In his later years, Montgomery was acutely aware of this
human cost and felt it deeply. In 1967, on the 25th anniversary of the battle,
Montgomery went to Egypt on what would be his last overseas trip. With a former
staff officer, he visited the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery on the ridge
near Alamein station, which has a clear view of most of the battlefield.
Montgomery had been there on October 24, 1954, when the cemetery was officially
opened, but this visit in 1967 was a more poignant and restrained affair. After
spending considerable time before the headstones of two brothers killed on
successive days, Montgomery quickly left the cemetery. That evening, walking
beside the Mediterranean, Montgomery was silent and subdued. He confessed to
his concerned companion, “I’ve been thinking of all those dead.” That forlorn
feeling, no doubt tinged with a sense of guilt, often returned. In the last
month of his life, Montgomery awoke after a troubled night. He told his friend,
Sir Denis Hamilton, the reason for his disturbed sleep:
I couldn’t sleep last
night—I had great difficulty. I can’t have very long to go now. I’ve got to go
to meet God—and explain all those men I killed at Alamein.
#
At Alamein, Montgomery demonstrated considerable skill
fighting “with the army he has rather than the one he wants it to be.” When
Lightfoot failed to achieve the break-in and the battle’s momentum was waning,
Montgomery, “resilient but resolute, did not hesitate to change his plan.” The
new plan, Supercharge, while not entirely successful, did enough to break the
will of his skillful opponent. Throughout the battle, despite many anxious
moments, Montgomery radiated “confidence and determination amid all the stress
and urgency.” It was an impressive performance. But despite achieving a
decisive victory, Montgomery never received the accolades, plaudits, or
adulation that his defeated opponent did. As Nigel Hamilton, Montgomery’s
sympathetic biographer, noted with some concern:
Author after author would play down or denigrate Monty’s leadership.
Not only did Auchinleck acolytes feel duty-bound to do so, but non-military
historians waded in, too.
The first book to be
thoroughly critical of Montgomery’s performance as a military commander was
Correlli Barnett’s The Desert Generals. It first appeared in 1960 and “caused a
scandal when published.” It has since been reprinted four times; the last
revised edition appeared in 2007, nearly fifty years after its initial
publication. Barnett’s book was followed by many others all “intent on chipping
away some of the polished marble of Monty’s reputation.”
Conversely, Rommel’s standing as a skilled, daring
battlefield commander, maybe even a brilliant one, has endured, especially
among British and American historians. David Fraser, for example, described
Rommel as “a master of manoeuvre on the battlefield and a leader of purest
quality.” He “stands in the company” of other military greats such as Napoleon
Bonaparte and Robert E. Lee. Ronald Lewin, not quite as praising, ranked him
with Jeb Stuart, Attila, Prince Rupert, and George Patton. For Lewin, who had
been an artillery officer in Eighth Army, Rommel’s place “as one of the last
great cavalry captains … cannot be denied.” For Martin Blumenson, Rommel’s reputation
has only grown since the war. Rommel was “a master of modern warfare” and
undoubtedly a military genius; one of the “great captains who epitomized
generalship on the field of battle.” In a similar vein, Antulio J. Echevarria
II wrote:
Indeed, the decades
since the end of the Second World War have seen historians and other writers
both add to and clear away substantial portions of the Rommel myth. What
remains, however, seems enough to qualify Rommel as one of history’s great, if
controversial, captains—perhaps even a military genius. He did, after all,
defeat a number of able British commanders before the run was broken by
Montgomery at El Alamein.
Rommel’s reputation was not always so high, especially among
those he commanded. Reflecting on what had gone wrong in this last battle, the
Afrika Korps commander, Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, felt that Rommel deserved
much of the blame. He agreed with Ludwig Crüwell that Rommel “never worried
about anything apart from his own fixed ideas.” But Rommel had other poor
qualities that had contributed to his defeat. He was cocky and overconfident.
Von Thoma described the incident that revealed this serious character flaw:
BURCKHARDT interpreted
when that NEW ZEALAND General [Brigadier George Clifton] was taken
prisoner—I’ve forgotten his name. Field Marshal ROMMEL said: “Tell the General
that the war will be over in six weeks and I shall have occupied CAIRO and
ALEXANDRIA.” BURCKHARDT told me himself that it would have been most painful
for him to have to say such a thing to this General who was standing there so
pensively and had had the misfortune to be taken prisoner in the front line,
which is no disgrace. So he simply said: “You’ll find you are mistaken, Sir.” I
mean later on, if he ever comes to write of his experiences, what will he say about
our appreciation of the situation and our over-confidence? Our tanks were
nothing but scrap-iron. It wasn’t a Panzer Division, it was just miserable
odds-and-ends. To ALEXANDRIA, to CAIRO!
There was more, too. According to von Thoma, Rommel’s battle
tactics “were those of an infantryman…. He took no interest … in all the rest,
that is personnel or supplies, which are the decisive factors for the whole
theatre of war.” Rommel’s reliance on the dense “Minengarten” for protection,
especially when they could not be covered by fire, “was fundamentally
incorrect.” It was a damning indictment of the man who had recently been von
Thoma’s commander, but it was by no means a lone criticism of Rommel. Writing
soon after the war, Generalmajor von Holtzendorff felt that Rommel’s forward
command and aggression made him an excellent Kampfgruppen [combat team]
commander but “seriously impaired his efficiency as an Army commander.” And,
according to Holtzendorff, Rommel never understood how armor should be used:
His attitude toward
the Panzer arm and its employment suffered from the lack of knowledge of its
technical capabilities. This attitude and his constant rejection of material
and fully justified objections on the part of the Panzer commanders repeatedly
caused heavy losses in material (especially Panzers), which then jeopardized
the very idea of the mission.
These criticisms, if valid—and von Thoma was certainly in a
position to know what he was talking about—hardly justify the Rommel “myth” or
the notion that he was one of history’s “Great Captains” or a military genius.
The reality is that Rommel as a military commander was not as exceptional as
some of his biographers have described him, nor was Montgomery the disaster he
has often been portrayed to be.
#
On October 23, 2012, a date that marked a significant
commemoration of the Alamein battles, the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail ran a
story by Guy Walters with a provocative headline. It read: Was Monty’s finest
hour just a pointless bloodbath? Historians claim El Alamein—which began 70
years ago today—sacrificed thousands for the sake of propaganda. The headline,
which probably caused distress to some veterans of the battle, was misleading.
In his article, Walters claimed that “detractors” of the battle’s significance
“maintain that it was a pointless battle in a pointless campaign, fought for
political reasons to boost morale throughout the Empire, and not from any
strategic necessity.” Once again, Montgomery’s generalship was denigrated. He
was described as a “hugely over-rated and unimaginative commander” who “should
never have been raised to the status of national hero.” Walters’ headline is
misleading in that his article, while not naming any of the “detractors,”
actually dismisses their arguments. He concludes:
El Alamein may not
have been an elegant victory, and Montgomery may have been a ponderous general
who was happy to steal much of the credit from the RAF, but it was a battle
that gave the British what it most badly needed—confidence with which to go on
and win the war.
Correlli Barnett had certainly dismissed the October Alamein
battle as pointless. With Operation Torch, the Allied landings in French North
Africa, due to commence in early November, for Barnett this raised “the really
interesting question … why this bitter battle … was fought at all.” Barnett was
emphatic that the “famous Second Battle of Alamein must therefore, in my view,
go down in history as an unnecessary battle.” The hindsight in Barnett’s
judgement is clearly evident. As David Fraser, with the wisdom of experience,
has astutely observed: “In war no man can say how an untried alternative course
of action would have gone, since in war nothing is certain until it is over.”
Some senior military commanders were also dismissive of the
October Alamein battle. The US Chief of Staff George Marshall was one. Marshall
was never impressed with the British campaign in North Africa or with
Montgomery’s generalship. In some off-the-record comments made in 1949, his
interviewers noted:
He [Marshall]
explained that our opinion of the British at that time was not very high in
that the President thought the 8th Army at El Alamein would lose again in the
desert. FDR said to have them attack at night. The General discussed what was
wrong with British command in Africa at some length. He said that the British
in the Middle East [8th Army] had committed about every mistake in the book. It
was no model campaign. The pursuit of Rommel across the desert was slow. The
British even laid a minefield in front of them which benefited the Germans more
than it did the British. Here Marshall formed an opinion that Montgomery left
something to be desired as a field commander. The experience with Montgomery in
northwest Europe confirmed Marshall’s opinion about that.
Even the Chief of the German High Command, Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel, was dismissive of Alamein and the North African campaign.
Shortly before his execution at Nuremberg, Keitel reflected on Rommel’s career.
During his interrogation, Keitel had expressed “unlimited admiration of
Rommel’s military achievements and courage.” While Rommel’s efforts in North
Africa had resulted in some “unexpected victories,” this talented commander’s
skills had been wasted there. Keitel wrote, “One cannot help wondering what
this daring and highly-favoured tank commander would have achieved had he been
fighting with his units in the one theatre of war where Germany’s fate was to
be determined.” Clearly, Keitel’s delusions continued to the end of his life.
Rommel and the units he commanded in North Africa would have made no difference
at all to the outcome of Germany’s defeat on the Eastern Front.
The October or second battle of El Alamein was an important
tactical victory for Montgomery and Eighth Army. As Stephen Bungay concluded,
“However one looks at it, in the third round of fighting at El Alamein Rommel
was decisively defeated.” It was “the climax to two years of to-and-fro
struggle in the Western Desert.” And there was a strategic effect to the battle
as well, which transformed it into one of the turning points of the war. A
senior German staff officer at their Supreme Command, the Oberkommando der
Wehrmacht (OKW), recalled after the war that this battle was indeed “the
turning point at which the initiative passed from German into Allied Hands.”
Generalmajor Eckhardt Christian admitted that the OKW “doubtlessly
underestimated Africa’s strategic importance” and that by November 1942, “The
realization of the enemy’s strength and our own weakness came too late to avert
disaster. The enemy now had the initiative and retained it.” Alexander also
wrote of the strategic effect of the battle. There were several reasons why the
battle had to be fought:
In the general context
of our war strategy in 1942, the battle of Alamein was fought to gain a
decisive victory over the Axis forces in the Western Desert, to hearten the
Russians, to uplift our allies, to depress our enemies, to raise morale at home
and abroad, and to influence those who were sitting on the fence. The battle at
Alamein was very carefully timed to achieve these objects—it was not a question
of gaining a victory in isolation.
And as Alexander pointed out, both his knowledge of military
history and his battlefield experience “convince me that a war is not won by
sitting on the defensive.”
Winston Churchill certainly saw the battle as a key turning
point. For him, the October–November Alamein battle was “the turning of ‘the
Hinge of Fate.’” He explained why in two sentences that have become the most
quoted (and misquoted) assessment of the battle’s importance. Churchill wrote
that:
It may almost be said,
[This first part is often omitted] “Before Alamein we never had a victory.
After Alamein we never had a defeat.”
Little wonder then that on Sunday, November 15, 1942, to
mark the victory, the church bells rang all over the United Kingdom. It was the
first time in three years that Britons had heard their church bells ring. The
BBC made a point of recording the bells of Coventry Cathedral for their
Overseas Service. “Did you hear them in Occupied Europe?” a gleeful radio
commentator asked. “Did you hear them in Germany?”
The transformation was far more than a tactical and
strategic shift. This was alluded to in Guy Walters’ conclusion quoted above.
The October–November battle marked a major change in how the British Empire
thought and felt about its warfighting capabilities. It was a critical
transformation. For British soldier and historian David Fraser, the victory at
El Alamein in November 1942 “was the best moment experienced by the British
Army since another November day long ago in 1918.” It meant that “the tide had
finally and irrevocably turned.” When writing about the British defeat in June
1942 during the Gazala battle, which lead to the “deplorable” loss of Tobruk,
Fraser made a profound observation that has often been overlooked by military
historians. Fraser perceived that “battles are won and lost in the minds
of men, and this one had been lost.” To date, the British armies had experienced
few victories and many, costly defeats. There were doubts in the minds of men
and women at the highest and lowest levels whether the British could ever
defeat an army that included German panzer and motorized formations. That doubt
was infectious and had spread to Britain’s allies. The October Alamein battle,
inelegant as all Allied victories in this war were, provided convincing and
much-needed proof that a British army could achieve a victory over German
forces.
After the battle, the Australian commander, Lieutenant
General Leslie Morshead, wrote a revealing letter to a friend. In it, Morshead
highlighted why Eighth Army had won the battle. He also recorded a significant
mind-shift in the Australian soldiers:
It was a very hard and
long battle, twelve days and nights of continuous and really bloody fighting,
and it was not until the last day that the issue was decided. A big battle is
very much like a tug-of-war between two very heavy and evenly matched teams,
and the one which can maintain the pressure and put forward that last ounce
that wins…. I shall always remember going round the line during the battle and
a real digger saying to me “Yes Sir it’s tough all right … but we’ve at last
got these bloody Germans by the knackers.”
The feeling towards the end of the Alamein battle was that
the Germans were on the ropes and losing the battle. The British Eighth Army,
after a hard fight, did at last have “these bloody Germans by the knackers.”
While this sentiment wasn’t expressed in quite so colorful vernacular, it
certainly became infectious. The Alamein battle “was crucial to the morale of
the free world.” The news of Rommel’s defeat at Alamein electrified that free
world. Nigel Hamilton wrote that “the sense of a change in the fortunes of
democracy was palpable.” It signified, as many noted at the time and after, a
crucial shift. The spell was broken and the Germans could be beaten. As the New
Zealand official historian wrote, the battle of Alamein deserves its place in
military history “because it was the first victory of any magnitude won by the
British forces against a German command since the Second World War began.” That
victory transformed the British forces. Instead of doubt, bewilderment, confusion,
and a feeling of inferiority, there was now the strong belief that your side
could fight hard and win. It at last had all the tools to do the job. The long
string of defeats, what Churchill called the “galling links in a chain of
misfortune and frustration,” was finally over.80 The British army, with its
allies, had turned a corner and it was to experience a string of victories,
albeit marked with some setbacks. It had taken a very long time for the Hinge
to turn.
