The Road to El Alamein: Churchill's Desert Campaign

On September 13th, 1940,

an Italian army of 80,000 men

marched out of Libya into Egypt

to threaten the epicentre of the British Empire

at a critical moment in the Second World War.

The desert itself was peripheral,

but what began here as a skirmish

was soon at the heart of Britain's struggle to defeat the Nazis.

By 1942, it had become pivotal

to the course of what was by then a truly global conflict.

The desert campaign was an epic struggle.

Hundreds of thousands of men from at least ten nations

fighting to death

in one of the most inhospitable battlefields on earth.

The campaign culminated at the battle of El Alamein, 70 years ago.

A triumph that marked, in Churchill's famous words,

"The end of the beginning."

How and why that was so

are questions that lead from the desert

to the strategic, political, and personal imperatives

of those who presided over this military imbroglio.

This is the story of how the men who fought and died here in the desert

were players in a high drama

that was scripted in the war capitals of London,

Rome, Washington and Berlin.

On 10th June, 1940, in Rome,

the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini

declared war on Britain.

Dunkirk had fallen to the German Panzers.

His ally, Hitler, was apparently poised to invade Britain.

This was Il Duce's moment.

Mussolini was mercurial, quixotic,

sinister and faintly ludicrous,

but he wasn't entirely a buffoon.

He wanted two things.

An equal place with Hitler at the conference table,

and that, he said, meant having several thousand

dead soldiers on the battlefield.

He also had a wider vision to create a new Roman Empire in Africa.

And that meant challenging the British in the Middle East.

Mussolini regarded the Mediterranean

as Italy's very own lake.

A lake which yoked the motherland to Libya,

his Italian colony in North Africa.

But Libya bordered Egypt,

the seat of Britain's imperial presence in the Middle East,

a crucial strategic stronghold,

and at Alexandria, a vital port for the Royal Navy.

Egypt was at the hub of an empire which still ruled the waves.

An empire which had long been a source of power and wealth

that very few British people ever sought to question.

For the wartime coalition, and especially for Churchill,

the threat to Britain and the threat to the empire

were virtually inseparable.

The British fleet based here in Alexandria

patrolled the Mediterranean and protected a web of arteries

which linked the United Kingdom

to its possessions and dependencies in the Middle East,

in Africa and in Asia.

And for that reason, Churchill placed Egypt

at the very heart of his strategy for defending the nation.

The hub of Britain's political and administrative power

in the Middle East was Cairo.

Egypt was nominally independent,

but the British made no attempt to disguise their colonial presence.

The responsibility for defending the Middle East

fell on General Archibald Wavell,

whose authority not only embraced Egypt, but the Mediterranean,

East Africa and the Persian Gulf, with its crucial supplies of oil.

Wavell and Churchill could hardly have been more different.

Wavell was a scholar. An intellectual, a poet.

He was taciturn and withdrawn and he rather despised politicians.

Churchill, impatient, bombastic and garrulous,

rather distrusted generals.

The auguries were far from promising.

Nonetheless, it was plain to both men

that Mussolini's declaration of war on Britain

posed a real threat to Egypt.

Accordingly, Churchill ordered his commander-in-chief

to prepare for an Italian invasion.

Wavell's army was drawn from at least ten nations,

and especially from Australia,

South Africa, New Zealand and India.

An imperial army to defend an imperial stronghold.

Assuming Hitler was about to conquer Britain, Mussolini was in a hurry.

To justify his share of the spoils,

he needed to do battle before Britain sued for peace.

If Egypt was to form part of his new Roman Empire, he had to move fast.

To this end, he ordered his army commander in Libya,

General Graziani, to mount an invasion forthwith.

General Graziani marched the tenth Italian Army out of Libya,

across the border into Egypt with the deepest reluctance.

And only because Mussolini made it very clear to him

that he'd be sacked otherwise.

But Graziani knew that his men were ill-trained, ill-equipped

and wholly unfitted to confront the British,

even though the British had a much smaller force.

But the advance itself was a rather stately affair.

They covered something like 12 miles a day.

And after four days, they reached this line here,

50 miles from the border.

And they set up a chain of defensive forts, of which this was one.

The Italian invasion was very soon to provoke a prolonged conflict

that would transform a peripheral desert into a pivotal battleground.

Not that Graziani saw it like that.

The idea that he was going to advance as Mussolini wanted,

towards Cairo, more than 400 miles from here,

was clearly not on his mind at all.

With his army poised in the desert, Mussolini was in the Alps,

on his way to meet Hitler at the border between Italy and Germany.

In almost every sense, the two axis dictators

felt themselves to be on top of the world.

A week earlier on 27th September,

Germany, Italy and Japan signed the so-called Tripartite Pact,

which committed each of them to come to the military support of the other

if any one of them were attacked.

It also asserted their goal,

no less than a new world order.

As their trains climbed towards the Brenner Pass,

Hitler and Mussolini knew what to expect of each other

and what they wanted from the meeting.

This was not the first time

that the two men had met in the Fuhrer's railway carriage,

but it was one of the more agreeable.

But this wasn't merely a Nazi fascist love-in.

Hitler had a very hardnosed purpose.

Always anxious about the vulnerability of Italy,

the sudden flank of a Third Reich,

he needed to prop up Mussolini.

For his part, Il Duce was reassured when Hitler told him

that the Mediterranean was an important theatre of the war.

By the end of the meeting, they both went away convincing themselves

that one way or another,

the collapse of the British Empire was at hand.

However, the British Empire,

in the person of the Prime Minister, had other ideas.

Hidden in the cliffs near Land's End,

there was a secret cable station which despatched

thousands of Churchill's coded messages to all parts of the empire,

and, with growing urgency, across the Atlantic

to the White House and Franklin D Roosevelt.

The Prime Minister knew that without America

it would be quite impossible for Britain to defeat the axis powers.

His task therefore was to persuade the White House

that the United States was every bit as threatened by Nazism

as the United Kingdom.

If we go down,

you may have a United States of Europe under the Nazi command

far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the new world.

Roosevelt was not indifferent to Britain's plight.

But he was a consummate politician

whose overriding priority at that moment

was to secure an unprecedented personal victory at home.

In America the public was unmoved by Britain's predicament -

partly this was through a latent Anglophobia but more importantly,

it was a strong feeling -

"We do not want to get involved in what is Europe's war,"

even if the polls showed Britain were to go under.

So strong was this feeling

that in the run-up to the 1940 Presidential election,

when he was running for a third term,

Roosevelt went so far as to tell a crowd,

"I've said this before, I'll say it again and again and again -

"your boys are not going into any foreign wars."

Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Yes, the purpose of our defence is defence.

In the Middle East, the British high command,

urged on by the Prime Minister, was planning an offensive.

But in a capital city crawling with spies and informers,

secrecy was essential.

Wavell brought his wife and two children here to the Gezira Club

to watch the racing and relax.

That evening he took friends out to dinner. On the Monday morning,

he summoned the war correspondents to his office and he told them,

"We have attacked in the Western Desert".

And he cautioned them: "You should not describe it as an offensive -

"you can call it an important raid".

He was delighted to discover that none of them

had any inkling of what he had planned.

The attack caught the Italians off-guard.

The British advanced at rapid speed,

soon overrunning the Italian frontline.

The Italians stumbled back into Libya.

A retreat which soon turned into a rout.

Churchill was triumphant.

In barely eight weeks, an advance of over 400 miles

has been made, the whole Italian army in the east of Libya

has been captured or destroyed.

Out of an army numbering 180,000 men, only 30,000 evaded capture.

The British advance took them beyond Benghazi all the way to El Agheila.

They left behind a plentiful supply of rich pickings.

We found a gramophone and a pile of opera records.

So for some time we sat and ate tinned food with condensed milk

and listened to opera.

It was a singular triumph for Britain

and a singular disaster for Italy.

In the space of a month, the British had taken 130,000 Italian prisoners.

The Italians plodded four abreast in the sand,

a stupendous crocodile of marching figures

stretched away to either horizon.

They were tired and dispirited beyond caring.

I found no triumph in the scene -

just the tragedy of hunger, wounds and defeat.

Wavell issued a special order of the day to the Western Desert Force.

"You have done great deeds. We are fighting for freedom

"and truth and kindliness, against oppression and lies and cruelty

"and we shall not fail".

Operation Compass had been an unequivocal success.

It was the last for a very long time.

At the Berghof, his headquarters high in the Bavarian Alps,

Hitler confronted an unpalatable truth -

his vulnerable flank in southern Europe

was now menaced by Britain's success in the desert.

The rout of the Italians alarmed Hitler,

and on the 3rd February he told his commanders,

"If the Italians are beaten in North Africa,

"then Britain will be able to hold a pistol to the head of Italy.

"We must do everything to avoid that."

Three days later, he summoned his favourite General, Erwin Rommel,

who he regarded as the best tank commander in the German army

and said, "I'm forming an Afrika Korps. You are to be its commander".

Rommel had made his reputation during the rout of the British

that had led to Dunkirk and the fall of France.

The Desert Fox, as he'd soon be known,

landed in Libya armed with the most advanced German tanks

and battle-hardened troops.

The Afrika Korps was a force to be reckoned with.

Rommel's task - to rescue Mussolini

by stopping the British from conquering Libya.

But at that very moment, this threat dramatically evaporated.

In London, the Prime Minister had become greatly agitated

by what was happening on the other side of the Mediterranean.

Greece was at threat of imminent invasion. If Greece fell,

then neutral Turkey might fall into Hitler's embrace as well.

If that happened,

the whole of the Middle East would be threatened.

So Churchill, to the initial consternation of Cairo,

ordered Wavell to withdraw four divisions from the desert

and dispatch them to Greece

to help in what he described as her "peril and torment".

The impact in Libya was immediate.

On the 24th of February 1941

a small Panzer unit appeared, as it were from nowhere,

attacked and destroyed two British Scout cars and a truck.

1,000 miles away, back in his headquarters in Cairo,

General Wavell, who was preoccupied with the attempt

to get four divisions across to Greece,

was unperturbed - it was just a skirmish.

Rommel had only just arrived, it was inconceivable

that he could mount a serious assault on the British frontline

for weeks. As he later admitted, it was a grievous mistake.

Rommel was a gambler.

And he gambled now, launching an all-out attack

with a speed and daring which took the British completely by surprise.

It is painful to attempt to describe the muddle

in which the column withdrew.

Armoured cars, trucks and tanks were mixed up

without regard to their units; jumbled, jolting forward

at a speed which indicated that the panic of the higher command

had communicated itself to the troops.

We saw tanks coming over.

Wireless aerials with pennants atop, like a field full of lancers.

Men of the Tower Hamlets went forward to face them

in Bren Carriers and were virtually destroyed in a matter of minutes.

Hardly believing his luck, Rommel wrote home to his wife in triumph.

Dearest Lu, we've been attacking since the 31st

with dazzling success.

I took the rise against all orders and instructions

because the opportunity seemed favourable.

The British are falling over each other to get away.

Our casualties are small. Our booty can't yet be estimated.

You will understand that I can't sleep for happiness.

The helter-skelter advance of the German and Italian forces

that formed Rommel's Panzer army

had brought them over 1,000 miles

from axis headquarters in Tripoli to the border with Egypt.

But with his supply lines now stretched to the limit,

without a constant supply of food, fuel and weaponry,

his men would be soon be marooned in the desert,

unable to sustain an offensive.

Rommel looked covetously towards a small Mediterranean port

called Tobruk.

A former Italian outpost, this garrison town

with its deep water port and barricaded perimeter

had fallen into British hands during the rout of the Italians

a few weeks earlier.

If Rommel could seize it back again, he could more easily maintain

the flow of supplies needed to take Egypt.

He cabled Berlin at once, boasting that Tobruk would soon be his.

But the British had other ideas.

Churchill was besotted by Tobruk -

when Wavell had the temerity to describe it as "an excrescence"

he was sharply rebuked.

Tobruk, said Churchill, should be held to the death.

He told President Roosevelt that it was crucial

to the protection of Egypt, the survival of the Middle East

and ultimately therefore to stopping Hitler imposing

what he described as his "new robot order" on the world.

That was a hostage to fortune and it made Tobruk

an emblematic albatross around the necks of the British high command.

Wavell was far less obsessed with Tobruk, knowing he could

prevent his enemy using the port without occupying the town itself.

But Churchill insisted.

So Wavell rushed in reinforcements to defend Tobruk at all costs.

The Australian 9th division, fresh to the desert,

ill-equipped, un-bloodied, found themselves here

facing down that road to stop Rommel's advancing column.

Their commander, General Morshead,

"Ming the Merciless" they called him, had said,

"No surrender, No retreat. There will be no second Dunkirk here".

It was the start of a month of very bloody fighting.

Again and again, Rommel's men hurled themselves

at the garrison perimeter.

And again and again, the defenders drove them off.

Soon it was stalemate, but Tobruk was now under siege.

There was no second Dunkirk at Tobruk.

But in Greece, there was.

The four divisions that Wavell had diverted there from the desert

were overwhelmed by the advancing German Panzers and had no choice

but to flee, leaving behind 15,000 men killed, wounded or captured.

At Churchill's direction, Wavell was now overseeing military campaigns

on no less than five fronts.

A war which had started in Europe had now spread to the Mediterranean,

the Middle East, and north Africa. Hitler seemed unstoppable.

By late May the news was dire on every front.

Greece was gone, Crete was about to fall.

Vichy-held Syria seemed about to tumble into Hitler's embrace,

and a uprising in Iraq, with its crucial oil wells,

had yet to be suppressed.

The great fear now was that with Rommel poised on the Egyptian border

there would be a Nazi pincer movement that would throttle

this vital artery of the British empire.

Churchill's worst fears were now played out in London

where his own high command roused him to fury

by warning that he risked losing the war in an effort to save Egypt.

In these exceptionally testing times,

it didn't take much to incur the wrath of Churchill -

especially if your name happened to be Wavell.

So, when the Middle East commander-in-chief sent a cable to the Prime Minister,

saying that his troops weren't battle-worthy and ill-equipped,

and furthermore that if the worst came to the worst,

he had plans to evacuate Egypt altogether,

Churchill exploded.

"Wavell has 400,000 men", he shouted at one meeting.

"If they lose Egypt, blood will flow.

"I'll have shooting parties to shoot the generals".

By now, Wavell and Churchill were openly at loggerheads.

The general had support in the high command.

But Churchill would have none of it.

War was a contest of wills.

Attack was the name of the game. Retreat was out of the question.

The loss of Egypt and the Middle East would be a disaster

of the first magnitude.

The life and honour of Great Britain

depends upon the successful defence of Egypt.

The army of the Nile is to fight,

with no thought of retreat or withdrawal.

Rhetoric was one thing, reality quite another.

Rommel's army was on the high ground here

just inside the Egyptian border.

Wavell's troops were down below on the coast.

When Churchill ordered him to attack in June, Wavell demurred,

warning that the enemy was superior in guns, tanks, and mobility.

Churchill interpreted this as

"the message of a tired and beaten man"

and insisted that his order be obeyed.

Wavell finally succumbed to Churchill's bullying.

The result was Operation Battleaxe,

which was launched here at Halfaya at the border with Libya.

Battleaxe turned out to be a very blunt instrument.

The British hoped to take the high ground above the coastal plain

and then advance along the coast to relieve Tobruk.

But the Germans were ready for them.

Not only with their superior tanks, but the 88s -

an artillery weapon of unrivalled range and power.

All totally hidden from sight.

The British armour drove up towards the Halfaya pass -

into a carefully prepared trap.

I waved at the tanks, hoping they would pepper the enemy front.

They went straight in, on into the 88s and they were all wiped out.

Then about an hour after,

I looks, and all of a sudden there were about six Jerry tanks

coming for us and I shouted, "Right lads, every man for himself!

"Live to fight another day or else you've had it. Follow me."

And we dashed away. We ran like hell.

Under the ferocity of this bombardment,

the British offensive collapsed.

One of the lads started crying.

We lost half our battalion, and we lost half the company.

Out of about 90 men, only 46 got out.

Rommel, who had expected a hard fight, was jubilant.

Dearest Lu, the three-day battle has ended in complete victory.

I'm going round the troops today to thank them.

The outcome was much as Wavell must have suspected.

On the 18th June he cabled Churchill to say,

"I am sorry to have to report that Battleaxe has failed."

The Prime Minister was at his country home, Chartwell,

when Wavell's cable arrived.

Churchill had invested a great deal of political

and personal capital in Battleaxe

and he was more than usually downcast at the outcome.

By his account, he wandered disconsolately about the valley for some hours

as he reflected on a defeat

in which yet again, the British Army had been comprehensively outgunned,

outfought and outfoxed.

In his mind there was only one man to blame.

Battleaxe was Wavell's personal nemesis in the Middle East.

A great soldier who faced overwhelming odds

was dismissed by Churchill with barely a thank you.

I feel that after the long strain that you have borne a new eye

and a new hand are required in this most seriously menaced theatre.

Churchill's military advisors were dismayed.

Though they admired his energy and resolve,

this was not the way to run a war.

In this case too, they knew that the blame for Wavell's defeat

in an unwinnable battle lay not with the general but the politician.

They knew also that the fate of the Middle East hung on Hitler.

The Fuhrer was here in Poland, where he had built

a vast complex of concrete bunkers hidden in the forest

50 miles from the Russian border.

Wolf's Lair, as it was called, was his new headquarters from which to

mastermind Operation Barbarossa, the mightiest invasion in all history.

Nearly 4 million men. Over 3,000 tanks, more than 4,000 aircraft.

Like almost everyone else, including the British,

Hitler presumed that the Soviet Union would collapse within weeks

and so vaulting was his ambition, so boundless his hubris,

that he had already drafted so-called Order 32,

which called for the destruction of the British in the Mediterranean

via a movement on one side down through Turkey,

on the other from Libya.

The destruction of the Middle Eastern Empire,

precisely the pincer movement that so agitated Churchill

and the British High Command.

The great fear was that intoxicated by his conquest of Russia,

Hitler would very soon direct his Panzers towards the Middle East,

posing a mortal threat to the British empire.

So when president Roosevelt invited Churchill to join him for a tete-a-tete,

the Prime Minister accepted with alacrity.

At 7.00 on the evening of the 2nd Roosevelt came here.

He boarded his presidential yacht The Potomac, telling the media

that he was off for a few days' cruise away from it all.

In fact, as soon as he got out of here into the Long Island Sound

he was transferred from his yacht to the US Warship The Augusta,

which steamed full speed ahead for a secret rendezvous

just off the coast of Newfoundland.

Roosevelt was elated.

"I am looking forward", he said, "to the big day ahead."

Steaming to the same rendezvous was Churchill,

anxious to woo the American President in person.

At Placentia bay they pledged themselves to quote

"The final destruction of the Nazi tyranny."

But this was only a pledge.

And Roosevelt was quick to reassure the American people,

war was not in the offing.

Equally disturbingly for Churchill, Roosevelt's closest advisors

had already told the Prime Minister

that the Middle East was a hopeless cause

and that American weapons should no longer be wasted on it.

To convince Roosevelt that they were wrong,

Churchill needed results in the desert.

Wavell's successor was General Sir Claude Auchinleck

who had come straight from

perhaps the most impressive jewel in Britain's imperial crown, India.

He had served in the Indian army during the First World War

and had stayed on to become Commander-in-Chief.

He was an imposing figure, a man of clear integrity

and a little bit obstinate, an outsider.

Like Wavell before him, Auchinleck was swift to realise that his men

were not yet trained and equipped to do battle against Rommel.

And he was even less inclined than his predecessor to

surrender his military judgment to Churchill's political imperative.

In the long hot summer months of 1941, Auchinleck did not relent.

Though Tobruk was still under siege and suffering,

the Middle East commander-in-chief refused to launch an offensive

until he thought his troops were ready.

Rommel, however, was itching for action.

Unable to get into Tobruk, Rommel set up his headquarters

here about 20 miles from the heart of the town.

But he hadn't been idle, he had a big plan,

it was a blitzkrieg right across the desert

destroying the Eighth Army and taking Cairo,

and if he could get resources

and if there was the commitment from Berlin,

it would be part of an even larger operation

to throttle Britain in the Middle East.

But such an unequivocal commitment was not yet forthcoming.

The defeat of Russia had to come first.

In London, the Prime Minister was much vexed at Auchinleck's refusal

to be harried into premature action.

With Hitler's Panzers less than 50 miles from Moscow,

the fall of Russia seemed to be imminent.

And then, for sure, the Middle East would be next.

So when he was eventually given a date for Operation Crusader,

he released his pent-up frustration in a torrent of Churchillian rhetoric.

"The battle will affect the course of the whole war", he said

and he went on, never knowingly understated, to say,

"The desert army may add a page to history to rival

"that of Blenheim and Waterloo. The eyes of the world are upon you."

Churchill reiterated this in a long letter to Roosevelt,

assuring him that a British victory against Rommel in Libya

would alter "the whole shape of the war in the Mediterranean".

Auchinleck was in a sanguine mood.

Just before the battle, he wrote to the chiefs of staff in London.

I am not nervous about Crusader, but I wonder if you realise

how everything hangs on the tactical issue of one day's fighting

and on one man's tactical ability on that one day.

All these months of labour and thought can be

set at nought in one afternoon, rather a terrifying thought.

In the early hours of 18th November,

more than 100,000 men and 700 tanks,

the Eighth Army as it was now called,

advanced out of Egypt into Libya.

Their quarry, the 400 tanks and 120,000 men of Rommel's Panzer Army.

Here on the airfield at Sidi Rezegh

there took place the most intense tank battle

of the entire desert campaign.

Hundreds of tanks on both sides across this vast area.

But the British were hugely outgunned

and therefore, with the romance of the 19th century cavalry,

they opted to charge, charge directly at Rommel's lines.

I cannot describe the confusion of this all-out tank battle,

we were here, there and everywhere.

I do not know who was keeping the score

but we were losing a great deal of equipment and men.

The noise, the heat and the dust were unbearable.

Despite the heroism of their crews,

the British tanks were outmatched by the Panzers,

outgunned and outpaced.

Sometimes the dead were laid alongside the blackened hulks

of their burnt-out tanks.

The tanks themselves still smouldered and smelt evilly.

Their interior fittings had been dragged out

like the entrails of some wounded animal,

for you would see the toothbrushes and blankets of the crews

scattered around, together with their little packets of biscuits,

their water bottles, photographs of their families.

The Desert Fox was a master at integrating

and orchestrating his forces infantry, artillery and armour

working as one, driving a wedge between the scattered British lines.

Within three days, Sidi Rezegh had become a charnel house

but it belonged to Rommel.

With half the Eighth Army's armour now destroyed,

Rommel opted for a gamble that defied military logic.

Carving a route straight through the British lines,

he led two Panzer divisions in a headlong dash to the Egyptian border.

At this point, showing the intuition of a truly great commander-in-chief,

Auchinleck sensed that Rommel had over-reached himself.

Telling his generals at the front to stay firm,

at a moment of real crisis

he sent a message to every man in the Eighth Army.

"You've got your teeth into him, hold on, fight deeper and deeper.

"There is only one order, attack and pursue, all out, everyone!"

It worked.

Rommel was forced to rush back from the border

to rejoin the main body of the Panzer Army

which was hard-pressed on the outskirts of Tobruk.

This was the moment for the garrison to break out.

Slicing through the Axis lines, they managed to link up with

the New Zealand 2nd Division, which had itself

cut a swathe through the Panzer Army from the other side.

A siege which had lasted 240 days was over.

Rommel was now critically short of men, machines, and supplies,

he had little choice but to retreat.

For once, he had been too clever by half.

In a dramatic reversal of fortune, the Desert Fox was now on the run.

Dearest Lu, we're pulling out. There was simply nothing else for it.

I hope we manage to get back to the line we've chosen.

Christmas is going to be completely messed up.

My commanding officers are ill - all those who aren't dead or wounded.

With the siege of Tobruk lifted, the Eighth Army pressed on,

driving Rommel back, forcing him to retreat beyond Benghazi,

hundreds of miles,

to the point where he had started this campaign nine months earlier.

The Eighth Army had inflicted 40,000 casualties

on the Italian and German soldiers of the Panzer Army.

18,000 of Auchinleck's men were dead, wounded, or missing in action.

The British had paid a high price but it was a big victory.

It was not a victory on the scale of Blenheim or Waterloo,

but it was a single triumph,

demonstrating that Rommel could be worsted on the battlefield

and in the grim days of 1941, Crusader, though long forgotten,

except by those who fought here, was a precious gleam of light.

Churchill was delighted.

"Here then" he intoned later, "we reached a moment of relief

"and indeed rejoicing about the desert war."

But Crusader was suddenly and dramatically overshadowed

by an event which turned the Second World War

into a truly global conflict.

On the very day that Tobruk was relieved,

the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour.

When Churchill heard the news, he could scarcely contain his delight.

Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation,

I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.

To have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy.

At this very moment I knew the United States was in the war,

up to the neck and in to the death.

Churchill now seized the moment.

His overriding purpose, to persuade the Americans to adopt

his strategy for defeating the global threat posed

by the alliance of Germany, Italy, and now Japan as well.

To this end, he invited himself to the White House.

For his second visit, Churchill crossed the Atlantic

in the battleship The Duke of York in conditions so atrocious,

so stormy that the journey took twice as long as usual.

Ten days rather than five.

But while those about him were collapsing with sea sickness,

he sat down and he wrote one of the major documents of the war.

A grand vision for the future strategy of what was now

a military alliance between Britain and the United States.

Armed with that, he went straight to the White House -

his task, to persuade Roosevelt that his first priority should be

not the destruction of the Japanese in the Pacific

or of the Germans in Europe

but to join with Britain in fighting in North Africa.

A pretty tall order.

Churchill stayed as Roosevelt's houseguest for almost three weeks.

Their personal relationship blossomed,

but they had sharp differences of perspective.

At dinner one night,

the President went out of his way to tell the Prime Minister

that most Americans had a genuine hatred for the British empire -

a measure of the difficulties Churchill faced

in persuading his ally to confront their enemies

in North Africa before anywhere else.

Nonetheless, the Prime Minister was much feted in Washington

where he was given a rapturous reception

when he was accorded the rare privilege of addressing Congress.

'In the days to come the British and the American people

'will for their own safety and for the good of all

'walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace.'

But this display of transatlantic amity made precious little impact

on any of the President's men.

They thought the defeat of Japan or Germany mattered far more

than Churchill's imperial ambitions for the Middle East.

When Roosevelt's most senior advisers looked closely

at Churchill's plan some of them were aghast.

It was madness to go to North Africa.

Others were ambivalent, how on Earth could it work?

Churchill had made it clear he was predicating his plan

on the assumption that the British would soon win in Libya.

The issue, after days and days of wrangling, was left in doubt.

But when Churchill came to leave he was elated

when Roosevelt said to him, "Trust me to the bitter end".

The Prime Minister's satisfaction did not last long.

Despite the fact that the Soviet Union had failed

to collapse on schedule,

Hitler's vision of the Thousand-Year Reich

was remarkably undimmed by any kind of reality check.

So in January he was talking about the Wehrmacht heading south

through the Caucasus to take Iran and Iraq.

Then he thought the Arabs would rise up in revolt against the British,

at the same time, Churchill would be obliged

to remove his troops from North Africa

and, he said, he would give all the resources Rommel needed

to ensure that the British were driven to the conference table.

That put the spotlight on the island of Malta, a British garrison

strategically located in the middle of the Mediterranean.

A deep water port, and the only airbase between Italy

and the North African coast.

For months, the Royal Navy and the RAF had set off from here

to inflict severe damage on the Axis convoys on which Rommel relied

for the supplies needed to sustain his campaign in the desert.

But this was about to change.

In one of his spasms of anxiety about the Middle East and Rommel,

Hitler belatedly woke up to the importance of the Mediterranean

which he now said should be seen as a decisive theatre of the war

and that meant neutralizing the Royal Navy and the RAF.

In turn, that meant Malta.

Malta had to blockaded,

besieged from the sea and bombarded from the air.

The impact was almost immediate.

The onslaught on Malta - led by Luftwaffe squadrons

released from the Russian front - made British operations

against Axis convoys in the Mediterranean extremely hazardous.

As a result, Rommel's supplies once again started to flow freely

to his front line.

The British, somewhat resting on their laurels near Benghazi,

failed to see what was coming.

The Panzer Army struck like lightning,

leaving the British reeling and wrong-footed.

They were soon in headlong flight all the way back until

they reached a point, not far from Tobruk, known as the Gazala line.

Here they dug in across a front which stretched for 50 miles

from the sea to a fort called Bir Hakeim.

Rommel gloated contentedly.

Dearest Lu, I wonder what you have to say about the counter attack

we started at 8.30 yesterday.

Our opponents are getting out as though they'd been stung.

Prospects are good for the next few days.

Churchill was astonished and horrified.

The rout of the Eighth Army threatened to torpedo his efforts

to enlist the Americans in his North African venture.

A prime ministerial cable from Porthcurno

was soon on its way to Cairo.

I am much disturbed.

I had certainly never been led to suppose

that such a situation could arise.

It seems to me this is a serious crisis

and one, to me, quite unexpected.

Auchinleck not only failed to reply

but soon made matters worse by informing London

that the Eighth Army would not be ready to confront Rommel

for at least two months.

A furious Prime Minister demanded to see him in London.

But Auchinleck refused.

I am certain that I cannot, repeat, not,

leave the Middle East in present circumstances.

I am not, repeat, not, prepared to delegate authority to anyone

while strategical situation is so fluid and liable to rapid changes.

Churchill was tempted to fire him.

Instead, he dispatched a caustic reply.

Your losses have been far less than the enemy

who nevertheless keep fighting.

It will be thought intolerable that your men should remain unengaged,

preparing for another set-piece battle in July.

At home, the Prime Minister was in trouble.

From Dunkirk to Greece to Singapore,

one defeat had followed another without sign of victory anywhere.

Churchill's leadership was coming under severe and sometimes

savage scrutiny, murmurings in Westminster and Whitehall.

Outright attacks in the public prince.

At a secret session of Parliament

seeking to explain set back after set back, he let rip.

"I am anxious that members should realise" he said

"that our affairs are not conducted by simpletons and dunderheads

"as the comic papers would depict.

"Any featherhead can be confident in time of victory.

"The test is to have faith when things are going badly".

And they were going badly, very badly, in the Mediterranean.

Malta was still under siege, its people half starving.

By the spring, Malta was being throttled.

The aerial bombardment had reached such a pitch

that people fled the city to live in the countryside

or in tunnels underground or in makeshift air raid shelters.

In a little over one month more than 1,000 people were killed,

4,500 injured, more than 15,000 buildings destroyed.

In March and April, more bombs fell on Malta

than on London during the entire Blitz.

Hitler now authorised an invasion of the island

and gave Rommel the go-ahead for an all-out offensive on Egypt.

On the 27th May 1942 a forward officer of the Southernmost tip

of the Gazala line radioed his core headquarters

40 miles up the line to say, "In a cloud of dust I think

"I can see large military formation on the move".

He was told, "No, there are no forces south of you."

"They're tanks, I can see that their tanks!"

"No, I repeat, no, there are no enemy movements."

"The tanks are approaching, they're German Mark IVs"

At the other end a bored voice said,

"No, there are no movements like that."

"I'm under fire." And then the line went dead.

It was Germans, it was an astonishing move by Rommel,

right down to the south to get round the back of the Gazala line.

The Panzers surrounded and then overran

the 7th Armoured Division - the Desert Rats.

The shelling was at close quarters and murderous.

I didn't realise it had hit us.

I turned round and there were two radio operators without heads.

I was wounded in the legs. I fell off the tank.

I was left miles from anywhere in no-man's-land,

watching shells drop round me,

just wondering about the things you've done and you'd like to do.

Fear, because you didn't know what was going to happen.

German armour and German vehicles got right up on us.

All our positions were overrun like a farmer ploughing his fields.

After two and a half weeks, the Eighth Army could take no more.

Confused and exhausted, the troops were ordered

to retreat across the border back into Egypt,

leaving the garrison in Tobruk to fend for itself.

By this time, Tobruk was totally surrounded.

The defenders here demoralized and frightened,

watching as the remnants of the Eighth Army

streamed back towards the border.

Churchill had made it very clear

that Tobruk should be held at all costs.

Rommel was equally determined to destroy it.

He launched his final assault on the perimeter just here.

The onslaught started in the early hours

with a massive artillery barrage.

Then at dawn, out of a clear sky,

the dive-bombers began their attack -

the first wave of some 600 missions flown on that day alone.

The effect was overwhelming.

The garrison crumbled, almost without resistance.

By the end of the day, the Panzers had reached the town centre.

Sensing that it was all over, the demoralised defenders -

or a hard core at least, stumbled on a stash of booze, got drunk,

and sung themselves into oblivion

before being marched off to captivity.

# There'll always be an England

# Where there's a busy street... #

Across town, Rommel's men countered this musical cacophony

with their own patriotic counterpoint.

Just before the Tobruk commander ordered the 35,000 men under him to surrender,

he signalled Eighth Army headquarters, "Situation: shambles."

Bodies lay everywhere.

At what was once the town square, we found thousands of other prisoners.

My God, the humiliation of it all.

Rommel stormed into town,

passing columns of dejected British prisoners,

to stay here at the hotel at the heart of Tobruk.

He was ecstatic.

"The high point of the African war", he said.

If he was ecstatic, Hitler was euphoric.

"Destiny's gift to the German people" he said.

A quite incredible victory,

and as a mark as how important Tobruk had become to both sides,

the next day, Rommel was made Field Marshall.

Rommel was exultant and wrote to his wife,

"Tobruk, it was a wonderful battle"

Even as Tobruk crumbled, Churchill was on his way to the White House

once again hoping to convince the President that

the first Allied operation of the war should be in North Africa

and not in Europe, as most of his advisors were still urging.

The Prime Minister was with Roosevelt

when the news arrived from Tobruk.

It could hardly have come at a worse moment.

An aide came into the room carrying a piece of paper.

It was handed to Churchill who looked at it

and according to those present,

literally the blood drained from his face.

Tobruk, Tobruk had fallen.

Tobruk had been his beacon, a litmus test of triumph or disaster.

This was a humiliation.

Instead, Roosevelt broke the silence with six words,

"What can we do to help?"

It was an extraordinary moment.

So far from ruining Churchill's credibility in Washington.

The debacle at Tobruk was about to turn the tide of the war.

The Americans not only agreed to ship 300 of their newest tanks

to the desert but it soon became clear that the President

was on the verge of committing US troops

to an Allied landing in North Africa.

None of this gave Churchill respite.

In London, politicians and public alike knew virtually nothing

about the secret talks in Washington.

Nothing about a joint military operation in North Africa,

and nothing about the 300 American tanks.

The only news was Tobruk.

Yet another national disaster

which prompted another censure motion in the Commons,

"This house has no confidence in the central direction of the war."

The debate gave a flavour of the animosities

lurking beneath the surface of the war time coalition.

Aneurin Bevan, the Welsh Labour MP, declared

"The Prime Minister wins debate after debate,

"loses battle after battle."

Churchill did not attempt to disguise the enormity

of what had happened but he countered,

"If there are any profiteers of disaster who feel able to

"paint the picture in darker colours they are at liberty to do so."

The censure motion was overwhelmingly defeated.

Though Churchill emerged virtually unscathed from this public ordeal,

he was far from confident about his own position as Prime Minister

and the news from Egypt promised calamity.

With Tobruk in his hands,

Rommel advanced rapidly across the border into Egypt, racing the

Eighth Army back towards the British naval headquarters at Alexandria.

A victory for the Axis dictators seemed but days away.

On the 1st of July, German radio broadcast

to the women of Alexandria, "Get your frocks out, we're coming".

It wasn't a joke and there was suppressed panic.

Shopkeepers put up signs, welcoming Rommel and the Germans,

that the British fleet evacuated the port and made for Haifa,

Beirut and Portside and the ex-patriot community,

fleeing, took to the buses, the trains or their cars and went south.

In Cairo too, the British community headed for the exits -

for Palestine and even South Africa.

Fearing that Rommel would soon be at the gates of Cairo,

the staff here at the Embassy and the General Headquarters

built funeral pyres of papers, secret documents, codes and maps.

Great plumes of smoke went up and were seen over the city.

Paper fluttered the ground on what was soon known as "Ash Wednesday,"

but as the British community made for their cars, the boats,

the trains and the buses,

the British Ambassador, showing enviable sangfroid,

simply ordered that the white railings around the embassy should be repainted.

The Middle East commander-in-chief hastened to the front line.

Not in panic, but with purpose.

Taking personal command of the Eighth Army,

Auchinleck ordered his troops to retreat back here

to this small halt on a railway line

in the middle of nowhere called El Alamein.

It was about 60 miles from Alexandria.

If Rommel and the Panzer Army could break through here

they'd have all Egypt at their mercy.

Threatening Britain's oil supplies

and the vital artery between Britain and its Empire beyond,

India and the Far East.

A catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions.

Auchinleck had chosen well.

40 miles to the south of El Alamein lay the Qattara depression,

an empty quarter that was virtually impassable.

The only way for Rommel to reach Alexandria and Cairo

was to force a way through the British lines

between the station and the depression.

The terrain favoured the defenders.

Rommel knew that and that his only hope of victory

was to make one more lunge through the British lines

in the hope of reaching Cairo.

For day after day,

night after night, the first battle of El Alamein raged to and fro.

Attack, counter attack, all along this line.

After three and a half weeks

Auchinleck asked for one more supreme effort.

He told his men, in an order of the day,

"You have stopped them at the threshold of Egypt,

"now stick to it".

And they did.

Gradually but inexorably, Rommel was forced to yield.

Dearest Lu, unfortunately, things are not going as I should like them.

Resistance is too great and our strength exhausted.

However, I still hope to find a way to achieve our goal.

I'm rather tired and fagged out.

Not only Rommel, everyone on both sides was exhausted.

The struggle petered out.

While the first battle of El Alamein drifted towards a stalemate,

a delegation from Roosevelt arrived in London.

In something of a volte face, they sought again to persuade

the British to put Europe before north Africa.

This time there was a showdown.

After long tortuous months of high-wire negotiation

littered with acrimony and bad faith on both sides,

Churchill finally made it unambiguously clear.

There would be no circumstances in which Britain would participate

in a joint Anglo-American invasion of mainland Europe,

the so-called Second Front, until 1943 at the earliest.

Instead, Churchill argued for the destruction

of the Axis forces in North Africa.

An Anglo-American invasion from the west to coincide with

an assault from the east led by the Eighth Army.

The operation would be codenamed Torch.

Roosevelt accepted that and agreed in Churchill's phrase that

"the true Second Front should be in North Africa."

It was a defining moment of the Second World War.

It was a triumph for the Prime Minister,

the more remarkable because the Americans had for so long

disputed the importance of the Middle East

and because they deplored Britain's imperial pretensions -

both of which were now to be salvaged.

Buoyed by this diplomatic breakthrough,

Churchill headed for Cairo.

Churchill arrived here at the British Embassy in Cairo

at the beginning of August,

after a long, arduous and dangerous flight from London.

In a bomber that was so noisy

he could only communicate with his staff by writing notes,

but he was exhilarated, and when he got here

the ambassador Sir Miles Lampson

gave him his private quarters to live in.

He had delicious food,

the air was cool, the sybarite in Churchill purred with pleasure.

The war leader was on the war path.

Churchill decided the time had come to confront Auchinleck -

who had not been forgiven for his refusal to obey every exhortation

emanating from a prime ministerial cable.

Churchill came up here to Ruweisat Ridge

where Auchinleck had his forward headquarters.

The Prime Minister was not impressed.

Auchinleck lived very frugally

and Churchill was offered a very frugal breakfast.

After breakfast, he got up, jabbing at a map and saying,

"Can't you attack here, here or here?"

and Auchinleck saying, "No, no, not yet."

After a bit, Churchill went out of the caravan

and stood with his back to the General.

Nothing could have been a more eloquent testimony

to his irritation and his anger.

A few days later,

Churchill gave the Middle East commander-in-chief his marching orders.

Another fine General fired for refusing

to lead his army into battle until he could be confident

of the victory that Churchill so urgently required.

For several days, Churchill had been in intense discussions

with his most senior staff, trying to find a successor to Auchinleck.

Someone who would be really anxious to take the battle to Rommel.

Almost in desperation, he even offered the job

to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

Churchill then appointed General Gought,

who was almost immediately killed when his plane was shot down.

It was at that point that they summoned from London

a General who had never been to the desert before - Bernard Montgomery.

Montgomery had a reputation for being abrasive and dyspeptic.

That didn't worry Churchill.

In a letter to his wife Clemmie, he said, "If he is disagreeable

"to those about him, he is also disagreeable to the enemy."

Montgomery, who had been decorated for gallantry in the first war,

was serving in something of a backwater on the home front,

when the summons arrived.

He left at once for Egypt.

Montgomery was in a hurry.

Even before he officially took over

as the New Commander of the Eighth Army,

he came up to Auchinleck's headquarters at Ruweisat Ridge here

and he summoned his staff officers to his side and told them,

"No more withdrawals, here we stand and fight,

"if we can't stay here alive, let us stay here dead."

Stirring stuff, but it included a pretty nasty smear

and an insinuation that Auchinleck was planning to withdraw.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Not that would have worried Montgomery, he was vain,

arrogant, brutal and prepared to do almost anything

to serve his own advantage, whatever the cost to others and yet,

yet he had an uncanny skill to electrify the atmosphere around him.

Churchill was swift to detect that in Montgomery

he had found the man to deliver the great imperial victory he craved.

After a whistle-stop tour of the front

during which he swam naked in the Mediterranean

and met the men at the front,

the Prime Minister came away rejoicing in what he described as

"the reviving ardour" of the Eighth Army.

But it was not merely Montgomery's way with soldiers.

Hitler had abandoned the invasion of Malta.

The Royal Navy and the RAF were once more sinking Axis convoys.

And, as a result, Rommel was yet again critically

short of weapons, ammunition, and fuel.

Even more importantly,

the Eighth Army had been massively reinforced from Britain and America.

Knowing all this, Churchill left no-one in any doubt

about the importance of the struggle ahead.

Before he left for London, he declared,

"We are determined to fight for Egypt and the Nile Valley

"as though it were the soil of England itself."

Back in England, however,

the Prime Minister came down to Earth with a jolt.

By now Churchill was driven by demons,

often filled with deep gloom.

Fearing he would be driven from office with, as he put it,

"A load of calamity about my shoulders".

He needed a victory, and he wanted it before Torch

to deal a mortal blow against Rommel,

to make the likelihood of success in North Africa much greater,

and to convince the Americans

that the British could fight and win on the battlefield.

It would also raise the spirits of the British people

and thereby his own as well.

In the desert, Montgomery had already been put to the test.

At Alam el Halfa, his troops had held the line

against a desperate effort by Rommel to breakthrough towards Cairo.

The challenge now was to drive him out of Egypt altogether.

The Eighth Army had a decisive edge in men and weapons

but Montgomery was no less cautious than his predecessors -

and he refused to be bounced into action before his troops were ready

for what he described as "the killing match" which awaited them.

The date was set for the last week of October.

Some 200,000 Imperial and Commonwealth troops

were waiting for the order to start the final battle of El Alamein.

Two months earlier,

Montgomery had said that victory was a mathematical certainty.

On paper it was,

but the British had to cross some seven miles

through a huge minefield to reach Miteiriya Ridge

before dawn the next morning,

and that was anything but a mathematical certainty.

At 9.40pm on the 23rd October, in the light of a full moon,

the silence of the desert was broken in the most spectacular fashion.

No fury of sound had ever assailed our ears like that before,

it cuffed, shattered and distorted the senses,

and loosened the bowels alarmingly.

It was sheer horror.

At 10.00pm tens of thousands of infantrymen -

from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India,

as well as Britain and other parts of the Empire -

rose from their slit trenches

and began to march in steady columns towards the Axis front line.

The sound of the Highlanders' bagpipes wafted through the night air.

They soon came under heavy fire.

Dead and wounded littered the ground.

One of the casualties has both legs and an arm blown off.

While I stand there he regains consciousness

and starts pleading, "Kill me, God, please kill me."

I find I am incapable, and with tears in my eyes

cover the body with a greatcoat, thinking how small he looks.

In fact, Montgomery had miscalculated.

It took much longer than he had allowed to clear the minefields.

As a result, the tanks, which followed the infantry,

became gridlocked.

By daylight on the 24th, it was a shambles.

Infantry tanks and artillery still trapped here in the minefield.

Miteiriya Ridge - complete chaos, a traffic jam of vehicles,

tanks on fire, a human carnage.

The attack was petering out.

But the Panzer Army was also in trouble,

running out of tanks and fuel.

To make matters worse, they were without Rommel,

who'd been sent home some weeks earlier on doctor's orders.

Hitler now realised that the Desert Fox was needed urgently

at the battlefront.

The Fuhrer rang Rommel, who was in the Austrian Alps

recuperating from his many stomach ailments, a sick man.

Hitler said,

"The news from North Africa is bad, are you well enough to go back?"

Rommel immediately assented, but with great foreboding

as he was to write later,

"there were no more laurels to be won in Africa."

Montgomery's offensive - Lightfoot, he had called it - now stalled.

And his casualties were mounting fast.

Before long, Montgomery realised that he had to think again,

that his plan was in tatters and that meant calling a pause.

In Downing Street, the Prime Minister could scarcely believe it.

When Churchill was told that Montgomery had been forced to pause and regroup,

he was incandescent, almost frantic, ordering,

"It is most necessary that the attack be resumed before Torch",

which was then only five days away.

Soon afterwards, he followed up with a flow of abuse about Montgomery

for allowing the battle to peter out.

Storming, "Have we not got one single General

"who can ever win one single battle?"

The General in question betrayed not one sign of anxiety,

knowing that in the battle of attrition that now loomed,

there should be only one outcome.

The Eighth Army's great superiority in men

and weaponry soon began to tell.

Montgomery's final assault - Supercharge -

caught Rommel off balance.

As he struggled to fill the ever thinning ranks of his front line,

Supercharge became a slogging match, man against man.

Tank against tank.

Some of the tanks continued to advance even after

they had been hit and set on fire,

with only dead and dying men inside them,

like huge self-propelled funeral pyres,

a dead man's foot still pressing down the accelerator.

The souls of the dead men must have been trapped in their vehicle,

how else could a smashed and blazing tank

continue to advance towards the enemy?

The Italian high command in Rome knew that all was lost.

But their leader appeared to think otherwise.

By this time, Mussolini was living in parallel universe,

with Rommel at bay in the desert

and his own dreams of an African Empire crumbling before him.

Nonetheless, on the 1st November he roused himself to send a message

to Rommel saying, "I'm sure there will be victory in this battle."

Like Mussolini,

Hitler was also living in a parallel universe of unreality and denial.

Now facing a monumental crisis at Stalingrad

where the Third Reich would soon reach its nemesis, he cabled Rommel,

ordering him, "Stand fast. Yield not a yard.

"There is only one way, that of victory or death."

This was a ludicrous order and it was ignored.

The Panzer Army was crippled.

Its young men broken by an unimaginable outcome.

Defeat. Rommel was in despair.

Dearest Lu, we are simply being crushed by the enemy weight.

At night I lie open-eyed,

racking my brains for a way out of this plight for my poor troops.

The dead are lucky, it's all over for them.

I think of you constantly with heartfelt love and gratitude.

Perhaps all will be well, and we shall see each other again.

The Eighth Army now drove the remnants of Rommel's force

back into Libya towards Tripoli.

For the first time,

Britain could claim an unequivocal victory on the battlefield.

Montgomery had advised that in the final battle of El Alamein,

some 13,000 men from Britain and the Empire would be killed or wounded.

He was right.

In the two years since the start of the desert war,

the price in human lives on both sides

had been in the many scores of thousands.

Killed, wounded or missing.

Three days after El Alamein, with Rommel's men in full retreat,

more than 100,000 allied troops landed in North Africa.

Torch had been ignited.

It is virtually inconceivable that

Roosevelt would have gone to war in North Africa

and from there to Italy,

if Churchill had not fought with such tenacity

to defend the Middle East in an otherwise empty desert.

What might originally have seemed to be a faraway struggle,

a sideshow at best.

The conflict, which reached its climax at El Alamein,

had proved to be pivotal in a war which now engulfed the world.

For the first time in the war, Churchill could celebrate.

After a long string of defeats, he had a victory.

And at a mansion house luncheon a few days later,

he made the most of it.

We have a new experience.

We have victory, a remarkable and definite victory.

Germans have received back again that measure of fire and steel

which they have so often meted out to others.

Now this is the not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end,

but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.

Churchill had good cause for feeling jubilant.

After two long gruelling years, it was becoming clearer by the day

that Hitler would not prevail, that Mussolini was a busted flush.

The Americans were not only in the war but fighting in North Africa

alongside the British, where victory was virtually inevitable.

He had achieved his overriding ambition

to place the Middle East and the Mediterranean

at the very heart of Allied strategy for the defeat of Nazism.

In so doing,

he had chartered the future course of the war in the West.

It was a remarkable personal, political and diplomatic triumph.

The campaign in the desert which culminated at El Alamein

had cost a great many lives.

But for both sides it did indeed mark the end of the beginning.

CHURCH BELLS CHIME

For two years the church of bells of Britain had been silent -

to be rung only to warn of a Nazi invasion.

Now they echoed across the land in celebration

and to honour those who had won glory on the battlefield

in a faraway desert, at a place called El Alamein.

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