Montgomery takes command of the Eighth Army

On the afternoon of 13 August 1942 Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery took command of the British Eighth Army, which since July had been holding positions at El Alamein, some hundred kilometres from Alexandria. He had flown into Egypt the day before and was not due to take over the army until 15 August, but after talking to the staff officers he decided there was nothing to wait for and informed Cairo that he was in command from that moment. That same evening he told the staff that all plans for further withdrawal were to be burned: the Eighth Army would fight where it stood. This was the last of a series of changes in the Middle East command that Winston Churchill carried through in the first half of August.

It is often said that Montgomery became commander of an Eighth Army “which comprised the Allied land forces in Egypt and Libya”, and that Churchill wanted more offensive action in North Africa. The second point is accurate; the first needs correcting. The Eighth Army was the field army in the Western Desert, not the whole of the land forces in the region: the garrisons in the Nile Delta, Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Persia came under other commands. In Libya, apart from remote oases in the south, there were no British troops left in August 1942 – since the fall of Tobruk the whole of Cyrenaica had been in Axis hands. The decision to give Montgomery the army was itself taken on 7 and 8 August in Cairo and London; 13 August was the day on which he actually assumed command.

The crisis of summer 1942

In the spring and summer of 1942 the Eighth Army suffered a string of defeats. At Gazala Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Panzer Army Africa smashed its armoured divisions; on 21 June Tobruk fell with some 33,000 men, and the remnants fell back deep into Egypt. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, dismissed the army commander, Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie, on 25 June and took command in the field himself. In the First Battle of El Alamein he stopped Rommel, but the July counter-attacks – hasty and poorly coordinated – brought no breakthrough, and on 31 July, at the end of that battle, Auchinleck suspended offensive operations until mid-September.

In London this meant political trouble. In July Churchill had survived a motion of no confidence, but he knew that another defeat in Africa might cost him office. Any day now he was also to travel to Moscow to tell Joseph Stalin that there would be no second front in Europe in 1942. He needed a victory, or at least a commander who would promise one.

Churchill in Cairo

On 3 August Churchill flew into Cairo. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, arrived the same day, and the Prime Minister of South Africa, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, in whom Churchill placed great trust, was already there. For several days Churchill talked with Auchinleck and toured camps and airfields, and on 5 August he went to the front at El Alamein. The impression was a bad one: the Eighth Army’s headquarters lived in makeshift tents among the flies on Ruweisat Ridge, the officers talked of further regroupings, and Auchinleck kept repeating that the army would not be ready to attack before mid-September. Churchill wanted a blow struck much sooner.

Brooke had fewer reservations about Auchinleck as a soldier than about his choice of men. He blamed in particular the Deputy Chief of Staff, Major General Eric Dorman-Smith, to whom he attributed a bad influence on the handling of armour. Both men agreed that Auchinleck could not simultaneously direct the whole of the Middle East and command an army in the field, and that the Eighth Army, after so many defeats, had lost confidence in its generals.

On 6 August Churchill put his proposals to the War Cabinet in London. The new Commander-in-Chief Middle East was to be General Sir Harold Alexander, who in 1940 had commanded the last troops at Dunkirk and in 1942 had led the remnants of the British forces out of Burma. The Eighth Army was to go to Lieutenant General William Gott, commander of XIII Corps, who had fought in the desert since the start of the war, was popular with the troops and was recommended by the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. Brooke preferred Montgomery, then commanding South-Eastern Army in England; after talking to Gott on 5 August he noted that Gott was tired and had already “tried most of his ideas” on the Germans. Churchill nevertheless pushed Gott through. A separate command was to be created from Persia and Iraq, carved out of the Middle East, and was offered to Auchinleck.

The death of Gott

On the afternoon of 7 August Gott was flying from the front to Cairo to rest for a few days before taking over the army. The flight was considered safe – Churchill had flown the same route without escort a few days earlier. But the Bristol Bombay transport of No. 216 Squadron RAF was intercepted by two German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters of Jagdgeschwader 27. The young pilot managed to make a forced landing in the desert, but the fighters strafed the aircraft on the ground and it burned out. Most of the passengers were killed, Gott among them. According to the German airmen’s accounts, they learned whom they had shot down only after returning to base.

That same evening Churchill, on the advice of Brooke and Smuts, agreed to Montgomery and sent a cable to London. Montgomery had only just been told that he was to command the British First Army in the planned invasion of French North Africa under General Dwight Eisenhower, in place of Alexander. On the morning of 8 August he learned that he was going to Egypt instead.

The removal of Auchinleck

On 8 August Colonel Ian Jacob of the War Cabinet secretariat carried a letter from Churchill to Auchinleck at his desert headquarters. The Prime Minister wrote that the War Cabinet had decided to divide the Middle East command, and offered the general the new Persia and Iraq Command. Auchinleck took the decision with dignity but declined the new post: he considered the separation of Persia and Iraq a strategic mistake and did not want it to look like a consolation prize. The command was later taken by General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson. Together with Auchinleck, the Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Thomas Corbett, and Dorman-Smith left Cairo; the commander of XXX Corps, Lieutenant General William Ramsden, who had temporarily commanded the Eighth Army after Gott’s death, also soon lost his post.

On 10 August Churchill handed Alexander a written directive. Its first point stated that the prime and main duty of the Commander-in-Chief was “to take or destroy at the earliest opportunity the German-Italian Army commanded by Field-Marshal Rommel, together with all its supplies and establishments in Egypt and Libya”. It is from this document, and not from the remit of the Eighth Army command, that the reference to Egypt and Libya comes. That same night Churchill flew off via Tehran to Moscow. Alexander formally took over the Middle East on 15 August.

Montgomery’s first days

Montgomery left England on 10 August and was in Cairo on the morning of 12 August. At GHQ he talked with Auchinleck, who told him to take over the army on 15 August. In his memoirs of 1958 Montgomery claimed that Auchinleck had then laid out to him a plan to withdraw – in the event of a strong attack by Rommel – to the Nile Delta, or even further. Auchinleck firmly denied this; there were evacuation plans of the kind every staff has, but his orders of July provided for the defence of the El Alamein position.

On the morning of 13 August Montgomery went up to the front. At a crossroads he was met by the Eighth Army’s chief of staff, Brigadier Francis de Guingand, whom he knew from earlier service; on the way he briefed Montgomery on the state of the army. At the headquarters on Ruweisat Ridge Montgomery found a staff that knew neither what Rommel would do nor what it should do itself. At about 2 p.m. he announced that he was taking command and sent a signal to Cairo that he had done so two days ahead of the appointed date. According to Montgomery’s memoirs, Auchinleck was angered by this but did not protest.

In the evening Montgomery gathered the staff officers and gave an address that became part of his legend. He announced that he had ordered all plans and instructions for further withdrawal to be burned: “If we can’t stay here alive, then let us stay here dead.” He said that Rommel was expected to attack at any moment – “Very good, let him attack” – that new American Sherman tanks were arriving from Suez, that the army would stop fighting in scattered battle groups and that divisions would fight as divisions. When it was ready, it would go over to an offensive that would “hit Rommel and his army for six right out of Africa”.

A new order

Over the next few days Montgomery moved army headquarters from Ruweisat Ridge to the coast at Burg el Arab, next to the headquarters of the Desert Air Force under Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham, so that the army and the air force could plan the battle together. De Guingand became chief of staff with full authority to issue orders in the commander’s name. To replace Gott at XIII Corps, Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks was brought out from England. Montgomery demanded from Alexander the 44th Infantry Division, newly arrived from Britain and earmarked for the defence of the Delta, and placed it on Alam Halfa Ridge, some fifteen kilometres behind the front line; he had the tanks dug in so that they would fight from fixed positions like anti-tank guns instead of charging the German guns. He also began to build up an armoured reserve, from which a corps for the coming offensive was to be formed.

Just as important was what was happening in the soldiers’ minds. Montgomery went from unit to unit, spoke to the men and handed out cigarettes, and he soon exchanged his regulation cap for a black tank beret with two badges, which became his trademark. When Churchill, on his way back from Moscow, visited the Eighth Army with Brooke and Alexander on 19 August, all of them were struck by the change of mood. Montgomery presented his plan of defence and predicted that Rommel would strike in the southern sector and then turn towards Alam Halfa Ridge. He knew this largely from German signals enciphered on Enigma and read by the British, though officially no one in the army was allowed to speak of it.

The dispute over Auchinleck’s legacy

For decades historians have argued over how much of this was Montgomery’s own work. The plan whose positions he manned had been prepared in outline by Auchinleck and Dorman-Smith in their appreciation of the situation of 27 July: Rommel would strike in the south to outflank the Eighth Army, and the defence would rest on minefields and on Alam Halfa Ridge. In his memoirs Montgomery claimed credit both for the plan and for saving Egypt. His supporters stress that he changed the plan decisively – he put the 44th Division on the ridge, abandoned the mobile defence in which the Eighth Army had kept losing, and gave the troops the certainty that there would be no further retreat. His critics, beginning with Correlli Barnett, believe that he took over a ready-made defensive system and an army that Auchinleck had already brought to a halt, and later built his legend on other men’s work. Both sides agree on one thing: after 13 August the Eighth Army regained its belief in itself.

Place in the war

The change of command closed a period in which British generals in North Africa came and went every few months and Rommel was thought invincible. Montgomery made his position clear from the start: he would not attack until he had overwhelming superiority and trained troops, even against pressure from Churchill. Meanwhile in the Mediterranean the British fleet was just then fighting the Pedestal convoy through to Malta, whose aircraft and submarines would in the following weeks sink ships carrying fuel for Rommel.

The predictions proved correct. On the night of 30–31 August Rommel attacked in the southern sector and was repulsed in the Battle of Alam Halfa – his last offensive in Egypt. Montgomery did not pursue him but spent the following weeks building up his forces, and on 23 October he opened the Second Battle of El Alamein. Victory in it, a few days before the Allied landings in French North Africa, made him the most famous British general of the war, and allowed Churchill to speak of “the end of the beginning”. Auchinleck returned to service in June 1943 as Commander-in-Chief in India.