Hitler did not want to fight for North Africa in 1941, his eyes were staring eastwards towards steppe not desert. Egypt was the prize his ally Benito Mussolini coveted. Yet Il Duce's ill-judged invasion of Greece was compounded by failure in Libya when Generals Wavell and O'Connor's strike in December 1940, Operation Compass, heralded disaster for Italy. Erwin Rommel was sent in with meagre forces, and grudgingly, to stem the rot. But this tortoise turned into a hare. The Desert Fox - generally at odds with his hosts and nominal superiors, not to mention High Command, was a maverick genius who began to rapidly turn the tide. It kept turning. The pendulum of war in the Western Desert began to swing, and it swung back and forth through abortive British offensives, Brevity and Battleaxe, then more tellingly with Claude Auchinleck's Crusader offensive.
But Rommel wasn't daunted. He struck back, harrying the Allies eastwards, past Gazala and Mersa Matruh, into Egypt and the El Alamein Line. Auchinleck saw him off in the First Battle of El Alamein (1-27 July 1942) but failed to mount a successful counterstroke. By now Churchill, desperate for a convincing victory, had had enough of 'The Auk' and his mercurial Chief of Staff Eric Dorman-Smith. He appointed General Harold Alexander to overall command and gave 8th Army, firstly to William Gott, whose death in a plane crash then cleared the path for Bernard Montgomery.
Alexander's instructions were plain, as set out in a directive on 10 August: 1 Your prime and main duty will be to take or destroy at the earliest opportunity the German-Italian Army commanded by Field-Marshal Rommel together with all its supplies and establishments in Egypt and Libya.
This story is from the Issue 113 edition of History of War.
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This story is from the Issue 113 edition of History of War.
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