![]() ![]() The Italian tanks were blown away, the lighter German tanks swiftly destroyed, the artillery barrage continued, the daytime air strikes intensified. This time the sheer weight of Montgomery’s pressure meant that the Axis lines just buckled under the relentless pressure more and more British tanks were knocked out by German mines, bazookas, and the 88 mms, losing at a rate of four to one, but they still kept coming, and they could sustain their losses more easily. Yet for all of its importance the battle is regarded as a notoriously attritional battle with General Montgomery unimaginatively converting his materiel superiority into victory. After their defeat at El Alamein the Germans and Italians were constantly on the retreat in North Africa until their eventual surrender in Tunisia. Its significance was feted, a touch inaccurately, by Winston Churchill: ‘ before Alamein we never had a victory, after it never a defeat.’ In the tumultuous year of 1942 and combined with the Battle of Stalingrad it proved to be the high water mark of German success in the Second World War. ![]() The Second Battle of El Alamein was the decisive battle of the North African campaign fought between the Allied 8th Army and the Axis Panzerarmee Afrika over 23 October to 4 November 1942. ![]()
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