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Battle of El Alamein
November 1941 - April 1943
The Year 1942 bean inauspiciously for the British in North Africa. It was true the starting in November of 1941, after a series of stalled offensives earlier in the year, the 8th Army under the overall command of General Claude Auchinleck, had pused the Afrika Korps several hundred miles into Libya. This victory, however, was based in part, on success in intercepting enemy supply convoys at sea. Increased German air and submarine support in the Mediterranean, coupled with some Italian, meant that by the end of the year it was British rather then Axis convoys that were not getting through. Rommel's worn-down forces in Libya were replenished, and in January and May 1942 new Axis offensives succeeded in defeating the 8th Army (less adept in co-ordinating the action of its armour, artillery, and infantry than the Afrika Korps) and driving it back into Egypt as far as El Alamein.
Rommel seemed poised to drive on to Cairo and beyond; yet even as the British were being driven back in early 1942, the logistical balance was beginning to swing against the axis. This, was, in part, the inevitable result of the strching and contraction of supply lines that each side experienced as the result of successful desert offensives. The enemy would be driven back hundreds of miles, the pursuers getting farther from their key supply ports on the one hand and the retreating defenders closer to theirs on the other. The shifting balance was also the result of Britians success in reinforcing the island of Malta in the central Mediterranean, signals intelligence, and concurrent success in preventing much fuel and other critical supplies from reaching Rommel through air and sea attacks.
Hence when the Afrika Korps launched renewed attacks in July, and again in late August 1942, the 8th Army was strong enough to prevent a renewed Axis drive into Egypt. In subsequent months the strength of the 8th Army was built up even further. The German and Italian divisions, meanwhile, proved more difficult to reinforce. The result was that when the 8th Army, under the command of General Bernard Montgomery since August, went over to the attack again on 23rd October 1942, it possessed numerical superiority in almost every category of equipment and an almost five-to-one superiority in tanks. Starved of fuel and replacements, the Afrika Korps (despite heavy fighting) was unable to withstand the blow, and although Rommel was able to extricate his more mobile units before they could be encircled along with the Italians, a full retreat across Lybia began.
The change in fortune brought about by this Third Battle of El Alamein, in which Axis forces had been defeated through weight of fire-power more than through superior generalship, turned out to be definitive. Evan as the Afrika Korps was retreating westwards in disarray, combined Anglo-American forces were landing in French Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, creating a new Alllied Front to the rear.
The ambivalence of the Vichy goverment in France over whether to support the Allies or the Axis at this point allowed the Germans to despatch troops over to Tunisia to act as a blocking force, and the advance by the 8th Armay from Lybia and the 1st Army from Algeria was bitterly contested over the winter of 1942-43 by Rommel and General von Arnim. Despite operational setbacks, however, the Allis could reinforce their units far more effectively now than the enemy, who were now relying heavily on a vulnerable air supply route. In April 1943, when the general advance was renewed, the German and Italian defences collapsed. Though it had taken longer than expected, the Axis had finally been driven from the southern half of the Mediterranean, leaving behind 238,000 prisoners of war on top of the 30,000 already captured in the wake of El Alamein.
