The Battle of Alamein: Turning Point, World War II, and : Alamein (review)

On Sunday, 8 November 1942, for the first time in three years, church bells rang throughout Britain in celebration of a great victory, in Egypt, at a place called El Alamein. For the first time in the war the Allies had won a major victory over the German army and one of its great generals. Since the beginning of the war in 1939, the British people had experienced only glimmers of sunlight during grim years of wartime rationing when people put cardboard in their shoes in place of nonexistent leather, and lard substituted for hair cream. Defeat followed defeat, and in 1942, British troops in the western desert thought more highly of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel than they did of their own commanders. The Desert Fox seemed unbeatable, and the Suez Canal and the Middle East itself seemed wide open to Axis conquest.

Although some military historians dismiss the desert war as a mere sideshow, and the Battle of El Alamein hardly worthy of mention in the same breath as Stalingrad, the historical literature on the North African campaign and the Battle of El Alamein is extensive. Anniversaries, however, provide a golden opportunity for reflection, and two books published in 2002, the sixtieth anniversary of El Alamein, are both welcome additions to our World War II library. Moreover, as we enter the twenty-first century, epic sagas of World War II such as El Alamein, begin to fade into a distant, yet treasured, past. Both of these anniversary accounts are well researched, and their authors successfully capture the human experience of desert warfare: the chaos, the heroism and terror, the confusion, the maddening presence of sand (dust) that got into everything, the ever-present fleas, and the swarming flies. For sheer readability, Bierman and Smith's book is a winner. On occasion, the authors appear to be unfamiliar with recent historiography on certain topics; for example, they blame General Archibald Wavell's "unjust" dismissal on what they term "Churchill's adventure in Greece." If blame is to be assigned because of the Allied failure in Greece, historians now generally agree that others besides Churchill were responsible for the decision, if mistake it was, to aid Greece in 1941. But this is quibbling; writing with great verve, Bierman and Smith present the reader with a story that reads like a great war novel. From the Italian invasion of Egypt in 1940, to the Axis surrender in Tunis in May 1943, the authors offer the reader a fast-paced, fascinating panorama of the events and people that surround the Battle of El Alamein, and the final Axis surrender at "Tunisgrad"—more Germans surrendered at the end of the North African campaign than the Russians captured at Stalingrad. Even those who think they have heard enough already about the desert war and some of the hoary controversies that continue to persist over land, air, and naval strategy, the Desert Fox, Monty, Malta, and the importance of the Battle of El Alamein itself, will find Bierman and Smith's superb book difficult to put down. This is military history at its best. While the desert war was bitter and implacable, the authors note that men on both sides agree that it was a war without hate—Krieg ohne Hass, as Rommel is said to have described it. They observe that Rommel was "a stickler for the Geneva Conventions" (p. 2). At the same time, they dispel the "abiding myth" that he was anti-Nazi. Like so many German officers, Rommel was a great admirer of Hitler so long as Germany seemed to be winning. For some time he...