Operation Lightfoot was the opening of the Second Battle of El Alamein: a night assault by four infantry divisions of XXX Corps through the northern minefields, a diversionary attack by XIII Corps in the south, and an attempt to pass two armored divisions through the gaps before dawn. The infantry largely succeeded. The armored breakout did not, and by 25 October the battle had become the struggle of attrition that Montgomery’s revised plan had anticipated.

The plan for the night of 23 October

Montgomery’s plan put the main weight in the north, between the coast and the Miteiriya Ridge. XXX Corps under Lieutenant General Oliver Leese would attack with four divisions abreast. From north to south they were the 9th Australian Division, the 51st (Highland) Division, the 2nd New Zealand Division and the 1st South African Division. Their final objective, called the Oxalic line, lay beyond the main Axis minefield, several kilometers from their start lines. Behind them, the armored divisions of X Corps would pass through two corridors: the 1st Armoured Division through a northern corridor behind the Australians and Highlanders, and the 10th Armoured Division through a southern corridor over Miteiriya Ridge behind the New Zealanders.

The name Lightfoot reflected a simple fact about the minefields: infantry could walk over anti-tank mines, which needed the weight of a vehicle to set them off, though not over the anti-personnel mines and booby traps sown among them. The infantry would therefore go first, clearing and holding the ground while engineers lifted the mines in lanes wide enough for tanks. The attack was timed for a night of bright moonlight. Farther south, XIII Corps under Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks would attack through the minefields near Deir el Munassib and Qaret el Himeimat to hold the 21st Panzer and Ariete divisions in that sector, while the 7th Armoured Division was to be preserved for later use.

The barrage

The guns opened at 21:40, local time. The Australian War Memorial counts 908 guns in the opening barrage; NZ History gives about 900; Niall Barr’s study puts the number of field and medium guns firing at 882. For about fifteen minutes the artillery concentrated on known Axis gun positions, in a counter-battery program prepared from air photographs and sound-ranging. Then, at about 22:00, the fire shifted to the forward Axis defenses and the infantry crossed their start lines, advancing behind a barrage that lifted at a fixed rate. The flash and noise were remembered by everyone who was there; according to the Imperial War Museums, the barrage was reported to have been heard in Alexandria, some 100 kilometers away.

The artillery program had been worked out in great detail. Each gun had its targets and timings for the night, and the field regiments of all four attacking divisions and the corps and army medium regiments were coordinated under a single plan. The barrage was not intended to destroy the Axis defenses by itself. Its job was to stun and suppress the defenders long enough for the infantry to reach them, and to keep enemy artillery quiet during the most dangerous part of the advance. Its weight, by the standards of the desert war, was without precedent, and it set a pattern that Montgomery would repeat on 2 November at the start of Operation Supercharge.

Four divisions in the minefields

The infantry advanced in lines of companies, following compass bearings and tape laid by navigators, with the barrage ahead of them and the noise of the guns behind. The 51st (Highland) Division went forward with pipers playing in some battalions. Resistance varied from outpost to outpost; some Axis positions surrendered quickly, others had to be cleared with grenades and bayonets, and machine guns firing on fixed lines across the minefields caused heavy losses. The Australians on the northern flank and the New Zealanders on Miteiriya Ridge reached most of their final objectives during the night. The Highlanders and South Africans took most of their ground but stopped short of the Oxalic line in places.

Many of the Axis positions in the forward zone were held by Italian infantry of the Trento and Bologna divisions, interleaved with battalions of the German 164th Light Division. The defenders had been shaken by the barrage and in places overrun, but the deeper positions and the anti-tank gun screen behind the main minefield were largely intact at dawn. Prisoners began to come back through the lanes on the first night. The Australian War Memorial’s collection of war diaries and unit documents gives a detailed, hour-by-hour sense of the night from the Australian side.

Engineers and the gaps

Behind the infantry came the engineers and the minefield task forces that were to open the lanes for the armor. Each lane had to be found, cleared, marked and kept open: sappers probed with bayonets and swept with mine detectors, a new Polish-designed type being used in numbers for the first time, while others laid white tape and set up lamps shining back toward the British side. A small number of Matilda “Scorpion” tanks fitted with rotating flails to explode mines were also used, the first such vehicles in action, but they were slow, raised enormous dust and frequently broke down. Most of the work was done by hand under fire.

The minefields were deeper and more irregular than the air photographs had shown, and the second belt in particular slowed the clearance. A lane that was clear at one point could be blocked by a single disabled vehicle, and every vehicle that left the marked track risked a mine. By the early hours of 24 October long columns of tanks, trucks, guns and ambulances were waiting nose to tail in the corridors, raising dust and drawing artillery fire. The difficulties of a mined battlefield did not end with the battle; the same fields remained a hazard for decades, as Chapter 9, Egypt, Memory and Unexploded Ordnance, describes.

The armor stalls

At first light on 24 October the leading armored brigades were still in the minefields or just emerging from them. In the northern corridor the 1st Armoured Division’s 2nd Armoured Brigade reached the western edge of the minefield but could not get much farther against the anti-tank guns beyond. In the south the 10th Armoured Division’s brigades reached Miteiriya Ridge but were exposed on the crest and drew back. The armored commanders were reluctant to drive into a screen of 88 mm and 50 mm anti-tank guns that they could not see, a reluctance shaped by the losses at Gazala and in July. Montgomery’s plan had required the armor to fight its way out if it could not pass through unopposed.

On the night of 24–25 October the 10th Armoured Division tried again to push its armor beyond Miteiriya Ridge. The attempt was confused, and German aircraft bombed a column of soft vehicles in the corridor, setting it on fire. In the early hours of 25 October Montgomery held a conference with Leese and the X Corps commander, Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden, and insisted that the armor continue. By the end of 25 October some armored units were beyond the ridge, but the hoped-for breakout into open country had not happened. Montgomery recast the battle: the New Zealanders would not attack southwest from Miteiriya as planned, and the weight would shift north to the 9th Australian Division, beginning on the night of 25–26 October.

The disagreement over the armor’s role became one of the best-known controversies of the battle. Montgomery and Leese believed the armored divisions had been too cautious and had not tried hard enough to break out on 24 October. Lumsden and his divisional commanders argued that tanks pushed forward over the crest of Miteiriya Ridge in daylight, against an unbroken screen of anti-tank guns, would simply be destroyed, and that the plan asked the armor to do the infantry’s job. Both views have their defenders among historians. What is clear is that the corridors were too narrow and congested to deploy two armored divisions quickly, and that the infantry divisions, which had already lost heavily on the first night, were left holding exposed positions in the minefields while the argument went on.

Stumme’s death and the Axis response

On the Axis side, the scale and timing of the attack came as a surprise, as the Bertram deception described in Supplies, Air Power and Deception had intended. Communications with the forward positions had been cut by the barrage, and the Panzerarmee’s commander, General Georg Stumme, drove forward on the morning of 24 October to see for himself. His car came under fire; he fell from it and died, apparently of a heart attack. His body was not found until the next day. General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma of the Afrika Korps took temporary command. Hitler telephoned Rommel, who was convalescing in Austria, and Rommel flew back, arriving at his headquarters on the evening of 25 October.

The 15th Panzer and Littorio divisions counterattacked the British salient through 24 and 25 October, piecemeal and at heavy cost. The Afrika Korps reported large tank losses; according to Rommel’s own assessment on his return, the 15th Panzer Division was down to 31 serviceable tanks. The 21st Panzer and Ariete divisions were still held in the south by the threat there. The Axis army had lost much of its forward defensive zone and a large part of its northern armor, but its main anti-tank screen and its reserves were still in place.

The southern attack

In the south XIII Corps attacked on the same night through the minefields the British called January and February, west of Deir el Munassib. The 44th Division and the 7th Armoured Division got through the first belt but were stopped in the second, and the attack was not pressed after 25 October because Montgomery wanted the 7th Armoured Division kept intact. On the far southern flank the 1st Free French Brigade attacked the high ground at Qaret el Himeimat and the El Taqa plateau. It gained some ground but was driven back by German and Italian counterattacks, including troops of the Folgore parachute division, and lost heavily. The southern attack did not break through, but it achieved one of its purposes: the 21st Panzer and Ariete divisions stayed in the south until Rommel brought them north after 26 October.

By the morning of 26 October the break-in had cost the Eighth Army heavily, especially in the infantry divisions, but it had placed the army inside the Axis defenses with a large reserve of tanks still in hand. The next phase, fought mostly on the northern flank around Trig 29 and Kidney Ridge, is the subject of The Fight in the North. The approach of the armies to this point is described in The Armies and the Ground, and the opening of the American and British campaign at the other end of North Africa a fortnight later is in Operation Torch.

Gallery · 6 photographs · select to enlarge

The opening night and the first days

Sources and further reading

More from The Lake Norman Brief