Between 25 October and 1 November the Second Battle of El Alamein became what Montgomery called a “crumbling” battle. Its center of gravity moved to the northern flank, where the 9th Australian Division attacked toward the coast road and the railway, and to the Kidney Ridge salient, where a single British infantry battalion with anti-tank guns broke up a major armored counterattack. Rommel, back in command, threw his reserves into these sectors. By the end of the week his army had little left to meet the next blow.

Why the battle turned north

By the morning of 25 October the infantry of XXX Corps held most of the ground they had attacked on the opening night, and the armor of X Corps was spread through the two corridors and onto Miteiriya Ridge, but there was no breakout. Montgomery decided not to continue the planned New Zealand attack southwest from Miteiriya, which would have been costly against intact defenses, and instead to shift the effort to the northern flank. There the 9th Australian Division, under Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead, was to attack north and northwest toward the coast, threatening to cut off the Axis troops holding the coastal sector between Tel el Eisa and Sidi Abd el Rahman.

The northern attacks had two purposes. One was to destroy the German and Italian infantry in the coastal pocket, the “crumbling” that Montgomery’s revised plan had foreseen. The other, increasingly important as the week went on, was to draw Rommel’s reserves to the north, away from the sector where Montgomery would make his next major attack. The 9th Australian Division’s account of these days is the best documented part of the battle, because the Australian War Memorial and the Australian official history by Barton Maughan recorded it in detail.

Trig 29

Trig 29, also called Point 29, was a slight rise marked by a survey point, inside the Axis defenses northwest of the Australian sector. It gave observation over the surrounding flat ground and was held by German troops. On the night of 25–26 October the 26th Australian Brigade attacked it. The 2/48th Battalion took the feature itself, with one company carried forward in Bren gun carriers as the barrage lifted, and the 2/24th Battalion attacked on its right. The position was taken before dawn.

During the attack, Private Percival Eric Gratwick of the 2/48th, a 40-year-old former blacksmith, drover and prospector, charged two enemy posts that were holding up his company, clearing them with grenades and bayonet before he was killed. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously; his Australian War Memorial record gives the details. Over the next two days, according to the Memorial, the Australians on and around Trig 29 repelled about 25 attempts to retake it, held first by the 2/48th and then by the 2/17th Battalion. The counterattacks drew in German armor and the Italian 7th Bersaglieri Regiment.

Kidney Ridge and the Snipe action

South of the Australians, the 1st Armoured Division and the 51st (Highland) Division held the northern corridor around a feature the British called Kidney Ridge, a kidney-shaped contour on the map that was in fact a slight depression. On the night of 26–27 October Montgomery ordered two infantry battalions of the 7th Motor Brigade to seize positions code-named Woodcock and Snipe to its northwest and west, from which the armor could advance. The 2nd Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps went for Woodcock; the 2nd Battalion of The Rifle Brigade, under Lieutenant Colonel Victor Turner, with 6-pounder anti-tank guns of its own and of the 239th Battery, 76th Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, dug in at Snipe.

On 27 October the Snipe position, isolated in the open desert, was attacked through the day by German and Italian tanks of the 15th Panzer, 21st Panzer and Littorio divisions. The riflemen and gunners held it until they were withdrawn that night, having lost most of their guns. Turner, wounded in the head, was awarded the Victoria Cross. The number of tanks knocked out at Snipe has been argued over since: the battalion was credited at the time with more than 30 German and Italian tanks and a number of self-propelled guns, while later investigations of the ground suggested a smaller but still substantial total. Either way, the action showed that well-sited 6-pounders could stop German armor in the open.

The same afternoon Rommel launched the largest German counterattack of the battle, using the 21st Panzer Division, which he had ordered north from the southern sector on 26 October, together with the 15th Panzer and 90th Light divisions. The attack was broken up by British artillery, anti-tank guns and tanks firing from positions they had already taken, and by repeated attacks of the Desert Air Force, whose light bombers caught the German columns as they formed up. It failed with heavy losses. By 28 October a Panzerarmee report, intercepted and read by British intelligence, gave the army 81 serviceable German and 197 Italian tanks, against about 800 British.

Rommel’s battle of attrition

Rommel had returned on the evening of 25 October to an army that had already lost the initiative. His problem was not only tanks but fuel. On 26 October the tanker Proserpina, carrying fuel intended for the Panzerarmee, was sunk off Tobruk by RAF torpedo bombers, and other cargoes were lost in the following days, as Supplies, Air Power and Deception explains. Every move of the armored divisions from one sector to another burned fuel that might be needed for a withdrawal, and once the 21st Panzer Division had been brought north it could not easily be sent back. Rommel concluded within days that the Eighth Army could replace its losses and his army could not, and that a battle of attrition in the minefields was one he would lose. His options were to keep counterattacking, at heavy cost, or to withdraw to a position farther west, which Hitler’s headquarters was unlikely to accept and for which he lacked the fuel. Through the last days of October he chose to counterattack. The section map shows the positions of the German reserves he moved to the coast.

Toward the coast road

On 28 October Montgomery began to regroup. He took the 2nd New Zealand Division and the 1st Armoured Division out of the line to form a reserve for a new attack, and gave the Australians the task of a deeper thrust northward. In London, Winston Churchill was impatient at the apparent pause; General Sir Harold Alexander and the British Minister of State in Cairo, Richard Casey, assured him that the battle was going to plan. On the night of 28–29 October the 20th and 26th Australian Brigades attacked north from the Trig 29 salient toward the railway and the coast road. The 2/23rd Battalion, with British Valentine tanks in support, pushed toward the railway; other battalions met strong resistance, and the attack gained ground but did not reach the coast.

The attacks nevertheless had the effect Montgomery wanted. Rommel believed that the main British effort was now being made along the coast, and he moved the 90th Light Division and then much of the 21st Panzer Division to the area around Sidi Abd el Rahman to meet it. The German armor and motorized infantry that might have been held back to stop a breakthrough elsewhere were committed to counterattacks against the Australian salient. Montgomery, seeing the German concentration in the north, decided that his next attack, Supercharge, would go in farther south than he had first planned, against a sector held mostly by Italian troops.

Thompson’s Post, the Blockhouse and the Saucer

On the night of 30–31 October the Australians attacked again, this time to cross the railway and the road and then turn east toward the coast behind the German positions at Thompson’s Post. The 2/32nd Battalion of the 24th Brigade crossed the railway and took a railwayman’s hut that became known as the Blockhouse, and the attack reached a depression north of the railway called the Saucer. The 2/24th and 2/48th Battalions, already much reduced, turned east toward Thompson’s Post through ground remembered by names such as the Fig Orchard. Fighting continued all night and through the next day.

During the attack on the night of 30–31 October, Sergeant William Henry Kibby of the 2/48th Battalion, who had already distinguished himself in the opening attack and at Trig 29, went forward alone against machine-gun posts holding up the remnants of his company and was killed. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. On 31 October and 1 November German infantry and tanks counterattacked the Saucer repeatedly. The British official history records about 200 fighter sorties flown on 31 October in answer to requests for special cover over the area. Brigadier Arthur Godfrey, commander of the 24th Australian Brigade, was killed when a shell hit his forward headquarters on 1 November.

The Australians held most of what they had taken. Their attacks had not cut off the coastal pocket, but they had drawn the bulk of the German reserves into the north and worn them down. The Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs and the Memorial’s commemorative address by the historian Mark Johnston give fuller accounts of the battalions involved.

“winning was only made possible by the bravery of the 9th Australian Division”

The cost to one division

The 9th Australian Division bore a heavier share of the fighting than any other Eighth Army division. The Australian War Memorial gives its casualties for the battle as 2,694, about a fifth of the army’s total, including 620 killed and 1,944 wounded. The Anzac Memorial in Sydney gives slightly different figures for the two Alamein battles combined. The Memorial also counts almost 5,500 Australian casualties between early July and 5 November 1942, including 1,259 killed. Many of the battalions that fought at Trig 29 and Thompson’s Post ended the battle at a fraction of their strength. After the breakthrough the division was withdrawn, and in early 1943 it returned to Australia to fight against Japan in New Guinea.

By 1 November the Eighth Army had regrouped and the New Zealand Division was ready for the next attack. The preparations and the breakthrough are covered in Operation Supercharge; the opening phase that led to this week of attrition is in Operation Lightfoot. For the Australian side of the war after 1942, see the Pacific collections, including Guadalcanal.

Gallery · 7 photographs · select to enlarge

The northern sector

Sources and further reading

More from The Lake Norman Brief