Rommel's own diary admits the desert war is lost
What happened
In the Egyptian desert, General Bernard Montgomery spent weeks deliberately building up British Eighth Army's numerical superiority before opening a massive night artillery barrage on 23 October, refusing Winston Churchill's repeated pressure to attack sooner. Against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's minefield defenses, nicknamed the devil's gardens, British engineers spent the battle's opening days clearing narrow lanes for tanks under Operation Lightfoot, absorbing heavy losses in a grinding phase Montgomery himself called crumbling. By 3 November, Rommel wrote home that the battle is going very heavily against us... we are facing very difficult days, perhaps the most difficult that a man can undergo. The Axis line broke the next day; roughly 240,000 Axis troops would ultimately surrender in Tunisia the following May, ending the North African campaign entirely.
Why it matters
El Alamein was Britain's first unambiguous land victory over Germany after years of setbacks, and Churchill later called it the end of the beginning of the war. The Suez Canal and Middle Eastern oil, the campaign's real strategic stakes, stayed in Allied hands, and Rommel's own retreat never really stopped until Africa was lost entirely.
How we know
Rommel's personal letters and Montgomery's own after-action reports both survive, giving historians the unusual advantage of matched firsthand accounts, in the commanders' own words, from both sides of the same battle.
Sources
- National Army Museum. Second Battle of El Alamein · Reputable sourcenam.ac.uk · The domain "nam.ac.uk" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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