The British Eighth Army won a decisive victory at El Alamein in Egypt between 23 October and 11 November 19421, breaking the Axis line and driving Rommel into the long retreat that ended the Axis threat to Egypt. Churchill called it the end of the beginning2, and it marked the turning point of the war in North Africa.
By the autumn of 1942 the Axis had driven deep into Egypt and stood barely sixty miles from Alexandria3. Then, at a dusty rail halt called El Alamein, the British Eighth Army stopped Rommel and threw him back. Churchill called it the end of the beginning, and he was right.
Backs to the wall
After the fall of Tobruk the desert war looked lost for Britain. A new commander, Bernard Montgomery, took over the Eighth Army, steadied its nerve and refused to attack until he was ready. He built up a heavy advantage in men, guns and the new American Sherman tanks4, and waited.
Operation Lightfoot
On the night of 23 October, more than 900 guns opened a bombardment3 that lit the horizon. Infantry cleared lanes through Rommel's vast minefields, the so-called Devil's Gardens, so the armor could pass. Montgomery called his method crumbling: grinding steadily through the Axis line rather than seeking3 one brilliant stroke.
The weight of steel
It became a battle of material and endurance. Allied code-breaking starved Rommel of the fuel5 and supplies crossing the Mediterranean, and his counterattacks withered for want of petrol. On 4 November the Axis line finally broke3 and the retreat began.
What the day decided
Rommel began a retreat that would carry him well over 1,000 miles across the desert7. Days after the breakthrough the Allies landed in the west with Operation Torch1, trapping the Axis in Africa between two fronts. El Alamein gave Britain its first decisive land victory over a German-led army and, with Stalingrad in the same weeks, marked the moment the Second World War began to turn.
The end of the beginning
El Alamein was the hinge of the war in the desert. Before it, the Axis under Rommel had driven to within reach of the Nile and the Suez Canal; after it, they never threatened Egypt again3. Montgomery's victory in November 1942 sent the Afrika Korps into a long retreat westward that, combined with the Anglo-American Torch landings in the Axis rear days later, trapped Axis forces in Tunisia and drove them from Africa within six months. Churchill caught its weight in a phrase: not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning. It was Britain's first clear land victory over a German army in the war, and the morale it brought was as important as the ground it won.
