In August 1942 Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) Alan Brooke, inspecting the Middle East, decided to replace General Claude Auchinleck with General Harold Alexander as Commanderin-Chief of the theatre. Since Auchinleck had doubled as commander of the British 8th Army at Alamein, west of Cairo, a new army commander was also required. Despite warnings by his military advisers, Churchill chose General “Strafer” Gott, a brave but exhausted Corps commander he had met when visiting the defeated army. Gott was killed when flying back to Cairo for a rest and bath, however. A summons was therefore dispatched by Churchill to London to send out General Bernard Montgomery, forever remembered as “Monty.”
After halting Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s final Panzer offensive to seize Cairo that month, Montgomery carefully prepared an offensive to be mounted against Germany’s Afrika Korps (DAK). If successful the counter-attack would push the German-Italian Panzer Army—led by its already legendary commander, “the Desert Fox”—out of Egypt and turn the tide against the Axis powers in North Africa.
The battle began on the evening of 23 October 1942, but—as typically happens in war—not all went according to plan.
Lieutenant-General Herbert Lumsden, commanding the 10th Armoured Corps, was supposed to use his tanks to lead a Corps de Chasse in conjunction with the main attack, which would be carried out by 30 Corps, led by Lieutenant-General Oliver Leese, while it was hoped that 13 Corps, led by Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, would distract Rommel further south. The initial phase of the battle was given the inappropriate name—given the massed artillery barrage— “Lightfoot.”
Though the initial “break-in” cleared a number of lanes through the half-million mines Rommel had sown at Alamein, the British assault across the Miteiriya Ridge, the German defensive line, essentially failed. Despite having previously agreed with Monty’s battle plan, Lumsden now fiercely protested to the army commander in the
