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It was unlikely, though, that the climate had much to do with Rommel's timing. All through the hot, stinking summer, while the unburied dead burst like ripe melons in the sun, while soldiers got dysentery (which the English call "Gippy Tummy"), while the flies swarmed over his desert camps, he had waited for reinforcements. It was likely that he wanted to attack before Alexander's reinforcements exceeded his.
All summer Allied planes had ranged up & down the Mediterranean, bombing Rommel's communication lines, but they had never succeeded in shutting off his streams of supply. London calculated that there were some 140,000 Germans and Italians —shock troops, armor, motorized divisions and paratroops—disposed along the 35-mile front and piled up in reserve behind the lines.
As for the British, before the holocaust last June they had some 100,000 actives to oppose 90,000 Axis troops. They had lost 25,000 in one disastrous day at Tobruk, 230 out of 300 tanks in one disastrous afternoon (TIME, July 13). It was doubtful that enough armor had reached the British in two months' time to put them on a par with the Germans. But they were probably still superior in the air.
These were matters of relative strength. Another matter of relativity was the untested ability of General Alexander to cope with the rowdy Rommel. If the two men's abilities were as well balanced as their forces, Rommel would not take Suez.
If Alexander succeeded where Wavell, Cunningham, Ritchie and Auchinleck had their tails twisted, Britons would put him in a special niche of fame. Britons, watching Alexander and Rommel square off, had a deep, personal feeling about this battle, for Rommel was the one enemy for whom they felt a deep, personal hatred—and respect. Around him had gathered the myths which decorate the great.* To destroy Rommel would be to win more than a battle.
General Alexander understood Rommel's war of wile, ambush and sudden attack. He got an early training in something like it. The third son of the fourth Earl of Caledon, he was left fatherless at a tender age and given over more or less to the care of his brothers. Their home was a large and straggling mansion in Northern Ireland. Most of the time Harold and his brothers ran wild in the woods and fields, spent their nights with poachers.
When he was not ranging the countryside Harold applied himself to cabinetmaking and metalworking. But at the age of ten, when he was finally sent off to school, he could not write his own name.
He plunged into solitary and laborious study. Small, tough as nails, he also became an accomplished athlete (he later set an Army record for the mile). Harrow and Sandhurst polished him off.
He fought in France in World War I. A lieutenant colonel at 26, he commanded a battalion; at 36 commanded a regiment; at 42, a brigade. Today, at 50, he is a brown, hard-faced, fit-looking general. He speaks French, Italian, German, Russian, and Urdu. Before the war he painted watercolors, studied science and archeology. After his retreat from Burma he. spent a month's leave in England rebuilding a blitzed greenhouse so that his wife could grow tomatoes.