The fighting for Tel el Eisa and Ruweisat Ridge

Many war chronologies record under 11 July 1942 that Erwin Rommel’s army had stalled before El Alamein “mainly for lack of ammunition”, and under 15 July that only minor skirmishes were taking place around El Alamein. Both entries need correcting. Lack of ammunition was only one of the reasons Rommel was halted, alongside the exhaustion of his men and shortages of fuel, transport and tanks. More importantly, in mid-July El Alamein was anything but quiet: on 10 July the Australians broke through the Axis front at Tel el Eisa, and on the night of 14–15 July the First Battle of Ruweisat Ridge began, one of the bloodiest of the whole war for the New Zealanders. In these days the initiative passed from Rommel to General Claude Auchinleck.

Why Rommel stopped

The offensive that Rommel had opened on 1 July petered out after only three days. On 4 July the field marshal reported that his three German divisions were down to 1,200–1,500 men each, and that the Afrika Korps had little more than twenty serviceable tanks left. Behind him stretched a supply line more than a thousand kilometres long, with the ports of Tobruk and Benghazi too small or too distant, and bombed constantly besides. According to the British official history, only about 5,000 tons of supplies reached the Axis forces in Libya in June, against about 34,000 in May. Ammunition was short, but so were fuel, water, lorries and above all men. The German air force could not keep up with the front, while the British air force attacked the roads day and night. The Eighth Army, although beaten at Gazala and Mersa Matruh, was now fighting a few dozen kilometres from its depots, was receiving reinforcements and had superiority in artillery.

So Rommel regrouped: he pulled the German armoured divisions back for rest and replenishment and put Italian infantry, coming up from the rear, into the line in their place. In the north, by the coast, stood the Sabratha Division, freshly arrived from Libya; in the centre, on and around Ruweisat Ridge, the Pavia and Brescia Divisions. Rommel himself was still preparing an attack in the southern sector, where on 9 July his troops had occupied the Bab el Qattara position abandoned by the New Zealanders.

Auchinleck, who from decrypted German signals was gaining an ever clearer picture of the enemy’s dispositions, decided to strike where the front was weakest. His principle, as he wrote, was to hit the Italians wherever possible, since their morale was low and the Germans could not hold a long front without them. New forces came into the line: Major General Leslie Morshead’s 9th Australian Division, veterans of the defence of Tobruk in 1941, brought over from Syria, and further Indian brigades. At the beginning of July Lieutenant General William Ramsden took over command of XXX Corps from Lieutenant General William Norrie.

10 July: Tel el Eisa

On 8 July Auchinleck ordered Ramsden to take the low hills of Tel el Eisa and Tel el Makh Khad west of the El Alamein box, and then to send mobile battle groups south towards Deir el Shein and raiding parties west towards the airfields at El Daba. The hill of Tel el Eisa by the railway was to be taken by the 9th Australian Division, supported by tanks of the 44th Royal Tank Regiment, and Tel el Makh Khad by the 1st South African Division.

At 3.30 a.m. on 10 July an artillery bombardment began, the heaviest the desert war had yet seen. It fell on the soldiers of the Sabratha Division, mostly inexperienced men who had only just occupied poorly prepared positions. Many of them panicked. The Australian 26th Brigade attacked along the coast towards the high ground marked on the maps as Trig 33 and by morning had routed the Italian division; according to Australian figures more than 1,500 prisoners were taken. The South Africans had taken Tel el Makh Khad by midday.

The most valuable prize of the day turned out to be a small German unit. About a kilometre behind the front line, on high ground well suited to listening, were elements of the 621st Radio Intercept Company, commanded by Alfred Seebohm (some sources give his rank as lieutenant, others as captain). For months the company had been intercepting the radio traffic of British units, which often used plain language or simple codes, and had been supplying Rommel with a running picture of the Eighth Army’s movements. Together with the dispatches of the American attaché Bonner Fellers, which the Germans read until the end of June, this had been one of the pillars of his success at Gazala. The Australians destroyed the company in the fighting; Seebohm was badly wounded and died soon afterwards, and several dozen of his men were taken prisoner. The British seized the equipment and documents: daily and monthly reports, lists of code names and keys, and even the current British call-sign book. Only now did they understand how much their own carelessness on the airwaves had been giving away. They tightened signals discipline and changed procedures and call signs, and Rommel lost a source of information that he never fully managed to rebuild. At the very moment when, thanks to Ultra, the British were reading more and more of his signals, he himself went almost blind.

11–16 July: counter-attacks on the coast

The loss of Tel el Eisa forced Rommel to abandon his plans in the south. Hurrying north came the first units of the German 164th Light Division, which was just being brought over from Crete, the Italian Trieste Motorised Division and the 15th Panzer Division. Their counter-attacks on the afternoon and evening of 10 July broke down under the fire of Australian artillery and anti-tank guns.

At dawn on 11 July – the day that chronologies mark as a “stalemate” – the Australian 2/24th Battalion, with tanks of the 44th Royal Tank Regiment, took the western end of the Tel el Eisa hill, known as Point 24, and held it all day against a series of counter-attacks. A small column of tanks, lorried infantry and guns set out from there on a raid towards Deir el Abyad and forced a battalion of Italian infantry to surrender before it was stopped on Miteiriya Ridge. According to British figures, more than a thousand Italian prisoners were taken that day.

Rommel stubbornly tried to eliminate the salient. On 12 July the 21st Panzer Division attacked Trig 33 and Point 24; after a two-and-a-half-hour fight, according to Australian accounts, more than 600 German dead and wounded lay in front of their positions. On 13 July the attack went in against the El Alamein box, held by the South African Royal Durban Light Infantry. German tanks and dive bombers came within a few hundred metres of its trenches, but the fire of Australian, South African and British artillery stopped them, and by evening the attack had died away. A further German attack on 15 July gained nothing. On 16 July the Australians, supported by British tanks, tried to retake Point 24, which had been lost earlier, and were driven back, losing nearly half the strength of the attacking units. After seven days the fighting for the Tel el Eisa salient died down. By the 9th Australian Division’s estimates, the enemy lost at least 2,000 killed and more than 3,700 prisoners.

14–16 July: the First Battle of Ruweisat Ridge

The drawing of German reserves to the coast gave Auchinleck the opportunity to strike in the centre, at the Pavia and Brescia Divisions on Ruweisat Ridge (Operation Bacon). The plan of Lieutenant General William Gott’s XIII Corps called for a night infantry attack: the 4th and 5th Brigades of the 2nd New Zealand Division were to take the western part of the ridge, and the 5th Indian Brigade the eastern part. At dawn the 2nd Armoured Brigade was to pass through the captured ground towards Deir el Shein and Miteiriya, and the 22nd Armoured Brigade was to cover the infantry while it dug in. The New Zealand Division was still led by Brigadier Lindsay Inglis, since Major General Bernard Freyberg was recovering from a wound received at Minqar Qaim. No one, however, had clearly settled who was subordinate to whom and how the infantry were to communicate with the tanks – and that is precisely what decided the battle.

The attack began at 11 p.m. on 14 July. Before dawn on 15 July both New Zealand brigades were on their objectives, but behind them lay uncleared minefields and pockets of resistance that held up the heavy weapons, the artillery and the anti-tank guns. The infantry found themselves on an exposed, stony ridge where it was impossible to dig in, almost without support. The British armoured brigades did not come to their aid. At first light the German 8th Panzer Regiment of the 15th Panzer Division attacked the 22nd Battalion of the 5th Brigade; after a brief exchange of fire its anti-tank guns were knocked out and some 350 men had to surrender. Sergeant Keith Elliott of that battalion, who despite his wounds led his platoon in a counter-attack and took many prisoners, was awarded the Victoria Cross for that day. The commander of the 5th Brigade, Brigadier Howard Kippenberger, drove across the desert in search of British tanks and with difficulty persuaded one of the brigades to move forward – but it halted some distance from the ridge.

At the eastern end of Ruweisat Ridge the 5th Indian Brigade, with the help of the 2nd Armoured Brigade, took its objectives in the early afternoon. Meanwhile the 22nd Armoured Brigade was fighting at Alam Nayil against the 90th Light Division and the Ariete Division, which were attacking from the south, and although it beat them off easily, it did not go north to cover the New Zealanders. Rommel, seeing the Brescia and Pavia Divisions collapse, gathered German reconnaissance units and battle groups from the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions from both sides of the ridge under the command of General Walther Nehring. At 5 p.m. they struck the 4th New Zealand Brigade, which by then was short of anti-tank guns and ammunition. The defence was broken, the brigade headquarters was overrun at about 6 p.m., and hundreds of soldiers were taken prisoner; unit returns speak of about 380 prisoners from this attack, while the histories of the New Zealand battalions put the figure at more than a thousand men from the whole brigade in the course of the day. Among those captured was the wounded Captain Charles Upham of the 20th Battalion, who for the fighting at Minqar Qaim and on Ruweisat became one of only three men in history to be awarded the Victoria Cross twice. Only after 6 p.m. did the 2nd Armoured Brigade enter the fight and halt the German attack. During the night the New Zealanders came down off the ridge.

On 16 July Nehring renewed the attack, this time against the 5th Indian Brigade, which had held the eastern part of the ridge. Intercepted radio traffic warned it that another attempt would come in the afternoon; there was time to dig in the anti-tank guns and prepare artillery fire, and the attack was beaten off. The Indian troops afterwards counted 24 destroyed tanks in front of their positions, as well as many armoured cars and guns.

The balance

In the three days of fighting for Ruweisat the British took, by their own count, more than 2,000 prisoners, mainly from the Brescia and Pavia Divisions. The 2nd New Zealand Division lost 1,405 men – killed, wounded and captured – and the 4th Brigade had to be withdrawn to the rear to be rebuilt. The division was left with a deep conviction that the British tanks had abandoned the infantry to their fate; this bitterness towards the British armoured units lasted throughout the campaign and resurfaced a week later at El Mreir.

The fighting at Tel el Eisa and on Ruweisat nevertheless cost Rommel a great deal. The Sabratha Division had in practice ceased to exist, and the Pavia and Brescia Divisions had been badly mauled. Rommel had to shift his few tanks from sector to sector, putting out one fire after another, protect the Italian positions with dense minefields and interleave German battalions among them. There could be no question of a further advance on Alexandria. The loss of the 621st Company also deprived him of the intelligence advantage he had enjoyed throughout the spring.

Place in the war

Mid-July was the moment when the initiative at El Alamein passed to the British, but also the beginning of a series of costly British attempts to decide the battle. They all followed a similar course: the infantry took their objectives at night, then lost them at dawn to German armoured counter-attacks, because the British armoured brigades failed to keep up or did not know how to work with them. As early as 17 July the Australian 24th Brigade attacked Miteiriya Ridge, which the Australians called “Ruin Ridge”, took more than 700 prisoners from the Trento and Trieste Divisions, and had to withdraw under counter-attack. The attack at El Mreir on 22 July and Operation Manhood on Miteiriya Ridge on 26–27 July ended in the same way, after which Auchinleck called off offensive operations.

The First Battle of El Alamein ended in stalemate, but Rommel never reached the Nile. In August Winston Churchill dismissed Auchinleck, and the new commander of the Eighth Army, Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery, built his defence and his later offensive on the experience of July – with an emphasis on close cooperation between infantry, artillery and tanks, and on the intelligence advantage the British had gained, not least at Tel el Eisa. The Australians of the 9th Division and the New Zealanders, who had suffered such heavy losses in July, played a key role in the Second Battle of El Alamein in October and November 1942. The same Miteiriya Ridge and the same hills at Tel el Eisa then became the scene of the breakthrough of the Axis front.