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By Root 1182 0

War I-style bombardment by more than 800 guns, and then, in the darkness, the British crashed into the Axis positions. The attack opened with the Australians moving along the coastal road. To their left the Highland Division, bagpipes wailing in the night, drove toward the desert ridges. To their left again were New Zealanders, then South Africans, Indians, and a Greek brigade, more British, and the French down on the end of the line. The Germans and Italians held hard; they had dug in extensively, they had laid minefields and strung wire and sited their anti-tank guns. For three days the British bludgeoned their way forward, only to be held to no real gain. On the fourth day Rommel sent his armor out in a vicious counterattack, but the British tanks and aircraft stopped it cold.

Montgomery had hoped to break his armor through, set up blocking positions, and then mop up the enemy infantry. The Germans were holding too hard for that, and the battle resolved itself into a straight slugging match. Finally, on the night of November 2, the New Zealanders broke into the clear, shored up a corridor through the main line of resistance, and British armor rolled on into the open. Late on the 2nd, Rommel acknowledged his battle was lost. He began to pull out, then made the mistake of asking Hitler if it was all right. The order came back next day to hold fast, no retreat. It was a mistake and Rommel knew it; reluctantly he canceled his withdrawal order, and the result was that the whole position fell to pieces, units facing in every direction, some moving, some trying to hold on. Aided by this confusion, the British punched another hole in the line on the 4th, caught an Italian armored division in flank as it moved up from the south, and wiped it out after it had put up a gallant stand. The rest of the Italians, cut off to the south, were left to their fate and the Germans, disregarding Hitler’s orders, began to fade away. On the 5th, Hitler said they could go after all.

Montgomery paused to pull his winded troops together. The battle cost him 13,000 casualties and more than half his tank force but he was quickly reinforcing and bringing in new material. The Axis lost twice that many men and half that many tanks and could afford neither.

Now the hunt was up. On the 7th, the British just barely missed cutting off the retreat; on the 11th, they crossed the Libyan frontier. For 1,400 miles, all the way to Tunisia, the 8th Army and the Desert Air Force harried the Axis and snapped at their heels. The Germans never really put a position together. The Royal Navy kept leapfrogging supplies forward from port to port. The fliers moved their airfields as fast as the armor went, and at one point even flew in and set up a temporary airfield ahead of the retreating Germans. Time and again the British armor lanced into the desert, racing to get ahead of the Germans and cut them off. They never quite succeeded, for the fleeing enemy could travel faster along the coast road than the British could through the rough scrub and shale of the desert. Repeatedly, though, they cut the tail of the column, and the Axis retreat was marked by a long suppurating trail of broken-down vehicles, abandoned when their fuel ran out, guns left behind, aircraft parked on overrun fields. Australians drank the wine stored by gourmet commanders, and Indians marched thousands of prisoners back eastward. It was one of the greatest and most exhilarating pursuits in history, and the old familiar desert names appeared in the communiques one after another: Tobruk on November 13, Benghazi on the 20th, El Agheila in mid-December, Sirte on Christmas Day—not for two years had the British been close to Sirte—and the climax, Tripoli, on January 23, 1943. By the end of the month the British were into Tunisia, and closing up on the end of the long desert campaign. El Alamein was one of the great turning points of the war, fairly won and exploited to the full. The only sour note in the whole symphony was that they had failed to bag Rommel himself. In February he and the tattered remnants