The Second Battle of El Alamein

“The end of the beginning”

Churchill once said “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.” The second claim might be a bit spurious (just think of Operation Market Garden – Read our earlier article), but the pithy summary still does justice to the pivotal nature of the battle that was waged in the sands of North Africa in late October and early November 1942. El Alamein was the site where the Axis advance in North Africa was first stopped in July. Three months later, the British Commonwealth counteroffensive under the command of General Montgomery (Read our earlier article) crushed all German and Italian hopes of victory in Africa. The battle started in the late hours of October 23 and ended on November 11, almost exactly 82 years ago.
 
The war in North Africa was previously a deadly game of tug. An advancing force got farther and farther away from major seaports, causing its supply line to stretch until it could no longer support the offensive. At that point, the other side fought a victorious battle and began its own advance – and thus the fraying of its own lines of supply.

Things came to a head near the town of El Alamein in Northwest Egypt. The region was a natural bottleneck, where wide flanking maneuvers, possible elsewhere in the desert, were impossible. The town lies near the eastern end of a 25-60 mile (40-96 km)-wide corridor (40 miles – 64 km – when measured at the town). To the north, the Mediterranean Sea forms an impassable barrier. To the south lies the sprawling Qattara Depression, a region of salt marshes, sand dunes and salt pans. Surrounded by tall cliffs and steep escarpments, the depression saw minor activity by both British and Axis forces, but was deemed completely unsuited for large-scale maneuvers, since armies couldn’t navigate the steep slopes around it. If one side managed to “plug” the corridor, the other was forced into a bloody frontal attack. This was exactly what happened at the First Battle of El Alamein, which stopped the advance of Rommel’s (Read our earlier article) Afrika Korps.

That battle was followed by several failed British counterattacks, which in turn led to a period of entrenchment. In August 1942, Churchill and General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, visited Egypt and relieved General Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-chief of Middle East Command, who they no longer thought was capable of managing the situation. Auchinleck was replaced by General Harold Alexander at the head of Middle East Command, and Lieutenant-General William Gott at the head of the Eighth Army. Gott, however, died when his transport plane was ambushed and shot down by Luftwaffe fighters, and Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery, a veteran of the Battle of France and an infamously difficult person to get along with, was quickly sent to replace him. Under their command, The British Eighth Army began a patient and massive buildup for an eventual attack on Rommel.

A victory at El Alamein was crucial to the British. Should Rommel regain the initiative and conquer Egypt, the Germans would seize the Suez Canal, the quickest route between Europe and the Indian Ocean. Perhaps even worse, the path would be open towards the Middle East and its strategically vital oil fields.
 
Rommel, meanwhile, was facing a fundamental problem. Located at the end of a long supply chain, he couldn’t receive materiel and reinforcements at nearly the same rate as the British. To make matters worse, most of Germany’s resources were dedicated to Operation Barbarossa, the ongoing invasion of the Soviet Union, which itself was not going too well. Having no better option, Rommel started digging in, laying miles of barbed wire and around half a million mines (some sources claim far higher numbers), most of them anti-vehicle explosives, creating two mine belts 3.1 miles (5km) apart. Specific parts of the minefields were nicknamed by “the Devil’s gardens” by the Allied forces that stumbled on them: once an advancing unit broke through a lightly defended position, it would find themselves in a box with no Axis forces, but littered with mines and covered by hostile enfilading fire (hitting the flanks).

While Rommel built up some significant static defenses with the mine fields, his mobile defense was severely impaired by British deception operations (described later). Normally, he would have kept most of his armor in reserve, ready for it to rush to whatever schwerpunkt (strongpoint) in his lines the enemy was attacking. Not knowing where that attack was going to fall, however, forced him to break up much of his tank forces and disperse them along his lines – which meant he didn’t have a single large force he could concentrate.
 
One thing most people might not realize about German preparations for the battle is that Rommel wasn’t there when it began. He fell ill in September and had to fly to Germany to recover in a sanatorium. He was temporarily replaced by General Georg Stumme, a competent general nicknamed “Fireball” by the troops because his high blood pressure made his face permanently flushed red.

On the British side, an important part of the preparations was the deception of the enemy, codenamed Operation Bertram. Several tricks were developed to confuse the Axis about the position of Commonwealth troops and supplies, all under the tactical leadership of filmmaker Geoffrey Barkas. “Sunshield” was the codename for a lightweight canopy made of local materials that could be mounted on top of a tank to make it look like a truck; several versions were made so that different tank types could be disguised as different trucks. Simultaneously, fake tank hulls were also made, either immobile or placed over jeeps and able to drive around. During the preparations for the battle, tanks were placed far behind the lines, while real trucks were near the front. Shortly before the fighting began, however, the tanks were brought up and disguised as trucks while fake tanks were left in their place. This gave the Germans the impression that the tanks were still two days behind, when in fact they were ready to attack.

“Cannibal” was the name for a different fake truck, placed over artillery guns and the distinctive-looking tractors used to move them around, named thus because they “swallowed up” the guns.
 
2,000 tons of petrol were hidden by simply placing the cans inside trenches where they were hidden from aerial recon by the trench’s shadow. Miscellaneous supplies were placed in piles shaped like trucks in various parts of the desert. A false water pipeline including dummy pump houses, tanks, filling stations and straw men were built towards the southern edge of the corridor between the sea and the Qattara Depression to give the false idea that the major thrust was going to occur there. The pipeline was constructed deliberately slowly to suggest it would be complete only two days after the actual attack date.

A week before the attack, over 80 dummy artillery pieces were constructed at a certain location. They were initially well-camouflaged, but the camouflage was deliberately allowed to deteriorate over time. As predicted, the Germans spotted the guns, noticed they were fake, and paid no more heed to them. Before the battle began, the dummy guns were replaced with real ones at night, giving the Germans a massive surprise once they started up.

By the time the Allied preparations were done, 195,000 Commonwealth troops and 1,029 tanks were facing 116,000 Germans and Italians with 547 tanks, with similar advantages in the number of artillery and anti-tank guns. 

With the Germans thoroughly confused about the disposition of Commonwealth forces, Montgomery was ready to launch the offensive on October 23. The initial part, codenamed Lightfoot called for sappers aided by tanks equipped with mine flails to cut two narrow, single-tank paths across the German mine fields near the northern end of the lines, the site of the main push. Meanwhile, forces in the south, closer to the Qattara Depression, would launch a diversionary attack. Once tanks and accompanying infantry got through the mines, they would form a forward line and the second part of the battle, euphemistically called “the crumbling” by Montgomery, would begin: a brutal slugging match of attrition until the Axis lines weakened to the point where they could be broken through.

The battle began at 9:40 p.m. with a 20-minute barrage by 884 Commonwealth guns against the German frontline which then switched to precision strikes in support of the advancing infantry. The bombardment lasted for five and a half hours and expended about 529,000 shells. (For comparison, this was more than one-third of the shells fired during the Battle of the Somme in World War I over the course of four days.)

Progress across the Devil’s gardens was slower than anticipated. The mine flail tanks didn’t work very well; Axis defensive fire was heavy; the first tank elements stirred up so much dust that visibility was reduced to nothing, and traffic jams developed. Nevertheless, some advance was made, and the attack threw the German headquarters into chaos by the morning of October 24.

Operation Bertram paid off in spades as confused reports from the front became more and more hysterical, with one Italian unit radioing in that they had been wiped out by “drunken negroes with tanks.” General Stumme got in his car and had his driver take him to the front without an escort so he could get an accurate idea of what was going on. The car came under attack on the way; the driver was shot in the head; Stumme jumped out to take cover, suffered a heart attack and died without ever being hit. Rommel was quickly ordered back to Africa, but only got there on the following day after a quick stop in Rome to exhort the Italians to send more supplies.

By that time, the operation had already moved on to the “crumbling” stage. Fighting was bloody in the north, with several German and Italian counterattacks launched and beaten back. The Desert Air Force, comprising British, South African and Australian units, wreaked havoc on Axis positions. Commonwealth ground forces eventually managed to cross through the minefields and established a salient 6 miles wide and 5 miles deep (9.7 by 8 km), though further advancement was stopped by rigid Axis defense.

The several days of back-and-forth were bloody on both sides. The 9th Australian Division, which already distinguished itself during the defense of Tobruk (Read our earlier article) in 1941, earned further acclaim with their limitless tenacity during the battle. Montgomery later told a friend “The more I think back, the more I realise that winning was only made possible by the bravery of the 9th Australian Division in holding the road against counter-attacks and slowly pushing forward despite increasing casualties. I do not know of any [other] Allied Division who could have done it. I must go to Australia and gather the 9th Division together so I can thank them properly.”

On the 26th, British torpedo bombers destroyed two Axis tankers in Tobruk; several more were sunk in the Mediterranean in the following days. The loss of these ships and their precious cargo rang the death knell over Rommel’s hopes of receiving more fuel for his mechanized units. In fact, Rommel realized he no longer had enough fuel to disengage the enemy, and that his only hope was to dig in and win via attrition. The only fuel he could get was whatever could be flown in from Crete by aircraft, and even that mattered little, as the Desert Fox only had 90 operational tanks left against 800 British ones.

On November 2, Montgomery launched Operation Supercharge, a renewed effort to destroy Axis tanks, fuel and supply routes, and to force them out of their entrenched positions and into the open. The attack, started by seven hours of aerial bombardment and spearheaded by the 2nd New Zealand Division in the early hours, revitalized the offensive and made it even more savage than before.

The 9th Armoured Brigade was ordered to charge directly into a line of German and Italian anti-tank guns in the morning, when they would be silhouetted against the rising sun. Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg of the 2nd New Zealand Division noted “We all realise that for armour to attack a wall of guns sounds like another Balaclava*, it is properly an infantry job. But there are no more infantry available. So our armour must do it.” (* Referring to the famous and disastrous “Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1854 during the Crimean War.)
 
The tank charge caused heavy damage but failed to breach Axis lines; the brigade’s force of fighting tanks was reduced from 94 to 14. After the action, one Brigadier Gentry surveyed the scene and found Brigadier Currie, the unit’s leader, sleeping on a stretcher. He woke him up, saying “Sorry to wake you John, but I'd like to know where your tanks are?" Currie waved at a group of tanks around him and replied, "There they are." Gentry said "I don't mean your headquarters tanks, I mean your armoured regiments. Where are they?" Currie waved his arm and again replied, "There are my armoured regiments, Bill." Montgomery later recognized the sacrifice of the unit with the words “If the British armour owed any debt to the infantry of the Eighth Army, the debt was paid on November 2 by 9th Armoured in heroism and blood.”

On the same day, Rommel reported to Hitler that he could no longer prevent an Allied breakthrough, which, in turn, would mean the destruction of the entire Axis army. Unsurprisingly, Hitler replied with orders to hold the line at all costs, ending his message with “As to your troops, you can show them no other road than that to victory or death.” Deciding that the order was impossible, Rommel moved his Afrika Korps west, leaving behind two Italian corps and a light division to fight a delaying action.
 
Over the next couple of days, the Italian units left behind crumbled, some after fighting to their last bullets. Commonwealth forces attempted to pursue Rommel, but they too were exhausted and low on fuel. The Second Battle of El Alamein ended at nightfall on November 11, when Commonwealth units captured Halfaya Pass along the Egyptian-Libyan border, leaving no more fighting Axis units in Egypt.

The Axis forces under Rommel were not quite down for the count, but their dislodgement from Egypt meant that they would never again threaten the Suez Canal and the oil fields of the Middle East. Beaten and low on supplies, they would continue to fight on for a while but would be eventually ousted from North Africa altogether, yielding the ground to the Allies and the coming liberation of Italy. It was for a good reason that Churchill stated on November 10, one day before the battle ended: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

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