The First Battle of El Alamein begins

On 1 July 1942 the army of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, which in less than six weeks had routed the Eighth Army at Gazala and taken Tobruk and Mersa Matruh, attacked the last British defensive position before the Nile Delta – at El Alamein, some 100 km west of Alexandria. Rommel hoped to break through the unfinished defences with a single blow and reach the Nile before the British could pull themselves together. The first day brought him only partial success: he destroyed an Indian brigade at Deir el Shein, but his 90th Light Division was pinned down by South African fire, and over the next two days the attack petered out. So began the First Battle of El Alamein, which by the end of July had halted the Axis march on Cairo and the Suez Canal.

A position between the sea and the depression

El Alamein itself was a small railway station on the coastal line from Alexandria to Mersa Matruh. Its military value stemmed from geography: some 60 km south of the coast began the Qattara Depression, a vast basin of salt marshes and soft sand, impassable to tanks and lorries. At El Alamein the desert front, which since Gazala had been open to the south, for the first time had both flanks resting on an obstacle. Rommel could not go round it as he had gone round the Gazala Line; he had to attack head-on.

The British had known the merits of the place since the 1930s. In the spring and summer of 1942 work began there on three fortified strongpoints, the so-called boxes – positions surrounded by minefields and barbed wire and held by a brigade or a division. The strongest, by El Alamein station, was held by Major General Dan Pienaar’s 1st South African Division. Some 30 km inland lay the Bab el Qattara box, which the New Zealanders called “Kaponga”, and on the edge of the depression the barely begun Naqb Abu Dweis box. Between them stretched mostly empty, flat desert, crossed by a few low, stony ridges. The most important of these, Ruweisat, ran from east to west some 15 km from the sea and gave an excellent view of the surrounding area. It was over these low rises – Ruweisat, Tel el Eisa and Miteirya – that the heaviest fighting of July was later waged.

After the defeat at Mersa Matruh the Eighth Army reached this position in disarray. General Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, who on 25 June had relieved Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie and taken command of the army himself, allotted the sectors on 29 June. The coastal sector with the El Alamein box was taken over by Lieutenant General William Norrie’s XXX Corps; in the south stood Lieutenant General William Gott’s XIII Corps with the 2nd New Zealand Division and the remnants of the Indian divisions; and the 1st Armoured Division, into which the survivors of the British armoured brigades had been gathered, remained in reserve. The New Zealanders’ commander, General Bernard Freyberg, had been wounded at Minqar Qaim, and the division was led by Brigadier Lindsay Inglis. Auchinleck’s idea was that fixed strongpoints would break up and channel the attack, while mobile columns of artillery and tanks would strike the enemy in the flanks and rear. His adviser and de facto chief of operations staff was Major General Eric Dorman-Smith, the author of many of the ideas of this battle, who was later blamed for its failures.

“The Flap”

In Egypt the situation seemed desperate. After the fall of Tobruk and Mersa Matruh, panic broke out in Cairo and Alexandria, which the British called “the Flap”. In the last days of June Admiral Henry Harwood had already taken the Mediterranean Fleet out of Alexandria to ports in Palestine and Lebanon and to Port Said, because the harbour had come within range of Axis aircraft. On 1 July secret documents were burned at British General Headquarters in Cairo, in rear-area offices and at the embassy, and ash drifted over the city – the day was later dubbed “Ash Wednesday”. The railway stations were crowded with people fleeing to Palestine, the banks were besieged, and some Egyptian nationalists openly awaited the Germans. Auchinleck believed he would stop Rommel, but he could not rule out being outflanked again. He therefore ordered positions to be built west of Alexandria and on the approaches to Cairo, preparations to be made for flooding parts of the Nile Delta and evacuation plans drawn up, while at the same time doing everything to keep the army together.

On the other side triumph seemed close. Benito Mussolini flew to Libya on 29 June and waited in Derna for the moment when he could ride into Cairo. According to an account repeated for years, he had even brought a white horse with him for the occasion. Formally, Rommel’s superior was the Italian Governor of Libya and Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, General Ettore Bastico, but in practice it was Rommel who set the pace, and Rome and Berlin followed him, postponing the landing on Malta for the sake of the pursuit into Egypt.

An exhausted army

Panzer Army Africa was utterly exhausted. According to German reports, on the morning of 1 July the Afrika Korps had only 55 serviceable tanks, and the Italian XX Motorised Corps a few dozen weaker vehicles. Infantry was so scarce that the German divisions had the strength of strong regiments. The supply line stretched more than a thousand kilometres from Benghazi and nearly two thousand from Tripoli, and ships from Italy sailed under the blows of aircraft and submarines from a reviving Malta. Captured British fuel, food and lorries from Tobruk and Matruh made it possible to keep moving forward, but ammunition, water and transport were constantly short. The German air force could not keep up with the move to forward airfields, whereas the Royal Air Force was now operating close to its bases in the Delta and attacking Axis columns almost without respite.

Rommel was also losing the advantage that intelligence had given him throughout the spring. Since the beginning of 1942 the Germans and Italians had been reading the telegrams of the American military attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner Fellers, who reported to Washington in detail on the state and plans of the Eighth Army; at Rommel’s headquarters he was known as “the good source”. On 29 June Fellers switched to a new, secure cipher, and on 7 July he was recalled from Egypt. The British, meanwhile, thanks to the reading of German signals at Bletchley Park (intelligence known as Ultra), knew more and more about the enemy’s positions and intentions.

Rommel’s plan

Rommel wanted to attack as early as 30 June, but for lack of fuel and because of transport difficulties the attack had to be put back by a day – and that day was badly needed by the British. The plan was for the 90th Light Division and the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions to pass between the El Alamein box and Deir el Abyad. The 90th Light was then to turn north to the coast road and cut off the garrison of El Alamein, which Rommel believed to be the remnants of the 50th Division, while the Afrika Korps was to turn south into the rear of XIII Corps. The Italians were to pin down the El Alamein box from the west and follow the Germans. Rommel did not know that the British had just put a fresh brigade into the gap through which he intended to pass.

1 July: Deir el Shein

At three in the morning of 1 July the 90th Light Division set off eastwards, but in the darkness it veered too far north and ran straight into the fire of the South African artillery in the El Alamein box. Brought to a halt, it dug in; according to the German war diary and the British official history, some of its units even panicked, and the officers had difficulty restoring order. In the afternoon the division tried to move east again, but the fire of three South African brigade groups pinned it to the ground once more. Rommel himself, who drove to this sector, later recalled lying for a long time with his staff under British fire.

The panzer divisions of the Afrika Korps were delayed by a sandstorm and then by a heavy air attack. It was already broad daylight when they went round Deir el Abyad and ran into an unexpected obstacle: in positions in the Deir el Shein depression, at the western end of the Ruweisat Ridge, stood the 18th Indian Infantry Brigade. It had been rushed over from Iraq, had occupied the position on the evening of 28 June and had had only two or three days to prepare its defences. It consisted of an Essex battalion, a Sikh battalion and a Gurkha battalion, supported by 23 25-pounder gun-howitzers, 16 new 6-pounder anti-tank guns and nine Matilda tanks.

At about 10 a.m. the 21st Panzer Division attacked. The Indians, British and Gurkhas held out all day in bitter fighting, and their anti-tank guns and artillery inflicted painful tank losses on the Germans. By evening, however, the position had been overrun, and most of the brigade had been killed or captured – in practice it ceased to exist. Yet its resistance was of great importance: the Afrika Korps had lost a whole day, which Auchinleck used to organise the defence of the Ruweisat Ridge. The 1st Armoured Division, sent to help Deir el Shein, ran into the 15th Panzer Division and pushed it back to the west. By the end of the day the Afrika Korps had only 37 of its 55 tanks still serviceable.

2–3 July: Ruweisat and the New Zealand counter-stroke

On 2 July Rommel renewed the attack. The 90th Light again failed to advance, so Rommel abandoned the planned turn south by the Afrika Korps and threw it east along the Ruweisat Ridge instead, to help break through to the coast road. The ridge was defended by an improvised force, “Robcol”, under Brigadier Robert Waller, the artillery commander of the 10th Indian Division – a field artillery regiment, a light anti-aircraft regiment and a company of infantry. Robcol gained some time, and late in the afternoon the British armoured brigades entered the battle: the 4th Brigade attacked the 15th Panzer Division and the 22nd Brigade the 21st. They beat off repeated attacks by German tanks, which withdrew before dark. During the night the defence of the ridge was strengthened.

On 3 July Rommel tried once more, with only 26 serviceable tanks left in the Afrika Korps and the Italian XX Corps on its southern flank. That day Auchinleck went over to the counter-attack in the south. The New Zealanders from the Kaponga box, reinforced by the remnants of the 5th Indian Division and the 7th Motor Brigade, moved north to threaten the Axis flank and rear, and ran into the artillery of the Italian Ariete Armoured Division. According to figures based on Italian data, Ariete lost 531 men in this clash, including some 350 prisoners, as well as 36 guns, several tanks and 55 lorries – by the end of the day it reportedly had only five serviceable tanks. The Axis attack on Ruweisat broke down once again against the 4th and 22nd Armoured Brigades. According to various tallies, Allied aircraft flew between 780 and more than 900 sorties that day, and the Desert Air Force, commanded by Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham, attacked enemy columns and airfields without pause.

Rommel calls off the attack

On 4 July Rommel concluded that without rest and reinforcements he could advance no further. He reported to Berlin that his three German divisions numbered 1,200–1,500 men each and that the delivery of supplies was constantly paralysed by enemy aircraft; he expected to have to stay on the defensive for at least two weeks. The figures cited by the British official history speak for themselves: in June some 5,000 tons of supplies reached Libya for the Axis forces, against 34,000 in May, and 400 vehicles against 2,000. On 4 July Major General Leslie Morshead’s 9th Australian Division, brought over from Syria, entered the line in the north, and further reinforcements were streaming into Egypt. On 5 July the New Zealanders made one more attempt to get into the rear of Ariete at El Mreir, but the fire of the Italian Brescia Infantry Division stopped them and XIII Corps broke off the attack.

Historians identify this as the moment when Egypt came closest to falling – and as the moment when that danger ended. Rommel had not lost the battle in the field, but his army had reached the end of its strength on the very threshold of its goal, and in the following weeks the initiative passed to Auchinleck.

Place in the war

The first days of July brought to an end the great Axis offensive that had begun at Gazala on 26 May. The Battle of Gazala, the fall of Tobruk and the pursuit into Egypt had won Rommel his field marshal’s baton and brought him to within 110 km of Alexandria, but they had also drained his army completely, while the British were now fighting on the doorstep of their own bases and depots. In the following weeks Auchinleck took the initiative: on 10 July the Australians attacked at Tel el Eisa, and from 14 July there was fighting for the Ruweisat Ridge, in which British infantry took their objectives only to lose them again for want of tank support. At the end of July both exhausted armies went over to the defensive, and the battle ended in stalemate.

That stalemate, however, was a strategic victory for the British: Rommel did not reach the Nile, Mussolini went back to Rome around 20 July after three weeks of waiting, and the Flap in Cairo died down. Even so, Winston Churchill, who because of the defeats in Africa had had to face a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons at the beginning of July, relieved Auchinleck in August. General Harold Alexander took over the Middle East Command, and Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery the Eighth Army. On the El Alamein position prepared in July, the British beat off Rommel’s last offensive at Alam el Halfa at the turn of August and September, and in October and November 1942, in the Second Battle of El Alamein, they routed his army and began the advance that ended in May 1943 with the surrender of the Axis forces in Tunisia.