The crisis at El Alamein

On the morning of 24 October 1942, after the first night of the Second Battle of El Alamein, General Bernard Montgomery’s plan began to come apart. The Eighth Army’s infantry had driven into the German and Italian minefields, but the armoured divisions, which were supposed to have reached the open desert before dawn, were stuck in the narrow corridors under the fire of anti-tank guns. For the next two days the armoured commanders argued that a further advance would end in a massacre of tanks, while Montgomery stubbornly demanded that they push on. This dispute, played out on the night of 24–25 October, was the first crisis of the battle.

Jams in the corridors

The plan for Operation Lightfoot provided for the two armoured divisions of General Herbert Lumsden’s X Corps to pass through the lanes cleared by the sappers and take up position on the Pierson line, beyond the infantry’s positions. Instead, at dawn on 24 October the 1st Armoured Division was stuck in the northern corridor, in the sector of the Scottish 51st Division, and General Alexander Gatehouse’s 10th Armoured Division on Miteirya Ridge, which the New Zealanders had taken. The lanes through the second minefield belt were not ready, hundreds of vehicles stood in the narrow tracks, and every tank that showed itself on the ridge drew fire.

Montgomery ordered the clearing of the corridors to be completed and the tanks pushed forward, and the New Zealanders, supported by the 10th Armoured Division, to attack southwards from Miteirya Ridge. The Australians in the north were to prepare the first “crumbling” attack for the coming night. During the day Scottish infantry of the Seaforth Highlanders, supported by tanks, took one of the strongpoints that could not be captured during the night. Artillery and aircraft pounded the Axis positions without pause – Allied aircraft flew more than a thousand sorties that day. Even so, by the afternoon the tanks had barely moved beyond the positions reached by the infantry.

Why could the tanks not break through? In front of them lay a defence built around anti-tank guns dug in so deep that only their barrels showed above ground, and around tanks hidden behind ridges. One chronology of the war describes this day by saying that the British tanks “withstood the fire of German 88 mm guns”. That is a simplification. The famous 88 mm guns, originally anti-aircraft weapons, were the defenders’ most dangerous weapon, but the Germans had relatively few of them at El Alamein; far more numerous were 50 mm anti-tank guns and captured Soviet 76.2 mm guns. The new American Shermans and Grants had thicker armour and more powerful guns than earlier British tanks, so they could fight at longer range, but the fire of dug-in anti-tank guns still destroyed them. The British armoured regiments in the corridors lost dozens of tanks. They did not so much withstand the fire as stay under it, because they had been ordered to.

Stumme’s death and the first tank battle

On the Axis side the morning of 24 October brought confusion. Reports from the front were incomplete and contradictory, because the artillery bombardment had destroyed most of the telephone lines. The commander of Panzer Army Africa, General Georg Stumme, drove to the front to assess the situation for himself. His car came under fire, the officer accompanying him was killed, and Stumme died, most probably of a heart attack; his body was found only the next day. Command passed temporarily to General Wilhelm von Thoma, commander of the Afrika Korps, and in the evening Adolf Hitler telephoned Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who was taking a cure in Austria, to ask whether he was able to return.

The Germans and Italians, however, did not wait idly. At dusk on 24 October, with the setting sun behind them, tanks of the German 15th Panzer Division and the Italian Littorio Division counter-attacked from the area of a low rise that the British called Kidney Ridge, against tanks of the 1st Armoured Division emerging from the northern corridor. It was the first big armoured clash of the battle: more than a hundred tanks took part, and by nightfall roughly half of them had been destroyed or immobilised. Neither side changed its position. For the Axis, though, it was a costly success: the 15th Panzer Division, which bore the brunt of the British attacks, had only about 30 serviceable tanks left by the evening of the next day.

The night of 24–25 October

For the night Montgomery ordered a renewed attack by the 10th Armoured Division across Miteirya Ridge. Clearing the lanes through the mines on and beyond the ridge took far longer than expected. At around 10 p.m., the hour set for the attack, German bombers appeared over the vehicles of the 8th Armoured Brigade assembled at the start line. They hit a column of lorries carrying fuel and ammunition – some 25 vehicles burned, and the blaze lit up the area all night and drew artillery fire. The brigade became dispersed, lost touch with its own artillery barrage and delayed its attack considerably.

General Gatehouse believed that leading tanks through narrow lanes onto an open slope, under the fire of dug-in guns, would be suicide, and proposed leaving at most one regiment forward. Lumsden shared his misgivings. The Eighth Army’s chief of staff, General Francis de Guingand, judged the matter so serious that at around 3.30 a.m. on 25 October he woke Montgomery and summoned Lumsden and the commander of XXX Corps, General Oliver Leese, to his command post. Montgomery heard them out and did not change his mind. The plan was to be carried out: the tanks must get through the minefields and break out to the west, even at the cost of heavy losses. According to his memoirs he also spoke to Gatehouse by telephone and made it clear that if the armoured division commanders were not prepared to do it, he would find others who were. The participants’ accounts differ in detail, and Montgomery’s memoirs, written years later, show him in a favourable light; they agree, however, that on that night the army commander imposed his will on his armoured commanders.

That is what lies behind the chronology’s statement that Montgomery “ordered the attack to continue despite the losses”. But the order did not bring a breakthrough. Some of the 10th Armoured Division’s tanks crossed to the western slopes of the ridge, but at dawn found themselves on open ground under the fire of enemy guns and tanks. The 24th Armoured Brigade reported that it had reached the Pierson line, but in the dust and confusion it had misjudged its position and was in fact much further back. In the south, in the XIII Corps sector, the 7th Armoured Division’s attack through the second minefield belt also broke down, with the loss of several dozen tanks.

A change of direction

In the course of 25 October Montgomery acknowledged that the attack southwards from Miteirya Ridge, to be carried out by General Bernard Freyberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division, would cost too much. He therefore shifted the direction of his main effort. The infantry of XXX Corps were to hold Miteirya, while General Leslie Morshead’s 9th Australian Division was to strike north towards the coast to cut off the Axis salient by the sea, held by the German 164th Light Division and Italian infantry. The 1st Armoured Division was to keep attacking around Kidney Ridge. On the night of 25–26 October the Australian 26th Brigade, supported by tanks, took a low rise marked as Point 29 – a hillock some six metres high from which German artillery observers could see the whole forward area – and captured about 240 prisoners. Fierce fighting raged over this hillock for the next week.

The balance of the first three days was disappointing for the Eighth Army. It had gained a salient a few kilometres deep and some fifteen kilometres wide, but the Axis defence, though seriously weakened, was holding in most of its positions. According to estimates cited in the literature, by 26 October the Eighth Army had lost about 6,000 killed, wounded and missing, and it had become clear that the Lightfoot timetable could not be kept. Montgomery did not break off the battle, however. On 26 October he concluded that the attack was losing momentum and ordered a regrouping: he withdrew the New Zealanders and some of the armour into reserve to prepare them for a new blow, while the Australians and the 51st Division continued the “crumbling” fighting in the north.

On the other side the race against time went on. On the evening of 25 October Rommel returned to Africa. He found an army whose divisions in the north had lost much of their men and equipment, which had fuel for a few days and could not count on prompt deliveries. Convinced that the main blow would fall in the north, he brought his reserves up from the south – a decision that, for lack of fuel, he could no longer reverse.

Place in the war

The crisis of 24 and 25 October became one of the most frequently described episodes of the battle. Montgomery’s admirers see it as proof of his iron will: had he given way to his armoured commanders at that point, the battle might have ended in another failure like General Claude Auchinleck’s July attacks, after which Churchill gave the Eighth Army to Montgomery. His critics point out that a plan which assumed pushing two armoured divisions through a deep minefield zone in a single night was over-ambitious from the start, and that Lumsden’s and Gatehouse’s fears were largely borne out. The dispute shaped the fate of both generals: after the battle Lumsden was relieved of command of his corps and Gatehouse of his division.

The way Montgomery fought the battle came closest to his own forecast of “crumbling”: a brutal battle of attrition in which the Eighth Army could afford losses and Panzer Army Africa could not. In the days that followed, impatience grew in London, and Winston Churchill asked whether the battle was petering out. In reality the regrouping of 26 and 27 October prepared Operation Supercharge, launched on the night of 1–2 November, which finally broke the Axis defence and forced Rommel to retreat. Seen in the context of the whole campaign, the crisis at El Alamein was the moment when it became clear that the Allies’ material superiority – provided the commander had the determination to use it – could break even the best-organised defence.