Rommel's retreat from El Alamein

On 3 November 1942, the twelfth day of the Second Battle of El Alamein, the German-Italian Panzer Army of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was already beaten. After Operation Supercharge on 2 November, Rommel had fewer than forty serviceable German tanks and had decided to withdraw westwards. The retreat had already begun when at 1.30 p.m. an order from Adolf Hitler reached his headquarters: not to yield a single step and to show the troops only one road – to victory or to death. Rommel complied and halted the withdrawing units. Only in the afternoon of 4 November, when British tanks had broken through the front and the commander of the Afrika Korps had been captured, did he order a general retreat without waiting for Hitler’s consent. That consent arrived on the evening of the same day.

Chronologies often state that the battle ended on 3 November and that Rommel’s troops were forced to retreat “during the night”. That is a simplification. The first Axis units began to withdraw on the night of 2/3 November, but Hitler’s order held them back for more than a day. The real retreat began in the afternoon of 4 November and on the night of 4/5 November. Some historians take 4 November, when the front broke, as the end of the battle; others take 11 November, when the pursuit drove the last Axis troops out of Egypt. The last Italian units were still fighting in their old positions on 6 November.

The “victory or death” order

On the evening of 2 November, after a day of fighting at Tel el Aqqaqir, Rommel reported to the Wehrmacht high command that the army was exhausted and could not stop another attack, and that with the shortage of vehicles an orderly withdrawal of the infantry was almost impossible. He decided to fall back in stages to a position at Fuka. During the night and on the morning of 3 November the supply columns and some of the units, including Italian infantry of X and XXI Corps, began to withdraw, and columns of vehicles set off westwards along the coast road.

Hitler’s reply reached Rommel at 1.30 p.m. on 3 November. It ran, in substance: together with the German people, he was following with confidence in Rommel’s leadership and in the courage of the German and Italian troops under his command the heroic struggle in Egypt. In the situation in which Rommel found himself there could be no other thought than to hold out, to give not a metre of ground and to throw every gun and every soldier into the battle. […] It would not be the first time in history that a strong will had triumphed over larger battalions. To his troops Rommel could show no other way than that to victory or to death. Hitler promised air reinforcements for Albert Kesselring, who commanded the German forces in the south, and gave assurances that Benito Mussolini and the Italian high command were doing everything to supply the army with the means to continue the fight. A similar order came from Rome.

“A certain apathy came over us”

The order came as a shock to Rommel. The field marshal, who had cut short his medical treatment and returned to Africa in the middle of the battle and had until then enjoyed Hitler’s particular favour, regarded it as a demand for the impossible. In his notes, published after the war, he recalled that everyone on the staff was stunned and that for the first time in the African campaign he did not know what to do: “A certain apathy came over us as we issued orders, at the behest of the highest authority, for all the existing positions to be held.” He later called 3 November one of the most memorable days of the war – the day on which the army command lost its freedom of decision.

Rommel ordered the Italian infantry corps and the 90th Light Division to hold their positions, and halted the Afrika Korps, which had already pulled back, about 10 kilometres west of the old line. The Italian XX Corps with the Ariete Armoured Division conformed to this position. In the evening Rommel replied to Hitler that he would carry out the order, but coolly listed his losses: the infantry, anti-tank units and engineers had lost about half their strength, the artillery about 40 per cent. He sent his aide, Alfred-Ingemar Berndt, to Hitler’s headquarters with the task of describing the army’s real situation. The order to halt the retreat did not reach some units in time; the Italian Bologna Division withdrew on the evening of 3 November in accordance with the earlier plan, and a gap opened in the front.

The British made full use of the day. Allied aircraft, in undisputed command of the air, flew 1,208 sorties on 3 November according to British figures – the most of the whole battle – and dropped almost 400 tons of bombs, mainly on Axis columns crowded onto the coast road. On the ground the fighting went on: the British 2nd and 8th Armoured Brigades pressed on the remnants of the Afrika Korps and the Littorio Division, while from the south the Ariete was coming up to the positions on the Rahman track. Bernard Montgomery, meanwhile, was preparing a new infantry attack to open the way for his armoured divisions.

The breakthrough of 4 November

At 5.45 p.m. on 3 November the Scottish 152nd Brigade attacked about 3 kilometres south of Tel el Aqqaqir, and during the night and early on 4 November further brigades went in – the 5th Indian Brigade a few kilometres further south and the Scottish 154th Brigade against Tel el Aqqaqir itself. The Scots met stiff resistance, but the Indians and the second Scottish brigade found the positions almost abandoned. On the morning of 4 November the British 1st and 7th Armoured Divisions broke out into the desert behind the front line, and Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand Division set off westwards to cut the road at Fuka.

In the morning Kesselring flew in to see Rommel. The conversation was tense: Rommel suspected that the marshal’s optimistic reports had contributed to Hitler’s order. Meanwhile the front was falling apart. During the day the commander of the Afrika Korps, General Wilhelm von Thoma, who had been personally leading the corps’ last tanks in the front line since morning, was captured at Tel el Mampsra. That evening he dined with Montgomery at his headquarters and discussed the course of the battle with him. Command of the Afrika Korps passed to Colonel Fritz Bayerlein.

The heaviest blow fell on the Italians. The British 7th Armoured Division, swinging round the southern end of the front, ran into the Ariete Division, whose thinly armoured and lightly armed tanks stood no chance against the heavier British vehicles. At about 3.30 p.m. the division sent its last report: the enemy had broken through to the south of it, it was surrounded near Bir el Abd, and its tanks were still fighting. Rommel noted that the Italians, at that time his strongest motorised force, had fought with exemplary courage, and that in the Ariete he had lost his oldest Italian comrades-in-arms, from whom more had always been demanded than they could give with their poor weapons. The Littorio and Trieste Divisions were also destroyed that day.

In the early afternoon Rommel concluded that orders from above no longer counted. The British had torn a gap more than ten kilometres wide in the front, and the Axis troops in the north were in danger of being encircled. “We had to save what could still be saved,” he wrote. After news of the destruction of the Ariete he ordered a retreat to the Fuka position; according to various accounts this happened between 3 p.m. and 5.30 p.m. He did not wait for the consent from Hitler that he had requested. Hitler and Mussolini agreed to the retreat only that evening, at about 9 p.m., after Berndt had reported at the Führer’s headquarters – by which time Rommel’s troops were already withdrawing.

The abandoned infantry

Hitler’s order cost the army most where it was weakest. Had the retreat begun on the night of 2/3 November not been halted, some of the Italian infantry divisions would have had a day’s start on the British pursuit. Now, without lorries, they had no chance. The Bologna, Trento, Brescia and Pavia Divisions tried to cross the desert on foot, without water or food, and most of their men were taken prisoner. The commander of the 40th Infantry Regiment of the Bologna Division, Colonel Arrigo Dall’Olio, is said to have declared on surrendering that his men had stopped firing not for want of will but because they had fired their last round. The paratroopers of the Folgore Division, who had held the southern sector of the front throughout the battle, withdrew on foot and laid down their arms on 6 November; the remnants of the division were disbanded. The German parachute brigade of General Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, also left without transport, fared better: his men captured a British supply column, and some 600 of them reached their own lines in its lorries.

The abandonment of the Italian infantry, although forced by the lack of vehicles, poisoned relations between the allies. Italian soldiers and officers felt that the Germans had taken everything they could and left them in the desert. In Italy itself the defeat at El Alamein, and especially the destruction of the Folgore and Ariete Divisions, became, in the view of some historians, one of the factors that undermined confidence in the regime and contributed to Mussolini’s overthrow in the summer of 1943.

The pursuit

The British pursuit fell short of expectations. On 4 and 5 November the British armoured divisions tried to outflank the retreating columns through the desert and cut them off on the coast road at Fuka and Mersa Matruh, but they got stuck in traffic jams at the gaps through the minefields, lost their supply columns and ran out of fuel. At noon on 6 November torrential rain began, which for two days turned the desert tracks into mud and immobilised the tanks. The last Axis rearguards left Mersa Matruh on the night of 7/8 November, and on 11 November the New Zealanders took the Halfaya Pass on the Libyan frontier. Egypt was clear of Axis troops.

Rommel saved the remnants of his motorised divisions – at the start of the retreat he had about 30 German and just over 10 Italian tanks – but lost most of his army. According to the British official history, by 11 November some 7,800 Germans and some 22,000 Italians had been taken prisoner, about 30,000 men in all. Italian and German figures from the time differ in detail, but all speak of tens of thousands of prisoners and the loss of almost all the tanks: of the 249 German tanks Rommel had at the start of the battle, 36 were left on 4 November, according to the British. The Eighth Army lost some 13,500 killed, wounded and missing in the whole battle from 23 October.

Bells across Britain

In London the news from El Alamein was received with all the greater relief because as recently as July Winston Churchill had had to defend himself in Parliament against a motion of no confidence after the fall of Tobruk. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Harold Alexander, suggested to the Prime Minister that the victory be marked by ringing the church bells. Churchill held back until it was certain that the success would last, and in the meantime, on 8 November, the Allies landed in North Africa. On 10 November, in a speech at the Mansion House, he said that this was not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning. On 15 November church bells rang out across Britain – for the first time since June 1940, when their use had been reserved as an alarm signal in the event of a German invasion.

Significance

The retreat from El Alamein ended more than two years of see-saw campaigns in the Western Desert, in which the front had swung back and forth several times between Egypt and Cyrenaica. This time the Axis army no longer had the strength to bounce back. Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to the oilfields of the Middle East were finally secured, and Malta, cut off from the east by the airfields in Cyrenaica, could soon again receive convoys from Alexandria. Rommel fell back through Libya all the way to Tripolitania and Tunisia, where, together with the troops sent there against the Allied landings in North Africa, he fought on until the spring of 1943. In May 1943 the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered, and – according to various estimates – between 230,000 and 275,000 German and Italian soldiers went into captivity.

The order of 3 November was the first, but not the last, instance of Hitler forbidding an army in a hopeless position to retreat. Less than three weeks later General Friedrich Paulus received similar orders at Stalingrad, with far more tragic consequences. Rommel, who had until then been regarded as Hitler’s favourite, from now on believed less and less in a German victory, and his relations with the Führer’s headquarters never returned to what they had been.

For the British, El Alamein was the first great land victory over the Germans, and for Montgomery the beginning of a fame that secured him command in the campaigns that followed, up to the landings in Normandy. Even then, however, his caution was criticised, and historians still argue over whether the slower pursuit, the rain and the lack of fuel excuse his failure to destroy the remnants of Rommel’s army before it slipped away into Libya. Churchill wrote after the war that before El Alamein the British had not won a single victory, and after it they had not suffered a single defeat. It was a simplification, but it captured the impression the battle left: in November 1942, together with Stalingrad and Guadalcanal, the initiative in the war began to pass to the Allies.