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By Root 1005 0

and continued to assume until late autumn, that the British campaign was lost; that Eighth Army had shown itself fatally inferior to the Afrika Korps, which was destined to sweep onward and seize the Nile Delta. During July, gloom suffused the British in Cairo, matched by visible exultation among Egyptians. On the notorious ‘Ash Wednesday’, Middle East headquarters conducted bonfires of secret documents and many families fled to Palestine. To the shame of the Mandate authorities there, several hundred Jews fleeing Egypt who applied for sanctuary, including some working for the British, were refused entry visas. Officials asserted blandly that they were unable to breach immigration quotas.

Yet the British predicament was not as bad as they themselves supposed. Some civilians, even in occupied Europe, made shrewder deductions from meagre and deceitful Nazi bulletins than did Allied soldiers on the battlefield. Victor Klemperer, the great Dresden Jewish diarist, wrote on 8 July 1942: ‘I assume that England and Russia exaggerate by 100 per cent, Goebbels and Co by 200 per cent … In Russia Hitler’s victories are killing him; in Egypt he really could win. But … Rommel appears to have been brought up short before Alexandria.’ Klemperer was right: Rommel’s condition was unenviable. The outnumbered Axis army stood at the end of a tenuous 1,500-mile supply line. Allocations of fuel and weapons from Germany were always inadequate. Empowered by Ultra decrypts, the Royal Navy and the RAF began to inflict heavy attrition on fuel, tank and ammunition shipments across the Mediterranean.

The RAF in North Africa gained strength, while the Luftwaffe weakened; the first American Grant tanks, almost a match for Rommel’s panzers, reached Eighth Army. Strategically, it would have profited the Germans to withdraw to a line inside Libya, easing their own supply difficulties and increasing those of the British. Whatever delusions Rommel’s soldiers cherished, his army lacked strength to make a final push for Alexandria with a realistic prospect of success. But vanity and ambition often caused ‘the Desert Fox’ to overreach himself, and Hitler urged ill-judged aggression upon the Afrika Korps even more insistently than Churchill pressed his own commanders.

Auchinleck was well placed to frustrate Axis purposes, merely by holding his ground. American and British forces were to land at the opposite end of North Africa in November – Operation Torch – and this made it unnecessary for Eighth Army to take risks. Once the Allies established themselves in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, Rommel’s position in Egypt would become untenable. But as autumn approached, the success of Torch seemed ill-assured, especially in Washington. For the British, there was also the imperative of national prestige. Since 1939 Churchill’s armies had suffered repeated defeats – indeed humiliations – often by smaller enemy forces. Spirits at home were low. Churchill’s people had grown morbidly sensitive about the contrast between the heroic struggle waged by the Russians and their own nation’s feeble battlefield showing. A British victory was desperately needed, and only in the desert was this attainable. The defeat of the Afrika Korps in Egypt was scarcely relevant to the war’s outcome, but had become an issue of the highest moral importance, and perceived as such by the prime minister.

On 1 July, when the Germans attacked again, they were repulsed in what became known as the First Battle of El Alamein. In the encounters which followed, neither side gained a decisive advantage. But what mattered was that Rommel was denied a breakthrough – although, given the opposing forces’ respective strengths and detailed Allied foreknowledge of German intentions, it would have been disgraceful had he achieved one. In the first days of August Churchill arrived in Cairo with Alan Brooke, to see for himself how things stood. He sacked Auchinleck, who was replaced as Eighth Army commander by Brooke’s nominee, Lt. Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery, and as Middle East C-in-C by Gen. Sir Harold Alexander.