He commanded a joint Italian and German army. Because of the terrain, his army was motorized and the invasion was spearhead by tanks or panzers. The British 8th army was forced to retreat into northwestern Egypt.
The Afrika Korps advanced into Egypt and made his way by the coastal route to Alexandria. If he could seize that city, then he would have been in a position to challenge the British and their control of the Suez Canal. The 8th Army laid many miles of mines and dug many tank traps. The battle took place only 60km from Alexandria. The Allies were close to their supply bases in Egypt and the Axis forces supply lines had become stretched in contrast.
Rommel launched a direct attack on the British positions. However, Auchelick had superiority in artillery and his forces had been well dug in. This allowed their lines to hold. The Allies then launched a counter attack, Rommel used a brilliant defensive strategy to repel the attacks [8]. The Allies had denied Rommel victory and they had stopped his advance to Alexandria.
The western forces had suffered heavy casualties some killed and wounded. Initially, General William Gott was appointed as its commander but he was killed in a plane crash. Churchill then had Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery appointed and he took command of the 8th army on the 13th August. Rommel could have withdrawn at this stage and given that his supply lines had been overextended this perhaps should have been his strategy.
The Germans expected a massive Allied counter-attack. Montgomery used a lull in the fighting to strengthen his position. In particular, he received many new tanks This meant that the allies had the advantage in terms of tanks. Montgomery to build up his forces until he had twice the number of men under his command as had Rommel. Rommel had selected his defensive position well and his flanks were protected by the sea to the north and to the south, by an impenetrable desert.
Rommel directed the planning for the second battle of El Alamein. He personally supervised the defensive line that was intended to repel the British counter-attack.
The German strategy was to have a set piece battle, one that would draw the British and their allies into a brutal war of attrition that would sap their will to fight. Then Rommel with his panzers would launch a counter-attack and he would go on and seize Alexandria.
His army also had the support of the Royal Air Force that was increasingly able to dominate the skies and to nullify the threat posed by the Luftwaffe. After six more weeks of carefully building up the 8th army it was ready to go on the attack.
The Allies had some , men and 1, tanks under Montgomery. They faced some , Germans and Italians with some tanks. It should be noted that many of the Axis forces were poorly armed and trained Italian soldiers. Then he ordered his divisions to attack to the north of the German line and to the south. At this stage Rommel was not present at the battle.
He had returned to Germany for treatment as he was genuinely ill. His subordinates, followed his plans for the battle very closely. The initial Allied assault only made limited advances and the German lines continued to hold. Montgomery was a methodical men and he used massed artillery with infantry attacks with limited objectives to weaken the German lines.
At this time the Axis divisions had begun to run short of supplies and ammunition. Indeed, for all the fame it had brought Rommel in the world press, this first campaign won him few friends among command echelons in Berlin. General Halder was especially unimpressed. A German division-plus had overrun territory--a vast wasteland, to be precise--but it hadn't really won anything.
There had been no battle of annihilation, no Kesselschlacht, nor could there have been. The Afrika Korps had come a long way, but now sat precariously on the edge of nowhere. Although Rommel and his command had shown a satisfying level of aggression, something the entire officer corps understood, most of them saw his drive to the Egyptian border as a misfire. Subsequent operations deserve the same cold eye. Both sides spent the summer rebuilding, replacing, and reinforcing, but by and large, the British were able to do it more rapidly.
Crusader led to hard fighting with heavy losses on both sides. In the course of this wild ride the Panzers overran, in quick succession, the headquarters of the XXX Corps, 7th Armoured Division, 1st South African Division, and the 7th Armoured Brigade, unleashing panic as he went.
With his tank strength near zero and his largely Italian infantry well blooded, he had no choice but to retreat back to where he had start-ed, El Agheila. By now, the dynamic of the desert war was well established. There was an iron logic at work, and neither side could escape its grip.
Long advances did not simply take you away from your railhead, they took you entire time zones from it. Supply became not just a problem, but the problem. Rommel was far more dangerous at El Agheila, relatively close to Tripoli, than he was on the Egyptian wire, six-hundred miles to the east. Likewise, the British were never more dangerous than when they were fighting with Egypt at their back, and never more helpless than when they had just overrun Cyrenaica.
It should not be surprising, then, that Rommel soon turned the tables on the Allies once again. In January , after spending a few short weeks regrouping his forces after their long retreat, Rommel was back on the offensive. Again, in an eerie repeat of the campaign, the British had stripped their front before him. Last year it had been the Balkans; this year it was to shore up Britain's collapsing position in the Far East, then reeling under a series of Japanese hammer blows.
For both sides, it seemed, there was always someplace more important than Africa. Rommel's second offensive bore quick fruit. Once again, there was a green unit in his path, the 1st Armoured Division.
Rommel's opening blow tied it in knots. A regimental-sized task force, Group Marcks, got around its right flank near the coast, while the mass of Afrika Korps looped around the left. Having German Panzers prowling around in the rear was enough to send 1st Armoured reeling back.
In the next two weeks Rommel reconquered Cyrenaica. It was even easier than the first time, perhaps the greatest hussar raid of all time. This was low-intensity fighting of the Kampfgruppen variety, without a fully formed division in sight. It included few battles and generated minimal casualties, and by February 6th, Rommel stood on the Gazala line, just east of the Cyrenaican bulge and thirty-five miles west of Tobruk. Here, the hyper-movement of the desert war ground to a halt.
Both sides had wasted themselves racing back and forth and were, for the moment, incapable of further action. For nearly four months, the opponents sat, dug in, and glowered at one another. The Gazala position came to bear all the hallmarks of Stellungskrieg, or static warfare: trenches and rifle pits, barbed wire and machine gun nests.
For the British, fortified "box-es," dense degree concentrations of tank obstacles and mines, came to dominate the front, with the gaps between them protected by great "mine marshes.
Here, on the Gazala line, Rommel would finally win a real victory, not the meaningless to-and-fro of the "Benghazi sweepstakes. Once that had taken effect, Rommel carried out the most audacious move of his career, launching his entire mechanized force--five full divisions, thousands of vehicles, and virtually every Axis tank in the order of battle--on a deep end run around the British flank.
It was a solid block of armor nearly fifteen miles on a side stood on the British flank. At hrs, this immense force crashed into the fortified box at Retma. It was an amazing scene. Sitting out in the sunshine of a lovely May morning, the defenders looked on with curiosity as a dust cloud appeared on the horizon. This one, however, suddenly clarified itself into something worse: tanks, tanks, and more tanks, vehicles of every description, sailing out of the dust.
To the east, near Bir Gubi, lay the 7th Motorised Brigade. Half the unit had been given some well-earned rest and recreation and the men were swimming in Tobruk harbor that fateful morning. West of Retma, 3rd Indian Brigade was caught equally unprepared. Its commander, General A. While they were able to beat off Axis counter-attacks, British efforts were hampered as their tanks were held up in the congested minefield corridors and suffered punishing losses from enemy anti-tank guns.
Despite the difficulties, Montgomery held his nerve. He pressed home the attrition of the enemy forces and launching a diversionary attack to draw in scarce Axis reserves. He then paused and regrouped before launching his final attack, codenamed Operation Supercharge, on the night of November. After several more days of severe fighting the British achieved a decisive breakthrough on 4 November. Nevertheless, the British had won a remarkable victory and Montgomery began pursuing his beaten foe back into Libya and Tunisia.
El Alamein was the first clear-cut and irreversible victory inflicted by the British Army upon the Axis. Coming after years of frustrating setbacks, this was a boost to British morale.
Victory proved that the problems that had plagued the Army for years had at last been overcome and that its equipment, tactics, generalship and fighting spirit were a match for the Axis. For Churchill, the victory was vital for re-establishing British prestige before America reduced Britain to the role of junior partner in the western alliance. This was why he had been so anxious to instigate the battle before Operation Torch, the Allied landings on the coast of Algeria and Morocco, began.
The landings began on 8 November and forced the Axis to fight on two fronts. With the Allies also prevailing in the naval and air wars raging in the Mediterranean, the Axis position in North Africa was now untenable.
Despite this, Hitler belatedly ordered a massive re-enforcement, which enabled the Axis to fight a defensive campaign in Tunisia into Although they fought a tenacious rearguard, the Axis forces were in an impossible position and in May were forced to surrender, with the loss of around , prisoners. This may be an overstatement given that North Africa was only a sideshow compared to the titanic battles waged on the Eastern and Western Fronts. However, the battle boosted national morale and became one of the most celebrated victories of the war.
Alamein also established the reputation of Montgomery. Using his talent for self-publicity, he claimed all the credit for the victory. This made him a household name and secured him prestigious commands in Italy and North-West Europe. The grim struggle that rolled back and forth across the North African desert from to resulted in the first major Allied victory of the Second World War.
Arrogant, unlikeable, but ultimately successful, Field Marshal Montgomery was one of the most prominent British commanders of the Second World War.
From to , the Allies fought an attritional campaign in Italy against a resolute and skilful enemy. In the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia and Greece. British and Commonwealth intervention and evacuation followed before a vicious partisan conflict began. During , the Allies endured months of fighting against a determined enemy. This bloody struggle eventually ended in the final defeat of Nazi Germany.
France's defeat in the summer of left Britain threatened with invasion. Find out how the Home Front was mobilised to resist enemy attack.
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