He had only 26 serviceable tanks left and little fuel. On July 3, after the British routed a converging move by an Italian division, Rommel broke off the battle. Convinced of Rommel’s underlying weakness, Auchinleck launched a strong armored counterattack on July 1 that prevented a further advance by the Afrika Korps. Rommel’s main armored thrust made progress until nightfall when the panzers were halted by artillery fire and attacks on their meager supply lines by fighters and bombers of Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham’s Desert Air Force. German panzers inflicted heavy losses on their British counterparts prior to El Alamein, but by the time of the decisive battle in October 1942, their own numbers had dwindled. III advances across the North African desert toward the Egyptian frontier and the village of El Alamein. Most of the British armor was only just arriving at Alamein, but the legendary “Desert Fox” was unaware of that fact.

The British defenses consisted of four fortified “boxes,” linked by small mobile columns, stretched across a 40-mile bottleneck between the Mediterranean Sea and the impassable salt marshes of the Qattara Depression. Rommel’s forces reached the Alamein line on June 30, 1942, and launched the first Battle of Alamein the following day. The Alamein line would form the North African front over the next four months. Auchinleck, the tall, widely respected commander in chief of the British Mediterranean Forces, took direct control of the Eighth Army and ordered a withdrawal from planned defensive positions at Mersa Matruh, east of Tobruk, to the area of El Alamein, a remote coastal town and railway station in northern Egypt, only 65 miles west of Alexandria. Vital bases-the port of Alexandria and British General Headquarters in Cairo-and the strategically vital Suez Canal were threatened. After the loss of the key port of Tobruk and a defeat at Gazala in the Libyan Western Desert, the Eighth Army was in full retreat. The gallant but dispirited army had been outgunned and outmaneuvered by German panzers, deadly 88mm flak guns, and generalship as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps and its Italian allies pushed east toward Egypt. After more than two wearying years of seesaw fighting across the North African desert, the outlook was bleak for the British Eighth Army in the early summer of 1942.

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