El Alamein was fought on Egyptian land by armies from Europe, Australasia, Africa and Asia, few of whose soldiers had any connection to Egypt before the war. This final chapter looks at Egypt’s position during the campaign, the cemeteries and memorials built at El Alamein after the war, the ways the battle is remembered elsewhere, and the explosive remnants that continued to kill and maim long after the guns had moved west.

Egypt in 1942

In 1942 Egypt was a nominally independent kingdom under King Farouk. Britain had recognized its independence in 1922 but kept troops in the country, and the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, debated in the British Parliament that November, recognized Egyptian sovereignty while allowing British forces to remain to defend the Suez Canal and imperial communications, with wider rights in wartime. Egypt broke off relations with Germany in 1939 but did not declare war on the Axis until February 1945. Its territory was nonetheless the Commonwealth’s main base in the Middle East and, from 1940 to 1942, a battlefield.

British power in Egypt was felt as occupation by many Egyptians, and the war sharpened the tension. In February 1942 the British ambassador used troops and tanks outside Abdeen Palace in Cairo to force King Farouk to appoint a government acceptable to Britain, an episode that left lasting resentment. When Rommel’s army approached in the summer of 1942, some Egyptian politicians and officers hoped that an Axis victory might end British control. The desert west of Alexandria where the battle was fought was thinly populated, mainly by Bedouin communities whose grazing lands and wells lay across the battlefield; their experience of the fighting and its aftermath is poorly recorded in the military histories. The background is covered in The Road to El Alamein.

The Commonwealth war cemetery

Soldiers killed in the battle were first buried near where they fell or in battlefield cemeteries behind the lines. The Australian War Memorial holds a photograph of the burial of Brigadier Arthur Godfrey of the 24th Australian Brigade, killed on 1 November, in the El Alamein Box Cemetery on 5 November 1942, and another of a dedication ceremony there on 17 November. After the war the Army Graves Service and then the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission concentrated graves from across the Western Desert into a large cemetery on a ridge beside the old coast road at El Alamein, about 130 kilometers west of Alexandria.

According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, El Alamein War Cemetery now contains 7,240 Commonwealth burials of the Second World War, 815 of them unidentified, and 102 war graves of other nationalities. An older CWGC information sheet, preserved by Australia’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs, gave 7,367 burials and 821 unidentified; the difference reflects revisions to the records over time. The cemetery holds men who died throughout the Western Desert campaigns, not only in October and November 1942, which is why its totals cannot be matched against the battle’s casualty returns described in Casualties, Prisoners and the Record. Within it, the Alamein Cremation Memorial commemorates more than 600 men whose remains were cremated in Egypt and Libya in keeping with their faith.

The Alamein Memorial and the missing

The Alamein Memorial, designed by Sir Hubert Worthington, forms the cemetery’s entrance. Its panels commemorate more than 8,500 soldiers of the Commonwealth land forces who died in Egypt and Libya, and in Eighth Army operations in Tunisia up to 19 February 1943, and who have no known grave, together with those who died in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Persia. Its air forces panels commemorate more than 3,000 airmen with no known grave who died over a wider area that included Egypt, Libya, Greece and East Africa. Veterans Affairs Canada notes that the memorial includes 213 Canadian airmen. Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein unveiled it on 24 October 1954, the twelfth anniversary of the opening of the battle.

A name on the memorial is a different record from a grave. It shows that a man died and was not found or identified, not where or exactly when he died. Families who could not visit Egypt often knew of their relatives only through such inscriptions and through photographs of the cemetery. Searches can be made through the CWGC’s Find War Dead database, which records both graves and memorial panels.

The German and Italian memorials

West of the Commonwealth cemetery, on the coast road toward Mersa Matruh, stand the German and Italian memorials. The German memorial, built by the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund), is an octagonal structure resembling a fortress, 42 meters across and 12 meters high, around a courtyard with crypts in seven of its eight niches. According to the Volksbund, it holds 4,283 German dead of the Second World War and 30 of the First, a total of 4,313, with their names on bronze plaques. It was inaugurated on 28 October 1959, after the earlier German cemetery at Tobruk had been completed.

The Italian military memorial, the Sacrario militare italiano, holds the remains of more than 5,200 Italian soldiers, according to the Italian Army. It is closely associated with Paolo Caccia Dominioni, an engineer officer who had commanded the 31st Engineer Battalion in North Africa and who spent years after the war searching the battlefield for the remains of the dead of all nations. Nearby, on a small hill, is the Italian base called Quota 33, built from 1948 and completed in 1955. Italian memory of the battle centers on the Folgore division and the other units that fought in the south and covered the retreat.

How the battle is remembered abroad

The name El Alamein traveled. In Britain, the village of Enham in Hampshire, a center for disabled ex-servicemen and their families, was renamed Enham Alamein in gratitude for a gift raised by a committee in Egypt after the battle. According to the Enham Trust, the Egyptian appeal raised £225,000, and the first instalment of £100,000 was handed over on 23 October 1945, the third anniversary of the battle. In Sydney, the El Alamein Fountain in Fitzroy Gardens at Kings Cross, designed by the architect Robert Woodward and opened on 18 November 1961, commemorates the 9th Australian Division, according to the City of Sydney.

Streets in France, Italy and elsewhere bear the name, and Naples has a monument to the Italian dead of El Alamein in the Giardini del Molosiglio. Anniversaries are marked at the cemeteries by delegations from the countries whose soldiers fought there; in October 2012 the New Zealand Defence Force sent a representative party to the 70th anniversary commemoration on behalf of the 76,000 New Zealanders who served in North Africa. Montgomery took “of Alamein” into his title when he was made a viscount in 1946. In Britain the battle became, with the Battle of Britain, one of the defining episodes of the national memory of the war, partly through Churchill’s own writing about it.

The mines left behind

Both armies mined the ground between the Mediterranean and the Qattara Depression, the Axis on the scale described in The Armies and the Ground and the British in their own defensive belts, and the fighting along the coast from Sollum to El Alamein left unexploded shells, bombs and grenades across a wide area. Wartime minefield records were incomplete; the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor reports that Egyptian military engineers described British minefield maps as sketch maps, and that many mines had been laid without records. Shifting sand buried some mines deeper and exposed others.

For decades the remnants killed and injured people who lived and worked in the area: herders, farmers, travelers and children, as well as people collecting scrap metal. The Monitor notes that the precise extent of contamination remains unknown and that past estimates have been unreliable. Egyptian government statements have at times given figures in the millions or tens of millions of mines and items of ordnance in the Western Desert. In October 2017 the European Union’s ambassador cited about 2,680 square kilometers of the northwest coast still estimated to be contaminated. Contamination is concentrated around the battle sites between the Qattara Depression and El Alamein and near Mersa Matruh and Sollum. Egypt is not a party to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, and its Sinai and Eastern Desert regions also contain mines from the wars of 1956 to 1973.

Clearance, development and survivors

Clearance has been carried out mainly by the Egyptian Army’s engineers, coordinated since the 2000s by a government body for mine clearance and the development of the northwest coast, with support from the United Nations Development Programme, the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and others. The United Kingdom has reported funding, with other donors, the clearance of 130,446 acres around El Alamein since 2006. A UNDP-supported project’s second phase, from 2014 to 2019, set a target of 902 square kilometers and reported 1,674 square kilometers cleared, according to UNDP; a 2023 joint statement by Egypt, the EU and UNDP gave 1,950 square kilometers for the wider period from 2007 to 2018. Part of the cleared land is the site of the new city of New Alamein.

Clearance figures measure land released, not the number of people protected or helped. The same programs included support for survivors. In October 2016 the EU, UNDP and Egypt’s Ministry of International Cooperation opened an artificial limbs center in Marsa Matrouh, the first in the region, according to the European External Action Service. The 2023 joint statement reported that nearly 170 landmine survivors had received prosthetic fitting and maintenance, 215 households of mine victims had been helped to start small businesses, and two mine-risk education campaigns in 2015 and 2017 had reached 92,162 people. The figures are modest beside the area of contaminated land, and the Monitor’s caution about the reliability of reporting applies to them as well.

Gallery · 7 photographs · select to enlarge

Memorials and the battlefield today

Sources and further reading

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