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In July of 1941, El Alamein was an unknown dot on the African map. Located 65 miles west of Alexandria and the Nile River Basin in Egypt, the town was a backwater railroad station of little concern. But what a difference a year makes!
In July of 1942, El Alamein, the little train depot on the Mediterranean, became the focus of one (well, actually two) of the most important battles fought during the Second World War.
The British had been fighting the Italians in Africa and were having a pretty good go of it. But things changed when General Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps arrived in early 1941. Here was a serious foe. And it didn’t take long for Rommel’s forces to get cranked up. Having been given orders to “hold the line” and operate defensively, Rommel sensed British weakness and “operated defensively” by pretty much clearing all but eastern Libya of the British and besieging Tobruk…in roughly 60 days. Though Tobruk would eventually be relieved, Erwin Rommel’s reputation as a master of desert warfare had now been firmly established.
With America’s entrance into the war in December and fighting breaking out in the Pacific, the British and Australians siphoned off troops from North Africa for the Pacific. And again, the Desert Fox struck, this time in early 1942. British forces were simply too disorganized and spread too thin to resist their enemy, and could do little but fall back. The German Panzers stopped, rested, and regrouped.
And then they proceeded to preempt a British offensive with one of their own. In June of 1942, the Battle of Gazala was decisively won by the Afrika Korps and Tobruk was captured, earning Rommel the baton of a Field Marshal. Britain’s stay in Libya (for the time being) was over and the push into Egypt began. The decision for the British to stand at Marsa Matruh was abandoned and General Claude Auchinleck, who had recentely appointed himself head of the retreating British, continued the eastern retreat nearly 200 miles into Egypt…to the place nobody knew…El Alamein.
The train station had little strategic value of its own, but its location was critical. Thirty miles to the south was the Qattara Depression, and tank operations there were impossible. If Rommel was to flank the British, he’d have to go far to the south and into the Sahara Desert. Auchinleck’s decision forced the Germans into a frontal assault along a relatively narrow front, which gave the British a much tighter defensive line.
And on July 1, 1942, Rommel’s forces, pushed ruthlessly by their relentless commander, exhausted, and running low on supplies, attacked the British at El Alamein. For the British, there was no fallback position. Defeat here meant the loss of Alexandria, the loss of Cairo, the loss of Egypt, the loss of the Suez Canal, and the loss of Africa. And for the next month, the battle would wage.
Recommended Reading: Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein
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