Montgomery's Eighth Army had built up a large advantage in men, tanks and aircraft. The attack, Operation Lightfoot, began at 9:40 p.m. with one of the heaviest barrages of the war, after which infantry and engineers cleared paths through deep Axis minefields. Rommel was on sick leave in Germany, and his stand-in, Georg Stumme, died of a heart attack under fire the next day. After 12 days of attritional fighting, the Axis line broke, and Rommel began a long retreat across North Africa.
By the autumn of 1942, Rommel's Panzer Army Africa had pushed deep into Egypt but was stalled at El Alamein, a railway halt about 100 kilometers west of Alexandria, where the Qattara Depression to the south protected the flank. Montgomery, appointed in August, refused to attack until he had overwhelming strength, including new American Sherman tanks.
The British deceived the enemy about where and when they would strike, using dummy tanks, fake supply dumps and even a mock water pipeline in the south. On the night of October 23, the barrage lit the desert. Sappers moved forward with mine detectors and white tape to mark cleared lanes. The first nights went more slowly than planned, and the battle became what Montgomery called a "dog fight".
Rommel flew back from Austria on October 25. His army, short of fuel and tanks, was ground down, and on November 4 it broke. Days later, Anglo-American forces landed in Morocco and Algeria. Churchill later wrote, "Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat," and said of the battle's significance, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
Key people: Bernard Montgomery, Erwin Rommel, Georg Stumme