Dan Snow's History Hit - The Battle of El-Alamein Explained

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Fought in the second half of 1942, the Battles of El Alamein were a series of climactic confrontations in Egypt between British Imperial and Commonwealth forces and a combined German and Italian army. Intended as a last-ditch attempt by the British to halt Axis gains in North Africa, they resulted in a clear victory for the British and represented a key turning point in the Second World War. Winston Churchill famously remarked that it was ‘not the end, not even the beginning of the end but, possibly, the end of the beginning’.In this episode, Dan explores the circumstances that provoked this historic confrontation and takes us through the twists and turns of the battle itself, from the perspective of those who fought it.Produced by Dan Snow and James Hickmann. Edited by Joseph Knight.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi folks, welcome back to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now if you're very keen, and you caught my episode yesterday, you'll know that I was talking to my dad. I was asking about his incredible career, witnessing some of the most extraordinary moments in late 20th century history. But we also talked about a trip that we took to Egypt to make a documentary about the Battle of El Alamein. So I thought I'd follow that up really.

I thought it was a good opportunity to broadcast, to reshare an episode I recorded about that battle. It took place in October 1942. It's one of the great turning points of the Second World War. Britain, alongside its imperial and commonwealth forces, that combined army won its first set-piece victory against an Axis army, against a German-Italian army, for the first time really in a big, big battle in the Second World War. It was fought in the deserts of Western Egypt, near a little train station called El Alamein, which would give the battle its name. And it was a victory. It was a clear, it was a decisive victory. Winston Churchill famously warned against getting overconfident. He said it was not the end. It was not clear, it was a decisive victory. Winston Churchill famously warned against getting overconfident.

He said it was not the end. It was not even the beginning of the end. But it was perhaps the end of the beginning. And Winston Churchill was right. The battle came right at the end of a period in 1942, which in many ways I think is the sort of nadir for the British and Allied war effort. Things have been going reasonably badly for the Allies in the spring and summer of 1942. And although it's a battle that's definitely smaller than those gigantic clashes on the Eastern Front or smaller than the battles that would

happen later in Western Europe, it was a battle that mattered. It mattered because it would transform the situation in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and it mattered because of morale. It's that thing that's so intangible, it's hard to quantify, and yet it wins and loses wars. It matters because Britain and the Allies finally had a clear-cut victory. This is a podcast about the Battle of El Alamein. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. The summer of 1942 was a grim time for the Allies. Hitler's forces in Russia were making enormous advances. They reached the Volga, having rampaged across Ukraine, southern Russia, deep into the Caucasus. Japan had followed up on its

Pearl Harbor strike by carving out a huge empire in Asia and the Pacific. Japanese forces had driven the British out of Malaya, Singapore, Burma. They were on the frontier with India. British authorities in India were destroying stockpiles of rice, trying to deny them to Japanese invaders. They were smashing tens of thousands of boats that could be used to transport enemy troops and supplies in the event of an invasion. They were also putting down forcefully an Indian uprising called Quit India. Japan's navy, it is true, had been catastrophically defeated at the Battle of Midway, which I've talked about, one of my favourite podcasts I've recorded recently. I screamed at my microphone for an hour about the Battle of Midway, but it was as yet unclear just how bad the damage to the Imperial Japanese

Navy was, and they still controlled a huge network of islands. They were still threatening Australia. In the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, British and Allied shipping was under terrible pressure from Axis assault, submarines, aircraft based in Italy and elsewhere, making it very difficult to transport the men, supplies, the war material needed to sustain the war effort. Whilst in North Africa, the Germans had enjoyed spectacular success. By the end of the summer of 1942, the Germans were dangerously close to the Nile Delta, to Cairo, to the Suez Canal, threatening Britain's great artery of empire and the source of British oil in the Middle East and Iran beyond the canal. It was a hugely perilous time for Churchill, for Britain, and for the Allied war effort. In North Africa, it is the

most extraordinary story. Fighting had been seesawing east and west across North Africa ever since Italy had entered the war on Germany's side in 1940. Italy had made that decision, foolishly as it turns out, and as well as invading France in 1940 where they were catastrophically defeated, they also invaded British-held Egypt in North Africa in September 1940. They made a sort of tepid advance, stopped after advancing 50 miles or so and dug in. There was then a stunning British counter-attack.

Tens of thousands of prisoners were taken and it was the start of a dash, a kind of freewheeling advance that saw the Italians chased all the way back into Libya and the British on the verge, really, of driving their new enemy out of North Africa entirely. At a coastal battle just south of Benghazi in February 1941, really the entire Italian army was ambushed, attacked. 130,000 men were captured. Something like 500 miles of territory had been taken by the Brits, all at the cost of less than 2,000

Allied soldiers. That success provoked a bit of complacency. The Brits paused, troops were sent elsewhere, there were problems in the Middle East and Southeast Europe, their brilliant commander, who the man who led them to that point was ill, had to be replaced, repairs had to be carried out, and there was a lull. And into that lull came the Germans. Hitler just couldn't stand by and let his key ally be humiliated. So in February 1941, the first German troops arrived in Africa. The new Afrika Korps was formed, and their commander was a bit of a rock star, the rising star of the German army, Major General Erwin Rommel. Rommel had had such an interesting career. He'd once tricked 10,000 men, ironically

they were Italians, to surrender to his much smaller unit. And between the wars, he'd written a best-selling book about how to fight modern war. I remember reading it at university. It's a remarkable book. And he'd risen up to command Hitler's sort of bodyguard unit. He actually referred to Adolf Hitler as a prophet. He used the connections that he made at the centre of power to get himself a plum job. This is a key moment. He was appointed to command one of the German panzer divisions, these armoured units with tanks and infantry and vehicles and support, which could all move fast across the landscape. They could move fast and they could break things. When you think of so-called Blitzkrieg warfare, you're thinking of warfare

carried out by these German panzer divisions. In the invasion of France and the Low Countries, Rommel was a standout commander. He reached the Meuse, this big river in France, shockingly fast. He personally led the crossing of that river. It was a French counterattack. He actually picked up a weapon himself and fired at the French. That's how close he was to the action. It was pretty unusual for a major general. And he sort of led that relentless drive, that thrust that sliced right across northern France and severed the entire Allied war effort into the British, the Belgians, some French trapped in the north, which would eventually end up in the Dunkirk pocket. It was a stunning campaign and Rommel was on the poster boys of it.

In early June, he'd advanced 60 miles in two days. Compare that to his experiences in the First World War, when he could only advance as fast as the heavily laden man could stagger across a muddy battlefield. Ten days later, he actually beat that. He advanced to Cherbourg, 150 miles in 24 hours. He was a master of speed and surprise. Sometimes the German high command was actually very nervous about this. They actually lost track of his whereabouts. And his 7th Panzer Division earned the nickname the Ghost Division. So when he arrived in Africa, true to form, he'd been given strict instructions to hold the line, to wait on the defensive, and he ignored it. He attacked. So by April 1941, this Afrika Korps, this German army with its Italian allies,

was back at the Egyptian border and pushed the Brits all the way back through Libya. The British commanders, very bad luck, had been captured and there was a crisis. This then began a kind of rapid replacement of British commanders in North Africa until Churchill found one he was happy with. It was a bit of a revolving door policy. He tried a few commanders. He tried General Sarge Bull Wavell, who attempted an offensive in June 1941 called Op Battleaxe. It was pretty disastrous. He was then sent to India, and he was replaced with a man brought from India, Claude Auchinleck. Auchinleck attacked in November 1941.

There was a very confused, I really struggle to understand this campaign, very confused weeks of fighting, various units advancing, retreating, ending up behind each other until actually Rommel did withdraw back into Libya and was able to rest, replenish and rebuild his force with new tanks and fuel coming in from Europe. Rommel would come back though. He struck in January 1942 and yet again there was a mad rampage across North Africa as the pendulum swung the other way. British units were pulverised as they retreated back towards Egypt, really for the second time along these roads and tracks. The city of Tobruk fell, many of you will have heard of. 30,000 Allied troops surrendered. It was a terrible defeat in this year of defeats for Britain.

Rommel, on the back of that, was made a field marshal. There was now a sense that he had the Suez Canal in his sights. He was on the verge of a decisive victory in North Africa. In late June, Rommel, moving across the Egyptian desert along the south shore of the Mediterranean, arrived at a last-ditch British defensive position at the railway station called El Alamein. railway station called El Alamein. If the British fell back from this position, Egypt would be lost, their entire position in the Middle East threatened. Now, the Brits did have a couple of advantages here. First, they were very close to their supply depots, so they could rush every gun they had, every shell forward to man this defensive position. And that gave British commanders an enormous advantage. But secondly, British commanders, for the first time, were receiving enigma decrypts. The German enigma code had been broken at Bletchley Park. You've heard me talk about that on many of these

podcasts in the past. But they were now not only being broken, they were being broken in time for them to be useful on the battlefield. So operational messages were being decrypted, messages about where people were heading, what fuel was being delivered where. In July 1942, the Germans assaulted these defensive lines. But Auchinleck the general pounded them with every gun he'd managed to scrounge from the theatre of war and every aircraft that could just about fly with something attached to it. The German attack faltered, the Australian counter-attack pushed them back, and Rommel halted. He was stopped, but not defeated. In the aftermath of this victory, as occasionally happens, the man partly responsible for it got the sack. Churchill decided that he was going to come and check out the situation for himself. His foreign secretary,

Anthony Eden, tried to persuade him not to go to Egypt. He said, do not act like a great blue bottle buzzing over a colossal cowpat. But Churchill wanted to go to see Stalin anyway and thought he'd go via Egypt and take the temperature on the ground. He arrived in August, he met with Orkinlek, he didn't like what he saw insufficiently positive and he sacked him in his place he appointed lieutenant general gott nickname strafer gott strafing being the word for machine gunning basically so he's had a pretty tough reputation he was installed as commander but he was killed amazing his plane was attacked it was shot down by a stray german fighter on his way to cairo to take up his job. He helped survivors away from the fuselage

when it crashed in the desert, and he was killed as German planes strafed them on the ground. He was replaced by Bernard Law Montgomery. He was a character. I guess one of the important ways to understand Montgomery was thinking about his experience during the First World War. He was a character. I guess one of the important ways to understand Montgomery, he was thinking about his experience during the First World War. He was thrown into a hastily arranged, completely unsupported infantry attack at the Battle of Le Cateau, really the second battle of Britain's war on the Western Front. He watched men cut down around him, all for nothing. He was shot at the Battle of Ypres.

Later on in 1914, A sniper's bullet hit Montgomery in the chest, pierced his right lung. He fell down, exposed to enemy fire, with a sucking wound in his chest, almost certainly a fatal injury. A fellow soldier ran over and tried to put a field dressing on his injury. That man was shot in the head and fell on top of Montgomery, sort of crushing him. So Montgomery was pinned beneath the corpse of this man. More shots were fired at them and a series of bullets aimed at Montgomery hit the dead man. Montgomery was shot in the knee as well. He remained trapped there as his chest filled with blood. He was rescued as night fell and made an extraordinary recovery. They actually prepared a grave for him, but he

didn't need the grave. He made a miraculous recovery. He spent the rest of the war as a staff officer. In late 1918, he's pictured with the young politician Winston Churchill in the dying days of the war, standing next to each other. I don't think they met, but they happened to be standing next to each other at a review. And these two men were now in some ways dependent on each other. He was a loner, I think it's fair to say. The great love of his life, his wife, had died in his arms in the late 1930s from septicemia, blood poisoning as a result of, I think, just a little scratch. So he was fairly closed off emotionally. Churchill later said about Montgomery that in defeat he was unbeatable, in victory

unbearable. And Montgomery himself was fantastically vain, particularly after victories like at Alamein and the rest of the war. He was once asked to name three great generals, and he replied, the other two would be Alexander the Great and Napoleon. Anyway, he arrives in Egypt and he weaves a bit of narrative later on, saying that the army he found there was depressed, we're all making plans to retreat and the whole thing was a disaster. That somewhat overstates his own agency. But it is true that he arrived with great energy. He issued a statement, I want to impose on everyone that the bad times are over, they are finished. Our mandate from the Prime Minister is destroy the Axis forces in North Africa. It can be done and it will be done.

I remember talking to Victor Gregg, who was a rifleman in the Eighth Army at this time. He lived to 101. You'll have heard many of my conversations with him on the podcast. Sadly, he passed away last year. He talked about Monty's impact on the Eighth Army. I talked to him about this when I first met him 20 years ago, making the Alamein program back then. And he said he was struck because he met Monty in person. He did the rounds and he came and introduced himself to nearly everybody. And he said he was outspoken. He seemed to talk to them and they quite liked him. They thought he was all right, but they'd had so many commanders before that they, to a certain extent, were still a bit cynical. Montgomery made a big show of having plans for any further retreat

burned, even though all good staff officers should have plans for all sorts of eventualities. He had these ones ceremonially burned, invited reporters along to see it. And he set about restoring the morale, restoring the supplies, the equipment of the 8th Army of the British Imperial Force out there in the desert, now anchored at Alamein. And Montgomery got lucky. The British government was sending a lot of gear to that army. Planes, more men, more supplies, especially tanks started flowing into the Western Desert. The new anti-tank guns were issued to the every unit. Anti-tank gun is a big piece of artillery, a big, big gun. It looks a little bit like a cannon, a modern cannon. And they fire the shells that will penetrate the armour of a tank and knock them out. Previously, much of the British

forces had been armed with a two-pound anti-tank gun, meaning a gun that fired a two-pound shell. Now, six-pound anti-tank guns were issued to everyone that fired a two-pound shell. Now six-pound anti-tank guns were issued to everyone, so six-pound shell capable of smashing through the armour of the most modern German tanks that they might face. As well as those guns, 300 Sherman tanks arrived from the USA, from Britain's new ally, the USA, better than nearly every Axis tank that they faced in the desert. There was also a focus on training. Montgomery rigorously trained his men. New officers, new men were assimilated into old units and they worked on the tactics required for an attack, a set-piece attack into German lines.

And those Germans had problems. The British enemy were gaining in strength opposite them and the Germans were weakening. They didn't have enough fuel. 50% of their supply ships going to Libya were being sunk by the Allies in the month of October 1942. There was not enough fuel, there was not enough food, there were not enough reinforcements and spare parts. Malta, little island of Malta, you heard me talking about in the podcast earlier this year, held out against sustained Axis attack. The siege didn't work and that meant it could still be used as a base from which Britain could sit astride those Italian supply lines to Libya. The failure to subdue Malta would be catastrophic for the Axis campaign in North Africa. The Axis forces lacked water. Fascinatingly, this is a bit niche, but it's quite interesting. The Axis officers, German-Italian officers, regarded latrine organisation as beneath them.

They were like, I don't care where men go to the toilet, it's ridiculous. So within days of arriving in their positions, I learned this in Daniel Todman's fantastic book called Britain's War, their units were surrounded by human waste. And of course, disease follows that unpleasantness. By the end of October 1942, 20% of German troops were ill, mostly with dysentery. Rommel himself had hepatitis, not sure if it was from the poo or not, but he had to go home and his men were seriously in the shit. But they did have a formidable defensive position. They had strung out half a million mines across the desert to lure the British into killing fields, to create traps for the British where they could be obliterated by pre-registered artillery pieces

and tanks. So Montgomery needed a plan for these minefields. One of his very brilliant plans, actually, was called Operation Bertram. This was a gigantic deception campaign. They built up huge amounts of supplies away from the Mediterranean, way down in the south, which implied that the British forces were hoping to attack in the south, sweep round and encircle the main German-Italian forces up there on the Mediterranean coast. To make that even more clear, they started building a fake pipeline as if they were pumping water or fuel down to the south. And this pipeline was progressing and getting a little bit longer every day.

But the Germans clearly looked at intelligence pictures and thought, well, they're not going to attack until that pipeline's completed, right? But the pipeline was completely fake. It was nothing. And so the pipeline was never completed. As well as dummy pipelines, they had dummy tanks made of balsa wood, of canvas, of inflatable material. There's a great picture of a couple of men picking up a dummy Sherman tank to show that it's just a fake, but from the air, they look real. So it was a huge fake army in

supply dumps, concentrating itself in the south. Further north is where Montgomery was going to make his effort. Montgomery needed a plan to deal with these minefields, and he came up with one. Victor Gregg, again, was part of the solution. He remembers being told on the 22nd of October 1942 that an attack would be going in the following evening at 10 o'clock, so given, say, 36 hours notice. He describes, he says in his book, our job was to protect the engineers while they cleared gaps in the German minefields. We spent the rest of the day punching star-shaped holes in old petrol cans. The cans would have lighted hurricane lamps put in them and would be hung from posts driven into the ground along the edges of the gap. There would be paths cleared through the minefields, lit so that tanks and armoured vehicles could follow up these engineers and infantrymen like Victor.

He writes, and he goes on to say in his book, A brass hat came round to inspect how we were doing and told us, prepare yourself some excitement. We wondered what he meant by excitement and knew he didn't mean jumping for joy. We went away to make the usual brew and write our letters home. So on the 23rd of October, 1942, 8th Army was ready. Montgomery had thought very carefully about how to break into the German defensive positions, break through them, and break out of them. You often hear people saying Montgomery was a classic First World War general. Well, this is why. It was going to be run on a tight timetable. It was going to, where possible, put machines rather than men in harm's

way. And it was about bringing overwhelming fire, men, and material onto the enemy in order to destroy them. The 8th Army is ready, his army is ready, it's 195,000 men, just over a thousand tanks. And across no man's land, over 100,000 German Italians and only 547 tanks of the Panzer Armee. Montgomery issued a message, he said, when I assumed command of the 8th Army Army I said the mandate was to destroy Rommel and his army And I said, that would be done as soon as we were ready We are ready now The battle which is now about to begin Will be one of the most decisive battles in history

It will be the turning point of the war The eyes of the whole world will be on us Watching anxiously which way the battle will swing We can give them their answer at once It will swing our way Let no man surrender so long as he is unwounded and can fight let us all pray that the lord almighty in battle will give us the victory i remember victor greg and i looked at that once at that transcript and he commented that and he remembers him and his mates sitting around saying

then the lord god's got very much to do with it we're just hoping that montgomery wouldn't do what other previous generals have done and that's send men and tanks rampaging forward into the savage anti-tank fire of the German panzers and the legendary 88 guns, these guns that began as anti-aircraft guns. But if you swivel the barrel down to horizontal to the ground, they were fantastic at taking out tanks as well. This is Dan Snow's history. There's more on this topic coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga.

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Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. through the day of the 23rd of october the men sat around there was a light drizzle that fell

be part of the day many of them wrote home victor writes in his book written years later but still very powerful we all sat with our private. Everybody tried to cheer everyone else up whilst attempting to hide their own private fears. It may have been easier for the troops who'd just come up, but us old hands are one with no illusions. We were all shit scared, trying not to show it. Once the flag went up, it would be easier, we knew. In the meantime, we waited and cursed and waited and cursed some more. The waiting came to an end at 9.40pm on the 23rd of October. 882 shells were fired pretty much simultaneously, nearly a thousand guns. Victor writes, without warning, a very light sword up into the night sky, and as it began to descend, the first guns opened up.

The whole 25-mile stretch of front shook with concussion. Thunderous roar enveloped us as shells churned up the earth, over which we would soon be advancing. The bigger guns to the rear opened up too, the heavy shells going over with a strange swirling sound. A continuous stream of heavy metal passed over our heads. Then we could see the flashes out to sea as the guns of the warships added their weight to the fray. Fear vanished. Over the next five, six hours, the British and Imperial troops fired something like half a million shells at the Axis forces. And that wasn't all. Overhead, RAF bombers blasted key German targets on the ground.

And other aircraft flew overhead with sort of radio jamming gear so that the Axis units wouldn't be able to communicate with each other. And at about 10 o'clock, so 20 minutes after the bombardment started, the infantry, people like Victor Craig, and the engineers moved forward. This is amazing, this bit. Victor describes it here. In front of us and around us were the engineers lying on their stomachs, searching for mines, prodding away with bayonets, desperately feeling for the touch of metal upon metal. We moved slowly forward, the lads behind us banging in the metal rods and hanging up lighted tins. Soon the whole area was lit up like Piccadilly Circus, and that was the job of these infantrymen. Going forward, no protection from the enemy other than the gigantic artillery

barrage landing in front of them and keeping the Germans and Italians heads down. I've done this with the Royal Engineers, in fact, 20 years ago for this program I made. I went through a simulation of this. You crawl forward and you use your bayonet. Nowadays they use little metal rods. Your bayonet, the long knife-like dagger on the front of your rifle. You want to clip it from the front rifle and stab it into the sand. And you move forward. And when it clicks onto metal, you know that there's a mine buried there. You then scratch around it, scratch the sand away. You then take the mine out, you make it safe, or you just push it out of the way of this track that you're clearing, perhaps into the minefield on either side. And this was the essential job at the beginning of

Alamein. These very brave engineers just going ahead, doing this on hands and knees on their stomachs. And I remember being on the battlefield of Alamein 20 years ago, and it's still absolutely littered with mines. You move around it, the Bedouin guides tell you where's safe and where you can and can't go, and there's still endless minefields. You can't see anything, but they're all down there, and every so often, unlucky car, person, animal detonates one of the mines. These channels had to be about seven metres wide, that was the width of a tank, but the bad news is that the minefields were about five metres or eight kilometres deep, so you're clearing these paths through miles of desert and it's completely flat and fuchsious. When I first went there, I was told, oh, there's a ridge over here the British tried to get to. Then there's this

depression in the ground here. Honestly, it all looked identical. We could have filmed the entire program out the back of our hotel. We ended up traveling three hours to the desert through these little desert roads with this Bedouin guide. And we'd arrive at a place that was precisely the same as the place we'd left three hours earlier. It was mad. But there you go, that's when we make good history shows, we try and take it to the place where it actually happened, even if it looks exactly like everywhere else. Victor and his mates, the infantrymen, were being machine-gunned, they were being mortared. I remember him telling me about the poor sods who were, I think he describes that they took a pasting or took a beating,

even though they were keeping themselves tight to the ground, slithering along on their bellies. Every so often they'd miss a mine, vehicles that were trying to push up with the infantry, with the engineers to provide a bit of cover for them, heavy machine gun. They'd blow a track off, they'd have to stop and repair them. And behind the infantry and the engineers, the tanks started rolling as quickly as possible. And soon they churned the desert sand up into this very thick cloud that stuck to everything. And Victo says he will never forget. I'll always remember him telling me this. Tell me the story a few times. He'll never forget a Highlander, a Piper of a Scottish unit moving forward, guns and very lights occasionally flashing, turning the desert night into day. And he saw this Piper marching slowly forward,

coming out of the smoke and heading off into the raging battle in front of him and being led by that piper the men of the highland units the highlanders heading as far west as they could to do battle with the german italian outposts suppress them and clear the road for tanks to push on through the german positions i remember victor saying if ever he saw anyone who deserved the VC, and he saw many people who did win Victoria Crosses, it was that piper. So through that first night, the Scots that I mentioned there, the Indians, the Australians, New Zealand, the South Africans,

it really was such an extraordinary Commonwealth imperial battle, this one at Alamein. The infantry took most of their objectives, but inevitably the tanks were slow getting through the minefields. Anything with vehicles, the tracks come off, engine failure, they're knocked out by an enemy shell, and suddenly they're holding up the entire advance. You've got to push them off somehow into the minefield, you've got to clear them out the way, you've got to get them repaired. So things obviously went slower than had been planned. That meant that as daylight broke, well, there was hell to pay. The infantry dug in, they would scratch out holes in the sand,

try and get below the ground, get out of harm's way, while the tanks basically stuck there, on top of the surface. No hedges, no trees, no dugouts they could go into. They're just moving and firing, engaging German tanks and guns at big distances, thousands of metres. The Shermans were able to pick off the German tanks at longer range, so they for once had the advantage in this battle. And the British anti-tank guns, these £6 anti-tank guns, could in turn destroy enemy German vehicles who desperately tried to move forward to close the range to engage with the British tanks. It reminds me of a kind of naval battle at this point. You've got these metal land ships, these ships of the desert, moving around, able to be seen by the other side,

just exchanging fire. And it all comes down to gunnery, how accurate you are, how nimble you are in your vehicle, and the technical advantages of the particular gun that you're firing. It's the one battle I've talked to people in tanks and in infantry. Everyone in tanks said they were so glad they weren't out there. They weren't infantrymen because there'd be machine gun bullets, there'd be anti-tank rounds ricocheting off your tank, you were hunkered down in this safe metal tank. But everyone who's an infantryman at battles says how glad they were they went in tanks because they witnessed tanks brewing up, they called them. Shermans were fueled by petrol. They had aviation engines. So very, very flammable. More flammable than a diesel engine would have

been. So when they did catch on fire, they would go up like a kind of firework. People called them Tommy Cookers. And so the infantrymen remember seeing these tanks go up and being very, very grateful they weren't in a tank. I think that's survivor bias there, because depending on how you got through the battle, you thought you picked the best path. Captain J.T. Lang was a gunner. He was an artilleryman. And he describes pushing forward with his crew on the 24th. Go forward early. Quite a few bodies. Shortly hit a mine, which blew off my right front wheel. So we're stuck. Recovery vehicle picks us up and we transfer back to the Bren carrier. Commanding officer comes on the phone line. No one knows where the Argyles are,

which is a Scottish infantry unit. Go out and find them. We set off in the carrier. Brief brush with some Italians and find the Argyles. Rather jaded, but operational. They have no food or water. Vehicles carry reserve supplies, as sometimes we get isolated. We handed out all of ours, including a few carefully hoarded bottles of beer. Very generous. They must have been in dire straits. Now Rommel had hepatitis, like I said, so he was actually in Germany. Strange thing about Rommel.

He was in Germany when the Battle of Alamein started. And guess where he was when D-Day was launched, where he was supposed to be protecting the beaches of Normandy in northern France. He was in Germany again, seeing his wife. Strange coincidence. Anyway, so Rommel was in Germany, and his deputy, General Stulmer, rushed to the front line to see what was going on. He came under fire himself, and he had a heart attack. He dropped down dead. So things are going badly for the Germans. Certainly, the British haven't broken through yet, but they've broken into German defences, and there is now an attritional battle

going on. Like I say, tank on tank, tank, units of infantry scrapping, driving back the Italians and Germans, tanks pushing forward on either side, engaging with each other, and largely the Allies having the best of those engagements, partly because they're twice the number of tanks the Germans and Italians had, and they had better tanks at this point. There's one particular famous action that I'm very struck by. Again, 20 years ago, I was very lucky. I talked to really several, a dozen, I'd say, veterans of this engagement. I suspect, well, sadly, probably none of them are alive anymore. And they all told me about this skirmish that took place. They were pushed forward on the 26th and 27th of October, so a couple of days into the battle. Overnight, they pushed that bit into German-Italian lines.

The place was designated Snipe, and it was a battalion of the Rifle Brigade. They were pushed forward with several anti-tank guns. The idea is to kind of break into German positions and provoke counterattacks. You then break up with your anti-tank guns. So actually, Victor Gregg was one of the riflemen. And he just remembers fighting all day. He remembers one of his friends, Izzy,

who kind of went mad, picked up a machine gun, firing it from the waist, charged towards German ranks and was cut down in a hail of bullets. But as the day went on, Victor remembers a massive infantry attack. He writes in his book actually this bit. He said, still they came forward, climbing over the corpses of their comrades, shouting and screaming. We were literally blowing their heads off as they tried to clamber over the edge of the rise in front of us. It now got so bad that it was impossible to touch

the bare metal of our weapons. When at last it seemed they were going to beat us, they hurled their tanks at our few remaining guns. The gun to our right was now only manned by one lad, Sergeant Calliston. Vic Turner, who was the commanding officer. Vic Turner, in full view and without any cover whatsoever, managed to reach the gun and worked his loader to keep it firing. We were fighting hand to hand. Another survivor of the snipe action remembers Sergeant Calliston. He operated this anti-tank gun virtually by himself. His commanding officer helped him, but he was wounded and lay by his side, shouting encouragement and instruction. At one point, Calliston managed to knock out three Axis vehicles with three rounds. It was a remarkable shooting. Calliston apparently was

a troublemaker, an absolute ruffian, massive bloke. He spent his time in prison cells when he wasn't fighting, but on the battlefield, he's the man you wanted on your team. Once he nicked a steam locomotive, he used to have a 50 Cal Browning that he'd managed to tear out of a crashed aircraft that used to carry around in the back of his vehicle. I remember saying to this veteran back in 2002, what happened to Sergeant Calliston? And he just said, he died, didn't he? Of course he died. Because men like him didn't live. And Calliston was killed in Italy the following year. The people that we think of as heroes, leading from the front, they can get lucky for so long. But very, very rarely, I suppose, would they survive the war if they took as many risks, showed such conspicuous bravery and disregard for their own safety as Calliston

that day. Snipe lasted about two days, this action. The British withdrew slightly, but nearly 60 Axis vehicles had been destroyed, historians think. Rommel could actually see the fighting from his HQ, and he took the lesson from Snipe to heart, which is in this landscape, with the determined British well-armed with new guns, any counterattack against prepared positions would fail. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

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wherever you get your podcasts. desperately trying to stop the British breaking through his lines. By the 27th, I think it was, 26th, 27th, he was down to just 100 operational tanks. I should say, actually, the commander of that rifle battalion that night was, in fact, awarded the Victoria Cross. And it was one of those awards that was supposed to reflect the fact that the whole unit had served extraordinarily well. So that's the Battle of Hallamane, attritional, clawing forward, often at night, and then engaging enemy vehicles by day when you could see them. I came across a lovely quote by Driver, a logistician basically, someone who's bringing up endless supplies and water and shells to their frontline soldiers. He's called Driver McCaskill, and he remembers, It was a very hectic time for us, with the guns again using ammo as fast as we could supply it. Fortunately, we were able to make most of our journeys in darkness, as for most of the way we were in full view of the

enemy. Quite exciting for those who like that sort of thing. He remembers once we delivered a load of supplies to some infantrymen. It was actually the Argyles, again this Scottish unit. They were thrilled. They discovered a treasure trove. He writes, the Argyles' objective was a former German divisional headquarters and yielded much valuable equipment, store of fine wines, large number of iron crosses and Africa Corps badges, which is why so many jocks, judging by their badges and decorations that day, were highly decorated members of the German army. I just love the idea of all these drunk Scotsmen covering themselves, festooning themselves with medals and decorations and unit badges from the German army. The battle

was progressing. The Brits and their allies were edging forward, but not quick enough for Churchill. He had to be restrained from getting involved by Alan Brooke, his senior soldier back in the UK. But Montgomery was aware of this pressure and he wanted to bring things to a head. He wanted to decisively break through German lines, send them scurrying back into Libya. And on the 2nd November, he launched a sort of second major attempt at breakout. He called this one Operation Supercharge. So again, the infantry would surge forward, make lanes in these gigantic minefields. New Zealanders would do the bulk of the work on this occasion. It was a Maori battalion in particular, captured a very important axis position. And then having cleared mines out the

way, having cleared infantry posts out the way, these tanks would go for it. They would charge through. On this occasion, he was very robust with his tank commanders. He said, I need you to break through, even at the risk of your own vehicles and of your own lives. There's no waiting here. This is it. This is supercharge. And his New Zealand sidekick, the very brilliant General Sir Bernard Freyberg, wrote that we all realise that for armour to attack a wall of guns sounds like another balaclava, i.e. the charge of the light brigade. It is properly an infantry job, but there are no more infantry available, so our armour must do it. So Montgomery made it clear, as did Freyberg, that he would accept 100% casualties if their leading tank units could basically break through this final German

line of defence. And well, unfortunately for the armour, they almost did sustain 100% casualties. The 9th Arm Brigade started the attack with 94 tanks, reduced to only 14 tanks by the end of the attack. There were 400 crewmen involved in the attack, 230 were killed, wounded or captured, an astonishing level of casualties. To stem this massive armoured assault, Rommel in turn was forced to hurl the remnant of his two once mighty tank divisions, desperate to hold back the British tanks. And what you get is the largest tank-on-tank action of the battle so far, and in that the superior numbers of the Sherman tanks, the superior quality of those tanks, especially the Sherman, meant that the Germans were annihilated. After that terrible

battle in which tanks were hit with all manner of anti-tank rounds, some of them just smashed the outside of the tank so hard that you turn everything inside the tank into shrapnel. Tiny bits of flecks of paint come off, nuts, bolts, washers. Anything loose is just thrown around the tank at supersonic speed, shredding anyone and anything inside. Alternatively, a round might detonate in the fuel, like I said, and send a gigantic white-hot flame high into the sky above the tank as it instantly incinerated anybody inside it. Some people said it was like a Zippo lighter being ignited. After that big tank battle, Rommel was told he'd have 35 tanks available the next day. And his artillery, his guns were at 30% of their strength at the start of the battle. And Rommel concluded that it was over. In order to avoid a breakthrough, in order

to avoid his army being surrounded, he must start withdrawing. While he did the classic, he messaged Hitler and said the situation was impossible. Quote, in these circumstances, we had to reckon at the least with the gradual destruction of the army. And then Hitler did what Hitler does, what autocrats do, what Putin is doing. Hitler intervened and told them to stand to the last man. Classic authoritarian flex. Rommel actually couldn't believe it. Suddenly he had this road to Damascus moment. He realised that Hitler didn't know what he was talking about. If he stayed put, his army would disintegrate, would cease to exist. And in fact, he did for a day try to obey Hitler's orders. And then 36 hours later, he wrote,

Our front broken and the fully motorised enemy streaming into our rear, superior orders no longer count. we had to save what there was to be saved and he retreated without waiting for hitler's acquiescence in pulling back he managed to save the rump of his german troops a lot of the italians were left behind the brits took 30 000 prisoners on top of that the axis forces lost 2 000 killed 5 000 wounded as well so around a third of their army on the battle was lost. The British forces suffered perhaps over 2,000 dead, 9,000 wounded and 2,000 missing, so effectively dead as well. That fell particularly heavily, as we talked about, on the tank crews, but also on the infantry. So it might not sound like much compared to the overall

strength of the army, but some infantry units were down to 50% strength. So terrible casualties within those units that were going forward at night and doing the hand-to-hand fighting, doing the skirmishing, driving back those German positions. So it was certainly not a victory without cost, but a victory it was. The Germans were fleeing. The vast majority of their tanks, their Panzers, their armoured vehicles were smoking ruins, and their legendary anti-tank guns, these 88s, had proved that they could be overwhelmed, and the lines penetrated. Captain Lang, who I mentioned, a gunner, reports on the 4th of November, last firing, we have fired about 1,800 rounds per gun since the 23rd. They needed new barrels, they got worn out. Montgomery, after that, received some criticism for not encircling

and completely destroying Rommel. I mean, that's not as easy as it sounds. Rommel was in headlong retreat, the rains turned the road to mush, logistics was very difficult, his units had been badly battered, and to be fair to Montgomery, he did advance 800 miles in the next 20 days. It's not like Rommel gave him much opportunity to surround and capture him. Once again, British and imperial forces streamed east along North Africa through Libya on the way to occupying all of the Axis lands in North Africa. In Britain, back home, the news was greeted with relief, with joy. Churchill allowed church bells to be rung for the first time since the invasion scare of 1940. According to Home Intelligence, which was the British government's

attempt to work out what the British people were thinking, and the news of that success meant the British public thought that the second week of November of that year was, quote, the best week of the war so far. A good many people tried to remain cautious in the midst of general jubilation, the report says, but it indicated a growing belief that the war will be over within the coming year. I love this, very snooty, very official. The less thoughtful suggest the spring or even Christmas. I mean, I think that's pretty optimistic. The war would not be over by Christmas 1942, sadly. Should have been, but wasn't. Britain and the Allies had its victory. It was an important victory because it showed that Britain

could beat Germany in a big set-piece battle without the help of the Americans or the Soviets. The British were determined to cling to great power status, to be equal partners with their two gigantic allies, and Allemagne was the strongest marker so far that they could lay down. Winston Churchill summed it up as he often did. Before Alamein, we had no victories. After Alamein, we had no defeats. Thanks for listening everyone. Thank you. you