Second Battle of El Alamein

Fought in the Egyptian desert near the railway halt of El Alamein from 23 October to 4 November 1942, this battle saw the British Eighth Army under Bernard Montgomery break the German–Italian Panzer Army Africa of Erwin Rommel and drive it out of Egypt for good. Coming just before Allied landings in French North Africa, it removed the Axis threat to the Suez Canal and the oil of the Middle East and gave the western Allies their first large success of the Second World War against the Axis since late 1941.

After victory at Gazala in June 1942, Rommel's German and Italian army pushed deep into Egypt. The British fell back to a short line at El Alamein, less than 100 kilometres from Alexandria, where the sea to the north and the impassable Qattara Depression to the south ruled out outflanking moves. Axis attacks there were held in July, and a final attempt by Rommel at Alam el Halfa at the end of August also failed.

In August Winston Churchill reorganised the command, appointing General Harold Alexander as Commander-in-Chief Middle East and, after his first choice was killed in an air attack, Montgomery to lead the Eighth Army. Britain poured in men and equipment, including new American Sherman tanks, and codebreaking let the Allies sink many of the ships carrying Axis fuel. Rommel, short of supplies and in poor health, went home on sick leave in September, leaving General Georg Stumme in command. Before leaving he had his men lay deep belts of mines, about half a million in all, known as the "Devil's Gardens".

By late October Montgomery had about 195,000 men and over 1,000 tanks against roughly 104,000 to 116,000 Axis troops with some 550 tanks. A deception plan, Operation Bertram, used dummy dumps and vehicles to disguise where and when he would strike. The attack, Operation Lightfoot, opened at 9.40 p.m. on 23 October with a barrage from about 1,000 guns. Infantry of four divisions, from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, advanced in the north while engineers struggled to clear lanes through the minefields for the tanks.

Progress was slower than planned. On 24 October Stumme died of a heart attack while visiting the front, and Rommel flew back, reaching his headquarters on the 25th. Montgomery's tanks repeatedly failed to break the Axis anti-tank screen, and Churchill grumbled impatiently in London. But Montgomery saw the battle as one of attrition, a "crumbling" of the enemy by constant artillery and air attack, and kept regrouping for fresh blows, notably by the 9th Australian Division near the coast.

The second great attack, Operation Supercharge, began early on 2 November after hours of bombing and shelling. The 9th Armoured Brigade charged the Axis gun line at dawn and was almost destroyed, but its sacrifice and the armoured battles that followed wore Rommel's tank strength down to a few dozen German tanks. Rommel warned Hitler that his army faced destruction and began to pull back; on 3 November he received an order to stand fast and yield no ground. On 4 November, with British armour breaking through and his Italian divisions encircled, he ordered a full retreat. Most of the unmotorised Italian infantry could not escape and was captured.

The Eighth Army suffered about 13,560 casualties, including some 2,350 killed. Axis losses are much less certain, given the chaos of the retreat; estimates of total Axis casualties range from about 37,000 to more than 70,000, with around 30,000 prisoners counted by 11 November.

The pursuit was slow, and Rommel escaped westward across Libya. On 8 November Allied forces landed in French North Africa in Operation Torch, and in May 1943 the remaining Axis armies in Tunisia surrendered. Alexander urged Churchill to "ring out the bells", and Churchill later wrote that it might almost be said that before Alamein there had been no victories and after it no defeats.

Our 1938 map shows Egypt and Libya on the eve of the war, and the 1945 map shows North Africa after the Axis had been driven out.