El-Alamein Veterans Meet in Sad Memory

They were young soldiers, far from home, huddled in desert sands, waiting for the night sky to explode.

The last time some of them would ever look at their watches was 9:39 p.m., Oct. 23, 1942. In one minute the wails of bagpipes would summon the guns of Major Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery’s 8th Army, the Desert Rats, to the final battle of El-Alamein.

Such a bombardment had not been seen since World War I. What followed was one of history’s great tank battles along Egypt’s barren but beautiful northern coast.

How many died to turn the tide of German victories, nobody knows. But after El-Alamein, it was the Allied forces who marched forward. After El-Alamein, Adolf Hitler’s dreams of world conquest began to sour.

Lance Barnard, a former deputy prime minister of Australia, served with the 9th Australian Division, the Diggers, who took the brunt of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s fury at the end of El-Alamein’s final battle.

“Each generation seems to produce another dictator and somebody has to go out and stop him,” Barnard said.

Twelve hundred Diggers are among the 7,354 men of the combined British Commonwealth forces buried at El-Alamein. They proved that Germany’s seemingly invincible Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” and his famous Afrika Korps could be beaten.

Six days after the Allied victory on Nov. 4, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave El-Alamein its place in World War II history: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Patience would prove him right. The ordeal of Stalingrad was then only beginning, American Marines were digging in at Guadalcanal, and D-Day--the beginning of the end--still was almost two years away.

Historians debate whether El-Alamein was the most crucial battle of the war, but none ignores what happened here.

After sweeping through Libya, Axis forces under Rommel sped along the only road on northern Egypt’s coastline toward Cairo, the Suez Canal and the rich oil fields of Persia. They could smell victory.

Allied commander Montgomery had other ideas. He sent escape vehicles to the rear and told his troops: “If Alamein is lost, Egypt is lost. If we cannot stay at Alamein alive, we will stay there dead.”

The cost of winning and losing the battles of El-Alamein, which raged off and on from July until November, 1942, was staggering. Dead still lie in unfound desert graves, but the number of casualties on both sides has been estimated at 65,000. The Allies suffered 13,500 dead and wounded. Half the forces of Germany and Italy were killed, wounded or captured.

The opposing forces were uneven. Montgomery had 11 divisions, about 210,000 men. He had 1,200 tanks, more than 1,000 field and medium guns, adequate fuel and ammunition and a short line of communications to his home base in Cairo.

Rommel commanded four German and eight Italian divisions and some independent units. He had no more than 108,000 men and 600 tanks, but plenty of artillery. Also, he relied on 5 million mines planted in the 50-mile-wide El-Alamein bottleneck between the Mediterranean and the quicksand of the Qattara Depression. His fatal flaws were the lack of fuel and a steady supply line.

The battle of El-Alamein should have been a showpiece for tank warfare. It wasn’t. Tanks broke down--the tinny Italian version was nicknamed “self-propelled coffin”--and the Qattara to the south prevented brilliant maneuvering.

Montgomery lost 600 tanks, about the number Rommel had when the battle began, and by Nov. 2 Rommel was fighting with only 30.

In his diary, Rommel lamented the battle: “Rivers of blood were spilled over a miserable strip of land which in normal times even the poorest Arab would never have bothered about.”

Today’s El-Alamein is not much better. But its stilled battlefields, a military museum and monuments of the famous battles beckon visitors to make the four-hour journey from Cairo.

Every year since 1978, individual countries have put aside differences to honor the fallen World War II desert fighters of all sides at observances on the Sunday nearest the Oct. 23 battle anniversary. The service, attended by hundreds of diplomats, veterans and well-wishers, rotates among the Commonwealth Cemetery and the German and Italian memorials.

This year’s is Oct. 21 at the Italian monument atop a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean.

El-Alamein’s newest memorial is a simple but poignant obelisk honoring the Australian Diggers. The 20-foot-tall monument of locally quarried limestone and Australian granite stands before the Commonwealth Cemetery and its thousands of Allied dead.

The monument was dedicated in the spring of 1989, and for the Australians it was long overdue.

Barnard, the former deputy prime minister, and Everard Baillieu of Melbourne, a gunner severely wounded at El-Alamein, spearheaded the campaign for a monument to honor their fallen comrades-in-arms.

“It’s such an emotional experience for me to go back to Alamein. It was the place we stopped Rommel’s advance, forced him to go back, leave North Africa,” Barnard said by telephone from Melbourne. He has made the pilgrimage four times.

“The first visit I made I was looking at the graves of my comrades, the graves of my friends. Each time I come I believe more and more that victory was made possible because of the efforts of the 9th Division.”

Melbourne attorney Frank Minotti, another veteran of the 9th, has written a division history. He wrote that until the obelisk, “no one visiting the cemetery would find anything to tell them what part the Australians played in those famous battles, and in what circumstances those in the cemetery gave their lives.”

There are guest registers at the memorials for the Commonwealth, German and Italian soldiers. Few leave El-Alamein without shedding a tear.

Last July 18, Australian Margaret Gillespie visited the Commonwealth Cemetery. “My brother Jim, always remembered by his family,” she wrote.

David and Myrna McDonell of Brisbane: “May there never be cause for such a sad place.”