The British conducted an operational pause from October 28–29 in the face of an unexpected thickness of the minefields, but more to reorganize for a final breakthrough assault (“Operation SUPERCHARGE”). Most importantly, they did so without stopping heavy bombing and shelling of the now-ragged Axis HKL. The renewed assault was made overnight on November 1, when three armored divisions moved through the blasted German minefields in two massed columns, concealed on either flank by vast smokescreens . With the Afrika Korps down to just 30 tanks in the north, Rommel pulled the last armored and mobile divisions up to the coast from the south, including the fine Italian “Ariete” armored division. The “Panzerarmee Afrika,” now shorn of most of its tanks and organic transport and under constant lethal harassment by British fighters and bombers, turned to run. As it did so, Adolf Hitler sent a Haltebefehl order commanding Rommel to stand and fight where he was. He did, his career as ever foremost in mind even over the welfare of his men. That meant leaving his much reduced and exhausted Panzerarmee in place to be smashed by a British and Commonwealth armored onslaught on November 4. Four days later, Anglo-American forces landed in Morocco and Algeria and began moving toward Tunisia, in Rommel’s strategic rear. This time Hitler let Rommel save what he could: he abandoned the Italian infantry and retreated along the coast with all the armor and mechanized forces he had left.

El Alamein was the first major Western victory over the Wehrmacht. The great desert battle was also the greatest solo British and Commonwealth victory over Germans and Italians in World War II. It turned back the Axis threat to Egypt and the Suez Canal; cost Germany invaluable manpower and equipment (200,000 troops and hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles); ended Benito Mussolini’s and the Italian military’s pretensions to imperial greatness and Mediterranean empire; and opened the path to total clearance of the Axis from North Africa: within months, all Axis forces on the continent would be crushed or captured by a Western Allied vice closing on Tunisia. El Alamein importantly bolstered flagging British morale, elevated Montgomery to premier British field commander, and was the essential prelude to clearance of North Africa and follow-on invasions of Sicily and Italy as the Western Allies knocked the first Axis nation out of the war in September 1943. Winston Churchill famously said of the victory at El Alamein: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Suggested Reading: Robert Citino, Death of the Wehrmacht (2007 ); John Latimer, Alamein (2002); J. Strawson, El Alamein: Desert Victory (1981).