The end of the First Battle of El Alamein

On the night of 26/27 July 1942 the British Eighth Army of General Claude Auchinleck made its last attempt that month to break the front of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Panzer Army Africa at El Alamein. The attack, named Operation Manhood, went in on the northern sector, towards Miteiriya Ridge, and by midday on 27 July it had collapsed with heavy losses. From then on both sides dug in facing each other, and on 31 July Auchinleck formally halted offensive operations. So ended the First Battle of El Alamein, which historians usually date to 1–27 July.

Popular chronologies record under 26 July that “the second British attack under Auchinleck” failed and that the battle can be regarded as over, and under 30 July that the stalemate at El Alamein continued. It was not, however, the second British attack but at least the fifth in July: after Rommel had been repulsed in the first days of the month, the Eighth Army struck at Tel el Eisa (10 July), at Ruweisat Ridge (14–16 July), at Miteiriya (17 July) and at El Mreir (21–22 July). Manhood was the third attempt at a breakthrough on the northernmost sector alone.

Background: from defence to attack

At the beginning of July Auchinleck, who had personally taken command of the Eighth Army on 25 June, halted Rommel’s exhausted divisions on a position between the sea and the Qattara Depression. When the Germans and Italians went over to the defensive, he concluded that it was now his turn to strike before the enemy could rebuild his strength. He attacked above all the Italian divisions, less well armed and less resilient, reckoning that the Germans could not hold a long front without them. The fighting for Tel el Eisa and Ruweisat Ridge in mid-July yielded thousands of prisoners, the destruction of the Sabratha Division and parts of the Trieste, Pavia and Brescia Divisions, and, on 10 July, also the capture of a German radio intercept company that had until then supplied Rommel with invaluable information about British intentions. Not once, however, was a gap turned into a breakthrough: the infantry took its objectives by night and at dawn was left in open ground without tanks or anti-tank guns.

Rommel was in a difficult position. At the beginning of July each of his three German divisions numbered 1,200–1,500 men, and his supply line stretched more than a thousand kilometres back to Tobruk and Benghazi under constant air attack. Benito Mussolini, who had flown to Libya at the end of June to prepare a triumphal entry into Cairo, returned to Rome around 20 July.

El Mreir: the disaster of 22 July

Before its final attack the Eighth Army enjoyed an enormous superiority in equipment: the 1st Armoured Division alone had about 170 tanks, while Rommel had fewer than a hundred serviceable German and Italian tanks combined. Auchinleck decided to strike in the centre, around Ruweisat Ridge and the El Mreir depression. On the evening of 21 July the New Zealand 6th Brigade took its objectives in the depression, while the Indian 161st Brigade attacked along the ridge towards Deir el Shein. As before, many of the vehicles carrying the supporting weapons did not arrive in time, and at dawn the British armoured brigades did not move. On the morning of 22 July the German panzer regiments of General Walther Nehring counter-attacked and smashed the New Zealanders in the depression; according to New Zealand figures the 6th Brigade lost more than 900 men, a large proportion of them taken prisoner.

A few hours later came a second disaster. The 23rd Armoured Brigade, freshly arrived from Britain and equipped with Valentine infantry tanks, advanced as ordered, although the commander of the 1st Armoured Division doubted whether the lanes through the minefields had been cleared. The commander of XIII Corps, Lieutenant General William Gott, had changed the axis of the attack at the last moment, but the new orders did not get through. The brigade ran into the minefields under fire from anti-tank guns and was then counter-attacked by the 21st Panzer Division. Within a few hours both its regiments had ceased to exist as a fighting force: according to various figures the brigade lost between 87 and 93 of its 104 tanks, destroyed or damaged. On the same day the Australians of Major General Leslie Morshead’s 9th Division took the hill of Tel el Eisa in the north, but their attack on Tel el Makh Khad, made without tank support, stalled.

Despite these defeats Rommel reported that the situation was “critical in the extreme”: his infantry, especially the Italians, was melting away, and replacements were slow to arrive.

Operation Manhood: 26–27 July

Auchinleck wanted to try once more before Rommel received reinforcements. The plan was entrusted to XXX Corps, reinforced by the 1st Armoured Division, the 4th Light Armoured Brigade and the 69th Infantry Brigade of the British 50th Division. The attack was to break the front south of Miteiriya Ridge, which the Australians called Ruin Ridge, and open the way to the north-west. The 1st South African Division was to prepare and mark lanes through the minefields by midnight. The Australian 24th Brigade was to take the eastern end of the ridge, while the 69th Brigade was to pass through the gap to Deir el Dhib and open further lanes. Behind them the 2nd Armoured Brigade and the 4th Light Armoured Brigade were to go in and strike at the enemy’s rear and supply lines.

Once again the plan had been prepared in haste, and the defenders were expecting an attack: German intelligence had correctly predicted its direction, and the Italian positions had been stiffened with German units. Just after midnight on 27 July the Australian 2/28th Battalion advanced on the ridge and by about 1–2 a.m. was on its objective. To the south the 69th Brigade set off at 1.30 a.m. and by morning had taken its objectives. Then everything began to fall apart. Anti-tank guns and ammunition vehicles got lost in the dark or stuck in the minefields, reports about the lanes were contradictory, and the 2nd Armoured Brigade waited for them to be clarified. The 50th Royal Tank Regiment, which was to support the Australians, could not find a lane and lost 13 tanks under fire. In a lane through the minefield the 2/28th Battalion’s wireless truck went up in flames, and the Australians lost communications.

In the morning Rommel counter-attacked. German battle groups with tanks smashed two forward battalions of the 69th Brigade and then surrounded the isolated 2/28th Battalion on the ridge. The battalion’s last message, according to the Australian War Memorial, read: “We have to surrender.” The battalion lost 65 killed and 490 taken prisoner, and the 69th Brigade more than 600 men. The whole attack cost more than a thousand soldiers and gained no ground at all.

Stalemate: 27–31 July

After Manhood both armies were exhausted. On 27 July Auchinleck drew up an appreciation of the situation, prepared with his deputy chief of staff, Major General Eric Dorman-Smith. It stated that the Eighth Army would not be ready for a new offensive before mid-September and predicted that Rommel, knowing that time was on the British side, would himself attack before the end of August – most probably on the southern sector, in order to outflank the British positions. That battle had to be prepared for: the minefields had to be extended, divisions regrouped, replacements trained and newly arrived units brought into the line. On 31 July Auchinleck issued orders to halt offensive operations and strengthen the defences.

This was the stalemate that chronologies mention under 30 July. On the other side Rommel too went over to the defensive: he had extensive minefields laid and German units interspersed among the Italian ones to stiffen them. Reinforcements were brought over to Africa – already in July the German 164th Light Division from Crete, and later the paratroopers of Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke’s brigade and the Italian Folgore Parachute Division, originally intended for an airborne landing on Malta.

The toll

According to the British official history, the Eighth Army lost about 13,250 men killed, wounded and missing in July, including about 4,000 in the 2nd New Zealand Division, about 3,000 in the 5th Indian Division and about 2,500 in the 9th Australian Division. The New Zealanders’ commander, General Bernard Freyberg, wounded at Minqar Qaim at the end of June, was away from the front throughout July. Axis losses are less well known. The literature usually gives about 7,000 prisoners, mostly Italians, and, according to some studies, about 10,000 killed and wounded. These figures are approximate and vary from source to source.

British tank losses were enormous, the result of the same mistake repeated in every attack: the infantry and the armour fought separately. For the Australian and New Zealand soldiers, left alone at dawn several times facing German tanks, the defeats were the fault of incompetent British armoured commanders, and trust between them and the British armoured brigades was seriously damaged.

The Auchinleck controversy

The assessment of the July fighting has divided historians for decades. One fact is undisputed: Auchinleck stopped Rommel at a moment when secret documents were being burned in Cairo and the fleet was leaving Alexandria. Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to Middle Eastern oil were saved, and the Axis never again came so close to seizing them. Auchinleck also made good use of intelligence: German radio messages read by the British (Ultra) gave him an accurate picture of the enemy’s dispositions, and from the end of June Rommel could no longer read the reports of the American military attaché in Cairo, which the Italians had previously been decrypting.

Critics point to the other side of July: a series of hasty, poorly coordinated attacks in which, despite its superiority in men and equipment, the Eighth Army never once broke the front, and confusion in command, in which corps, divisions and brigades often acted alongside one another rather than together. After the war Montgomery and his supporters portrayed the situation in August 1942 as chaos that he alone had put in order. Some historians, beginning with Correlli Barnett in The Desert Generals (1960), defended Auchinleck, recalling that it was he who had stopped Rommel and drawn up the defensive plan on which the later battle of Alam el Halfa was based.

Place in the war

In London the July stalemate meant that patience had run out. Winston Churchill, who at the beginning of July had survived a vote in the House of Commons, wanted a victory, while Auchinleck was talking of an offensive only in September. On 3 August the Prime Minister flew to Cairo with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, on his way to talks with Joseph Stalin in Moscow. After visiting the front he decided to change the command. On 8 August Auchinleck received a letter dismissing him; he declined the offer of a new command in Persia and Iraq. General Harold Alexander became Commander-in-Chief Middle East. The Eighth Army was to have gone to Gott, but he was killed on 7 August when German fighters shot down his aircraft; on 13 August Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery took command.

Auchinleck’s predictions came true. At the end of August Rommel attacked on the southern sector and was repulsed in the Battle of Alam el Halfa (30 August – 5 September). In October and November Montgomery, with crushing superiority and American Sherman tanks, won the Second Battle of El Alamein, and a few days later the Allies landed in French North Africa. The July fighting was the precondition of that victory: it was then that Rommel was stopped for the first time in this campaign and lost the initiative, which he never regained. Auchinleck returned to service in June 1943 as Commander-in-Chief, India.