The fighting for Thompson's Post at El Alamein

On the night of 30/31 October 1942 the 9th Australian Division of Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead attacked on the northern sector of the front at El Alamein for the third time in a week. Its battalions crossed the railway and the coast road, almost cutting off the German and Italian troops holding the salient by the sea, and throughout 31 October they beat off counter-attacks by German tanks. The heavily fortified strongpoint that the British called Thompson’s Post itself remained in German hands, and the two Australian battalions that attacked it were almost wiped out.

War chronologies sometimes record under this date that on 31 October the British made a decisive armoured breakthrough west of El Alamein and that Rommel’s minefields failed to stop the Allied tanks. That is not what happened. The fighting in the north on 28–31 October did not break the front; its purpose was to tie down the enemy’s reserves. The real breakthrough came only with Operation Supercharge, launched on the night of 1/2 November a little further south, and Rommel’s army began to withdraw on 4 November.

A change of plan

The first phase of the battle, which had opened on the evening of 23 October, had bogged down in the minefields. The British armoured divisions had been unable to break out of the corridors into the open desert, and the crisis at El Alamein forced General Bernard Montgomery to change his plan. As early as 25 October the commander of the Eighth Army abandoned the New Zealanders’ attack south of Miteirya Ridge and decided to shift the weight of the fighting northwards, where the 9th Australian Division was to strike towards the coast. On the night of 25/26 October the 26th Australian Brigade took Point 29 – a low rise south-west of Tel el Eisa – and the so-called Fig Orchard. Private Percival Gratwick of the 2/48th Battalion, who single-handedly attacked the machine-gun nests pinning down his company, was killed and awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

The Australian wedge threatened to encircle the coastal salient held by the 164th Light Division, the 125th Panzergrenadier Regiment and Italian Bersaglieri. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who had just returned to Africa, concluded that this was where the battle would be decided, and from 26 October he moved his last reserves north: the 21st Panzer Division and the 90th Light Division. Over the following days Point 29 was the target of repeated German and Italian counter-attacks, which were broken up by artillery and aircraft.

On the night of 28/29 October the Australians attacked for the second time. The 20th Brigade, supported by the tanks of the 40th Royal Tank Regiment, advanced north-west of Point 29, and the 26th Brigade was then to wheel north-east from its positions towards Thompson’s Post, cross the railway and reach the coast road. The infantry rode on the Valentine tanks of the 46th Regiment and in carriers, but mines and anti-tank guns soon brought them to a halt. The men had to dismount, lost touch with the tanks and were pinned down in front of the positions of the panzergrenadiers and Bersaglieri. The attack was called off before dawn.

The night of 30/31 October

The presence of the 90th Light Division on the coast convinced Montgomery that Rommel expected the next great blow to fall there. On 29 October – according to many accounts under pressure from London, which was growing impatient at the lack of progress, and after consulting General Harold Alexander – the commander of the Eighth Army decided to direct the main attack, Operation Supercharge, further south, on a narrow sector south of Point 29. To keep Rommel’s attention fixed on the coast until then, the Australians were to attack a third time.

Morshead’s plan was ambitious. The 2/32nd Battalion, which had not yet been in the battle, was to cross the railway and seize a base between the tracks and the coast road. From there the 2/24th and 2/48th Battalions – each down to little more than 200 men after a week of fighting – were to turn east along the road and come out behind the German fortifications, including Thompson’s Post. Finally, the 2/3rd Pioneer Battalion was to strike from the base due north towards the sea to close the line of retreat of the troops in the salient.

The attack went in on the night of 30/31 October. The 2/32nd Battalion reached its objectives. Beyond the tracks it took a long concrete railwaymen’s building in which the Germans had set up a dressing station; three German doctors and several orderlies were captured there. The building, which the Australians called the Blockhouse, became the battalion’s aid post, where – as the Australian official historian wrote – the doctors of both sides tended the wounded side by side. It was soon filled to overflowing with wounded, because the drive eastwards ended in disaster. The 2/24th and 2/48th Battalions ran into strongly held positions around Thompson’s Post and the rise known as Ring Contour 25. According to Australian figures, after that night the 2/48th Battalion had 41 men still on their feet and the 2/24th about 85, while the two battalions had more than 260 wounded between them. As they withdrew, men of the 2/24th Battalion also ran into a booby trap made of two aircraft bombs, which killed twelve.

This fighting cost the life of Sergeant William Kibby of the 2/48th Battalion, who since 23 October had repeatedly led his platoon in attacks on machine-gun posts; he was the second man of the battalion in this battle to be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. The pioneers advanced north as planned, but at dawn they were still between 500 and more than 1,000 metres short of the shore. The Australians now sat astride the road and the railway, and the position of the Axis troops in the coastal salient had become very dangerous.

The Saucer

The three Australian battalions were concentrated in an area roughly a kilometre square: around the Blockhouse, a crossing that sappers had blown in the railway embankment, and the low ridge of Barrel Hill, about half a kilometre north of the tracks. The soldiers called this hollow the Saucer. German observers in the minaret of the mosque at Sidi Abd el Rahman, where Rommel had his headquarters about 8 kilometres to the north-west, could see everything that went on in it.

On 31 October Rommel came to the northern sector to direct a counter-attack in person. A battle group of the 21st Panzer Division with elements of the 90th Light Division attacked the Australian positions all day – four times, according to British and Australian accounts. In the morning the pioneers, under pressure from tanks, had to fall back from the forward slope of Barrel Hill, and in front of the Saucer German tanks fought British Valentines that had come up to support the infantry. In the afternoon German tanks overran almost the whole company holding the north-western edge of the hollow. The Saucer was under constant fire, and a shell even pierced the roof of the Blockhouse. Even so, on the evening of 31 October the Australians still held it.

Morshead decided to relieve the exhausted battalions of the 26th Brigade with his last fresh battalions, the 2/43rd and 2/28th of the 24th Brigade. A relief in such cramped ground under fire was risky, but it succeeded. On the morning of 1 November the British intercepted an order from Rommel’s headquarters for an immediate attack on the “hut” – meaning the Blockhouse. Rommel believed it was held by a battered unit and did not know that fresh troops had arrived during the night. That day the Germans attacked the Saucer six times, and the fighting went on late into the night, but they did not retake the position.

Significance

The Australian attacks of the last week of October did not bring the breakthrough that some chronologies describe, but they did the job Montgomery had given them. Rommel, convinced that the issue would be decided by the sea, concentrated the 21st Panzer Division and the 90th Light Division in the north and used up in counter-attacks on the Saucer his last tanks and fuel, of which he had almost none left after the sinking of yet more tankers. On the night of 1/2 November the Eighth Army opened Operation Supercharge south of the Australian positions, at a point that the Germans had weakened by moving their reserves to the coast. After two days of heavy fighting for Tel el Aqqaqir the front gave way, and on 4 November Rommel – in defiance of an order from Adolf Hitler demanding that his troops fight to victory or death – ordered a retreat. The minefields and anti-tank screens were thus not carried by a single armoured thrust but worn down in twelve days of attritional fighting by infantry, artillery and aircraft.

The 9th Australian Division paid a heavy price for this. According to the Australian War Memorial it lost 2,694 men in the Second Battle of El Alamein, 620 of them killed – about a fifth of the losses of the whole Eighth Army, although it made up only a small part of its strength. Montgomery later wrote that the victory had been possible only thanks to the gallantry of this division. It was the division’s last battle in the Middle East. The government of John Curtin, which had for months been demanding the return of Australian troops to a homeland threatened by Japan, obtained the Allies’ consent, and in February 1943 the 9th Division returned to Australia. From September 1943 it was fighting the Japanese in New Guinea, where Morshead commanded an Australian corps.