Operation Supercharge

On the evening of 1 November 1942 the British Eighth Army of Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery opened the last, decisive phase of the battle at El Alamein that had been raging since 23 October. Operation Supercharge began with night air raids and the fire of hundreds of guns, and the infantry went in at 1.05 a.m. on 2 November – war chronologies therefore usually place the start of the preparations under 1 November, while the attack proper fell on the night of 1/2 November. The objective was Tel el Aqqaqir, a low rise by the Rahman track in the desert, about 5 kilometres north-west of the position the British called “Kidney”. That was the keystone of the German-Italian defence.

The attack was led by the New Zealand commander Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg, although this time most of his infantry came from British brigades. After a day’s fighting the armoured brigade that was to open the way had almost ceased to exist, but the German panzer divisions lost most of their remaining tanks in counter-attacking. On the evening of 2 November Field Marshal Erwin Rommel concluded that the battle could no longer be won and began preparing a retreat.

A new plan

The first ten days of the battle had brought no breakthrough. The attack of 23 and 24 October had stuck fast in the minefields, and after the crisis of 26 and 27 October Montgomery pulled some of his forces back into reserve and regrouped the army. In the north, by the sea, the Australians attacked along the coast road for several nights, drawing in the reserves of Rommel, who – back in Africa since 25 October – moved the 21st Panzer Division and the 90th Light Division north.

Montgomery had initially intended to make his new thrust there, along the coast. On 29 October, when intelligence confirmed that the Germans had concentrated their best units in the north, he shifted the axis of the attack to the south of the Australian salient, to a point held mainly by weakened Italian units mixed with German ones. According to many accounts he was urged to change the plan by his chief of staff, Brigadier Francis de Guingand, and by Major General Richard McCreery, chief of staff to the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Harold Alexander. The attack was planned for the night of 31 October/1 November, but at the request of Freyberg, who needed time to prepare his troops, it was postponed by twenty-four hours.

Forces and tasks

For the attack Freyberg had under his command, besides his own 5th New Zealand Brigade and the Māori 28th Battalion, three British brigades: the 151st Brigade (Durham Light Infantry battalions of the 50th Northumbrian Division), the 152nd Brigade (Seaforth and Cameron Highlanders of the 51st Highland Division) and the 133rd Lorried Infantry Brigade, as well as Brigadier John Currie’s 9th Armoured Brigade. The two assault brigades, the 151st on the right and the 152nd on the left, each supported by a regiment of infantry tanks, were to push through the minefields some 3.7 kilometres into the defences. The 9th Armoured Brigade was then to break through the last line of anti-tank guns on the Rahman track behind a creeping barrage. Through the gap thus made the 1st Armoured Division of Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden’s X Corps was to pass, in order to fight the German tanks in open country.

Rommel no longer had the forces for prolonged resistance. On 1 November, according to the British official history, the two German panzer divisions, the 15th and 21st, had 102 serviceable tanks between them, and the Italian Littorio and Trieste Divisions had 65, mostly light and obsolete. On this sector the Eighth Army had a superiority of several times over, including American M4 Sherman tanks, which had reached Egypt in September. Above all, Rommel was short of fuel: tanker after tanker sailing from Italy was being sent to the bottom, and his remaining petrol allowed him only short counter-attacks.

Montgomery knew that the breakthrough would be costly. When Currie warned that his brigade would be attacking on too wide a front, with no reserves, and would lose half its strength, Freyberg told him that the army commander was aware of the risk and was prepared to accept even a hundred per cent losses in the 9th Brigade, provided that the front was broken. The aim of the operation was not only to break the front but also to force the German tanks to fight in the open, where British artillery, anti-tank guns and aircraft could destroy them, and to use up the enemy’s last reserves of fuel.

The night of 1/2 November

On the evening of 1 November bombers of the Desert Air Force attacked the Tel el Aqqaqir and Sidi Abd el Rahman area for several hours. Then 360 guns opened fire, firing some 15,000 shells according to British figures. At 1.05 a.m. on 2 November the infantry advanced behind a creeping barrage. The attack went almost according to plan and at moderate cost. A battalion of the 90th Light Division and a battalion of the 15th Panzer Division were quickly overwhelmed, and by morning, according to British reports, only an Italian Bersaglieri battalion was still holding out on the sector attacked. The Māori took up positions covering the right flank of the new wedge, and the 133rd Brigade the left. New Zealand sappers cleared five lanes through the minefields, through which the Royal Dragoons armoured car regiment slipped out into the depths of the desert and spent the whole day destroying the enemy’s transport and lines of communication.

The 9th Armoured Brigade had set out on the evening of 1 November from El Alamein railway station with 132 tanks. The night march along churned-up, dusty tracks and through the minefields cost it many breakdowns, and only 94 serviceable tanks reached the start line. Currie asked for a half-hour delay to sort out his formations. Freyberg agreed, even though it meant that the tanks would move off just before dawn.

The charge of the 9th Armoured Brigade

At 6.15 a.m. on 2 November the brigade’s three regiments – the 3rd Hussars, the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry and the Warwickshire Yeomanry – advanced behind the barrage towards the gun line. Before they reached their objective dawn began to break, and the tanks stood out clearly against the rising sun. German 50 mm anti-tank guns, Italian 47 mm guns and some twenty German 88 mm anti-aircraft guns opened fire, while German tanks that had pushed in between the regiments shot into the flanks of the British vehicles. Even so, the brigade drove onto the gun positions and in half an hour destroyed some 35 guns, according to British figures, taking several hundred prisoners.

The price was enormous. Of the 94 tanks that had gone into the attack that morning, about twenty remained serviceable after the fighting – figures vary from 19 to 24 – so the brigade had lost 70–75 tanks. According to the British official history, of about 400 men in the tank crews 230 were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The gun line on the Rahman track had not been broken, and the 1st Armoured Division could not get out into the open. The commander of the New Zealand 6th Brigade, Brigadier William Gentry, who drove up in the morning to see what had happened, asked Currie where his tanks were; Currie pointed to a handful of vehicles around his headquarters and replied that those were his armoured regiments. British writing on the battle often quotes the remark that if the British armour owed any debt to the infantry of the Eighth Army, the 9th Brigade paid it on 2 November in heroism and blood.

The tank battle at Tel el Aqqaqir

Soon after dawn the 1st Armoured Division with the 2nd Armoured Brigade came into the gap behind the remnants of the 9th Brigade, followed before noon by the 8th Armoured Brigade on its left. Rommel did just what Montgomery had counted on: he threw everything he had into a counter-attack. At about 11 a.m. what was left of the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions and the Littorio Division struck at the British, who had had time to dig in and set up a screen of anti-tank guns. The attacking tanks came under artillery fire and incessant air attacks. The counter-attacks went on intermittently all day and broke down.

The day’s balance was disastrous for the Germans. Tank losses on the two sides were similar, but for the Eighth Army they were a small fraction of its armoured strength, while for Rommel they were most of what he had left. The number of battle-worthy tanks in the Afrika Korps fell by about 70 on 2 November. The British later called this fighting the “Hammering of the Panzers”. In the afternoon and evening the 133rd and 151st Brigades, with strong artillery support, took two further positions west of the former “Snipe” outpost, meeting little resistance from the shattered Trieste Division. Meanwhile armoured car regiments roamed behind the front, and Allied aircraft bombed the roads and Axis troop concentrations without pause.

Rommel’s decision

On the evening of 2 November the commander of the Afrika Korps, General Wilhelm von Thoma, reported to Rommel that the next day he would have at most 35 tanks fit for action, and that his artillery and anti-tank weapons had dwindled to a third of their strength at the start of the battle. The Italian armoured divisions were in an even worse state. Rommel concluded that he could not withstand another blow and that continuing to hold his positions risked the destruction of the whole army. He decided to withdraw in stages to a position at Fuka, about 90 kilometres west of El Alamein. The motorised units – the Afrika Korps, the 90th Light Division and the Italian XX Corps, to which he brought up the Ariete Armoured Division from the south – were to fall back fighting and cover the rest. The Italian infantry of X and XXI Corps, almost without lorries, were to get away as best they could. On the night of 2/3 November the first units began to leave their positions.

That same evening Rommel informed the high command in Germany of the situation. He wrote that after ten days of fighting the army’s strength was so exhausted that it would be unable to offer effective resistance to a further attempt at a breakthrough, and that with the great shortage of vehicles an orderly withdrawal of the non-motorised units seemed impossible; at the very least, therefore, the gradual destruction of the army had to be reckoned with. The reply from Adolf Hitler’s headquarters, which arrived the next day, nevertheless stopped the retreat.

Montgomery did not realise at once that the enemy was cracking. On the night of 2/3 November the commander of X Corps, Lumsden, sent the 7th Motor Brigade against the Rahman track north of Tel el Aqqaqir, but the brigade received its orders too late to reconnoitre the ground by daylight, ran into strong resistance and the attack failed. Montgomery regrouped his infantry yet again, forming a reserve of four brigades for XXX Corps for the next blow, and brought the 7th Armoured Division up from the south.

Significance

Operation Supercharge did not bring the clean breakthrough the plan had envisaged: the 9th Armoured Brigade bled to death on the gun line, and the 1st Armoured Division did not get out into the open. It did, however, achieve Montgomery’s main aim – it forced Rommel to use up his last tanks in counter-attacks he could not win. After 2 November the German-Italian Panzer Army no longer had any reserves with which to plug another gap. When British and Indian infantry attacked further south on the night of 3/4 November and on the morning of 4 November, the front gave way, the Ariete Division was destroyed fighting British tanks, and in the afternoon of 4 November Rommel ordered a retreat – against the order of Hitler, who the day before had forbidden him to yield a single step. The Italian infantry, without transport, were mostly taken prisoner.

The Second Battle of El Alamein was the first great land victory of the British and Commonwealth armies over the Wehrmacht. It ensured that Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to the oilfields of the Middle East stayed in Allied hands. A few days later, on 8 November, American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria, and Rommel found himself caught between two fronts. The retreat that began at Tel el Aqqaqir ended in May 1943 with the surrender of the Axis forces in Tunisia. Together with the decisions reached at the same time at Stalingrad and on Guadalcanal, November 1942 went down as a turning point of the war. The victory also strengthened Montgomery’s position, although historians still argue over whether his cautious, attritional way of fighting the battle and his equally cautious pursuit allowed Rommel to save too much of his force. Years later Winston Churchill wrote that before Alamein the British had never had a victory, and after Alamein they never had a defeat – a simplification, but one that captures well how the battle was remembered in Britain.