The Second Battle of El Alamein was fought where it was because of a retreat. Between 26 May and 30 June 1942 the British Eighth Army was driven more than 500 kilometers east, from the Gazala line in Libya to a position in Egypt anchored on the sea and the Qattara Depression. This chapter follows that retreat, the July fighting that stopped the Axis advance, the change of command in August, and the Battle of Alam Halfa that ended Rommel’s offensive.

Gazala and the loss of the Eighth Army’s armor

At the end of May 1942 the Eighth Army under Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie held a line of minefields and fortified brigade “boxes” running about 80 kilometers south from Gazala, on the Libyan coast west of Tobruk, to the desert outpost of Bir Hakeim. On 26 May Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika attacked. While Italian infantry pinned the northern part of the line, the German and Italian armored divisions swung around its southern end. The 1st Free French Brigade under Brigadier General Marie-Pierre Koenig held Bir Hakeim until the night of 10–11 June, when most of the garrison broke out. In the meantime British armored brigades, committed piecemeal, were defeated in a series of engagements around the area known as the Cauldron and at Knightsbridge.

By 14 June Ritchie had ordered the divisions still holding the northern Gazala positions to withdraw. The 1st South African Division went back along the coast road; the British 50th (Northumbrian) Division broke out westward through the Italian lines and then circled south and east to escape. The Eighth Army fell back toward the Egyptian frontier, leaving Tobruk to be held as a garrison. Unlike in 1941, when the 9th Australian Division and other troops had held it through an eight-month siege, Tobruk’s defenses had been neglected and its minefields partly lifted for use elsewhere. It was isolated within days.

The fall of Tobruk, 21 June 1942

The Axis assault on Tobruk began early on 20 June with heavy air attacks on the southeastern perimeter, followed by German armor and infantry. By evening the attackers had reached the harbor. On the morning of 21 June Major General Hendrik Klopper, commanding the 2nd South African Division and the garrison, surrendered. About 33,000 Commonwealth troops were taken prisoner; detailed breakdowns give roughly 32,200, including about 19,000 British, 10,720 South African and 2,500 Indian soldiers. Stocks of fuel, food, water and some 2,000 vehicles fell into Axis hands, and captured British trucks soon made up a large share of Rommel’s transport.

Hitler promoted Rommel to field marshal on 22 June. The victory changed Axis strategy. A planned airborne and seaborne invasion of Malta, the British island base astride the supply route from Italy to Libya, had been scheduled to follow the capture of Tobruk. Rommel instead asked to pursue the beaten British into Egypt, and Hitler and Mussolini agreed to postpone Malta. The decision gave the Panzerarmee a chance to reach Alexandria and the Suez Canal, but it left Malta’s submarines and aircraft in action against the convoys on which every further advance depended. Chapter 3, Supplies, Air Power and Deception, follows the consequences.

The news reached Winston Churchill in Washington, where he was meeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The State Department’s published record notes that the report of Tobruk’s surrender was met by an American decision to ship to the British in Africa 300 tanks and 100 self-propelled guns that had been assigned to the U.S. 1st Armored Division. These were M4 Shermans and M7 105 mm self-propelled howitzers, known to the British as the Priest. They traveled the long sea route around the Cape of Good Hope, exposed to the U-boat war described in the Battle of the Atlantic collection, arrived in Egypt in early September and fought in October.

Mersa Matruh, Minqar Qaim and the Flap

On 25 June General Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, relieved Ritchie and took personal command of the Eighth Army. He decided not to make a final stand at the fortified port of Mersa Matruh, about 200 kilometers inside Egypt, but to fight a delaying battle there and fall back if necessary to El Alamein. The Axis attack came on 26 June. X Corps held Matruh itself while XIII Corps, including the 2nd New Zealand Division, was deployed on the escarpment to the south. The two corps were poorly coordinated, and German armor drove into the gap between them.

The New Zealanders were surrounded at Minqar Qaim on 27 June. Their commander, Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg, was wounded by a shell splinter that afternoon. That night the 4th New Zealand Brigade broke through the encircling German positions with a bayonet attack and the division escaped east in its vehicles, an episode recorded in detail by Archives New Zealand. The garrison of Matruh fought its way out on the night of 28–29 June, and Italian Bersaglieri entered the town on 29 June. The retreat continued to El Alamein, about 180 kilometers farther east.

In Cairo and Alexandria the approach of the Axis army caused what British troops called the Flap. The Mediterranean Fleet dispersed most of its ships from Alexandria to ports farther east, and on 1 July General Headquarters Middle East and the British Embassy in Cairo burned secret files, a day remembered as “Ash Wednesday.” In Germany the same week, the main summer offensive in the Soviet Union, Case Blue, opened on 28 June; the threat of a German pincer reaching the Middle East from both Egypt and the Caucasus shaped Allied planning through the summer. The Stalingrad collection covers the northern arm of that threat.

Why El Alamein

El Alamein was a halt on the coastal railway from Alexandria to Mersa Matruh, with a few buildings and a station. Its value was geographic. About 65 kilometers to the south, according to the Australian War Memorial, lay the Qattara Depression, a basin below sea level filled with salt marsh and soft sand that heavy vehicles could not cross in strength. Between the sea and the depression the desert was not featureless. Low ridges such as Tel el Eisa near the coast and Miteiriya and Ruweisat farther inland gave observation over the flat ground; shallow depressions such as Deir el Shein and El Mreir offered cover. Whoever held the ridges could see and shell the other side’s movements.

Before the war the British had surveyed the position and in 1941–42 had begun to build defended localities there. When the Eighth Army arrived at the end of June 1942, the main ones were the El Alamein “box” on the coast, held by the 1st South African Division, a box at Deir el Shein held by the newly arrived 18th Indian Infantry Brigade, and other defended localities farther south toward the depression. The gaps between them were covered by mobile columns, artillery and the remains of the armored brigades. It was a line of strongpoints rather than a continuous front, and the next month decided whether it would hold. Chapter 2, The Armies and the Ground, describes the terrain in more detail.

The First Battle of El Alamein, July 1942

The Axis attack opened on 1 July. The Afrika Korps, reduced by weeks of fighting to a few dozen tanks, ran into the box at Deir el Shein, which the 18th Indian Brigade held for most of the day before being overrun. The delay and the fire of British artillery stopped the German advance. Over the following days Auchinleck counterattacked repeatedly, aiming at the Italian divisions, which were weaker in equipment than the German ones, in order to force Rommel to commit his German formations to rescue them.

The 9th Australian Division under Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead had been brought from Syria and joined XXX Corps in the north. On 10 July it attacked along the coast and took the Tel el Eisa ridge, where Australian troops also overran a German radio intercept company that had been providing Rommel with intelligence from British radio traffic. A separate leak, through American diplomatic cables from Cairo that German intelligence had been reading, had been closed at the end of June, as the Imperial War Museums note. Rommel was now fighting with less warning of British intentions, while British code-breakers continued to read many German signals.

On the night of 14–15 July the 4th and 5th New Zealand Brigades and the 5th Indian Infantry Brigade attacked Ruweisat Ridge in the center. The infantry reached their objectives in the dark, but the British armor that was to support them did not come forward in time. German tanks counterattacked on 15 July and overran much of the 4th New Zealand Brigade. Captain Charles Upham of the 20th Battalion won a bar to his Victoria Cross in the fighting, and Sergeant Keith Elliott of the 22nd Battalion a Victoria Cross. A week later, on 21–22 July, the 6th New Zealand Brigade was overrun in the El Mreir depression in almost the same way, and the British 23rd Armoured Brigade, newly arrived, lost most of its tanks attacking through minefields the next morning. On 26–27 July, in Operation Manhood, the Australian 2/28th Battalion was cut off and almost entirely captured at Ruin Ridge.

By the end of July both armies were exhausted, and Auchinleck halted offensive operations. The Eighth Army had stopped the Axis advance but had not destroyed the Panzerarmee, and its casualties for the month exceeded 13,000. The Australian War Memorial records 2,552 battle casualties in the 9th Australian Division alone during July. NZ History describes the losses at Ruweisat and El Mreir, and the several thousand New Zealanders captured there, as among the division’s heaviest of the war. The same lesson that infantry could take ground at night but could not hold it in daylight without tanks and anti-tank guns close behind it would shape the October plan.

A new command in August

Churchill flew to Cairo in early August with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke. They decided to replace Auchinleck. General Sir Harold Alexander became Commander-in-Chief Middle East, and Lieutenant General William Gott, commander of XIII Corps, was appointed to the Eighth Army. On 7 August the transport aircraft carrying Gott to Cairo was shot down and he was killed. Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery was summoned from England in his place and took command on 13 August, two days earlier than he had been ordered to.

Montgomery cancelled existing contingency plans for withdrawal toward the Nile, ordered that the Alamein position would be held, and brought the 44th Division forward to dig in on the Alam Halfa ridge southeast of El Alamein, the key to the rear of the line. He also began to reorganize the army so that divisions fought as divisions rather than in small mixed columns, and insisted that armor would not be thrown against Axis anti-tank guns. Intelligence from decrypted German signals gave a clear warning that Rommel intended to attack in the south at the end of August, and the defense was prepared accordingly.

Alam Halfa, 30 August–5 September 1942

Rommel attacked on the night of 30–31 August, sending the Afrika Korps and the Italian armored divisions through the minefields in the southern sector between Deir el Munassib and Qaret el Himeimat, intending to swing north behind the Eighth Army toward the coast. The minefields were deeper than expected and the advance fell behind schedule. Major General Georg von Bismarck, commanding the 21st Panzer Division, was killed, and Lieutenant General Walther Nehring, commander of the Afrika Korps, was wounded. Short of fuel, Rommel turned north earlier than planned, directly against the Alam Halfa ridge, where British armor waited in hull-down positions and artillery and the Desert Air Force struck the Axis columns day and night.

On 2 September Rommel began to withdraw. A New Zealand counterattack on the night of 3–4 September, Operation Beresford, was costly and failed to cut off the retreat. By 5 September the Axis forces were back near their start line, though they kept the high ground at Himeimat in the south. Montgomery did not pursue; he wanted time to prepare his own offensive. Rommel, who had been ill for weeks, handed over command and left for Europe on 23 September. The Axis army settled into a defensive position behind the minefields that would become the Devil’s Gardens, and both sides prepared for the battle described in this collection’s later chapters.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

The summer of 1942

Sources and further reading

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