Alamein - Battle of El Alamein

El Alamein was the World War II land battle Britain had to win. By the summer of 1942 Rommel's German forces were threatening to sweep through the Western Desert and drive on to the Suez Canal, and Britain was in urgent need of military victory. Then, in October, after 12 days of attritional tank battle and artillery bombardment, Montgomery's Eighth Army, with Australians and New Zealanders playing crucial roles in a genuinely international Allied fighting force, broke through the German and Italian lines at El Alamein. It was a turning-point in the war after which, in Churchill's words, "we never had a defeat". Stephen Bungay's book is as much at home analysing the crucial logistics of keeping desert armies supplied with petrol and tank parts as it is reappraising the combat strategies of Montgomery and Rommel, and ranges widely from the domestic political pressures on Churchill to the aerial siege of Malta, key to the control of the Mediterranean. And in a chapter on "The Soldier's War", Bungay graphically evokes the phantasmagoric blur of thunderous cannonade and tormenting heat that was the lot of the individual men who actually fought and died in the desert.

For Great Britain there were two pivotal battles in the Second World War. One was the Battle of Britain. The other was El Alamein. There, in October 1942, in a remote part of the desert between Libya and Egypt, at a place named only for the sake of its nondescript railway station, and after a year of stalemate, the British army under the command of General Montgomery won an epic battle of attrition with Rommel's Afrika Korps. If the first kept Britain in the war to stand a chance of fighting Hitler, El Alamein turned the tide, after several years of retreat and defeat, that set the Allies on the road to future victory. Like the Battle of Britain, moreover, Alamein has taken its place in history as more than just a military battle: it has become a national myth. Where 1940 was consecrated by Churchill as "their finest hour", Alamein has been enshrined for posterity as "the end of the beginning" - as the line that Hitler's forces were ultimately unable ever to cross.

Now Stephen Bungay, author of The Most Dangerous Enemy, the history of the Battle of Britain, published by Aurum Press in 2000 that has already been acknowledged as the standard work on the subject, unlikely to be surpassed for its comprehensiveness and authority, has written a new and immensely readable history of Alamein. Alamein is a book for the general reader: a superb narrative that covers every aspect of the battle: the political context that urgently demanded a military victory for Churchill as his government's fortunes reached their lowest ebb; the technological contest between the German tanks and the British artillery; the soldiers' war - a phantasmagoric blur of thunderous cannonade, swirling sand and baking heat; and the meeting of two evenly-matched military minds as the brilliant but mercurial Rommel faced the fastidious, dapper Montgomery across the desert wastes.

Stephen Bungay
Hardcover with d/w 266pp Aurum 2002 1st Ed

 

Near Fine/Fine

Book Code:  SH3394