(4 of 4)
Licked, Not Liquidated. This time the British broke Rommel's Schwung before it got fully under way. For the British had before them a real wall of steel and men and mines, stretching from Qattara to the sea. They stopped Rommel against that wall, in the valley between the ridges of El Hemeimat and El Ruweisat. There they kept pressing him back on his heels until he grudgingly gave way, edged back from a battlefield littered with his demolished tanks and motor vehicles.
Rommel's first failure was not merely a failure to find and exploit a weak place in the Eighth Army's line. A specific, carefully planned mode of attack, by which he had expected to break the British line, had failed. It was a method which he had used before, in more open battlefields, and it had usually worked. It was to drive an alley through or around a flank of the British defenses, then line the side toward the enemy's main forces with an impenetrable wall of artillery and aircraft. This time he tried to drive such an alley through the British mine fields, between the Eighth Army's southern flank and the Qattara Depression. Had he succeeded, he could then have moved his forces through the alley and used them as he liked in the British rear. Failing, he was stopped.
But Rommel was not yet defeated. If he can find another way, or enough armor, artillery and aircraft to make the first way work at El Alamein, he will be pounding toward the Nile once more. If he fails, the star of Rommel will be eclipsed by the star of Alexander, and the valley of the Nile will be secure.
In the Valley of the Nile, skinny, red-brown fellahin labored from sunup to sundown, pushed their ancient wooden farm tools behind their water buffaloes, patiently raised the river water by their shadoofs (well sweeps) and dumped it on to their fields, bucket by bucket, as their ancestors had before them. Their patches of maize were green. From their mud-brick huts they lifted their eyes, squinted at the Allied planes. Allied or Axis, it made little difference. The Nile was rising again to enrich their land, for which God be thanked.
* Latest Rommel "true story" : Brigade headquarters of an advanced unit got this message from a trooper sent out to bring in water: "Rommel captured, returning on foot." Out rushed a whole tank squadron to meet him. There was the trooper, plodding across the desert, leading a camel by its headrope. "Where is he?" barked the Senior Officer. "Where's 'oo" inquired the trooper. "Rommel," yelped the S.O., waving the message under his nose. " 'Rommel Captured,' " read the trooper interestedly. "Wot I said was 'Camel ruptured.' "
* Attack, impetus, weight.