Division, surrendered with the words that his men had ceased firing not because they lacked the desire but because they had spent every round. The British pursuit was hampered almost immediately by fuel and weather. The 1st Armoured Division ran out of fuel on the night of the 5th of November while attempting a night march, 16 miles short of Bir Khalda. By midday on the 6th of November it had begun to rain, and a fuel convoy bogged down 40 miles from its rendezvous. By the morning of the 11th of November, the 5th New Zealand Infantry Brigade captured the Halfaya Pass and took 600 Italian prisoners. That evening, the pursuit west of Bardia was temporarily handed to armoured cars and artillery alone, the larger formations simply unable to be supplied fast enough to trap what remained of Rommel's army before it escaped into Tunisia.