There are a variety of constituencies: American and Soviet, left-wing British, right-wing British, German-who, for their own reasons, want to demonstrate that El Alamein is a mere flyspeck in the desert and doesn’t change a lot. Most of the writing on El Alamein spends a lot of time trying to demonstrate it wasn’t pivotal. Churchill is the person who coined the phrase, “This is the end of the beginning.” He says that five days after the battle ends.
This idea of the battle being a decisive turning point in World War II, is that accurate? So fighting over where it happened and which bit of the campaign is important is endemic to the study of El Alamein. But there are many other claimants to the throne of being the pivotal battle of the Mediterranean in World War II-and possibly the entire war. The British sat down after the war and decided what to call all these battles, so there is a battle honour for ‘The Battle of El Alamein’ and that lasted from October 23rd to November 4th. “If you read any popular military history, you’ll still get…how awesome the Germans were. There were two previous battles on a similar line, one taking place in July 1942 and another taking place in September 1942. I’ll give you the no confusion version: El Alamein is in Egypt and the battle of El Alamein took place between 23 October and 4 November 1942. There is either no confusion or an enormous amount of confusion. People in Israel tell me that they grew up with this battle, their grandparents and parents telling them about it in a really intense way.Īnd what was El Alamein? As I was reading your book, I gathered there is some confusion about exactly when and where the battle took place. But the British were going to abandon most of Palestine and try and defend northern Palestine, so the big population centres would have been overrun.
If Rommel had succeeded in breaking the British line, the plan was to fall back on Palestine. In Israeli memory, it’s an absolutely pivotal battle because it saved the Jews of Palestine. What about the Israelis? I know you’re just back from giving a talk in Jerusalem. It was a multinational battle at a pivotal time. Even the Cypriots have a dog in the fight. And then you have the Egyptians, the Palestinians. Then there are all the sub-narratives-about Italy or India or the Commonwealth. It then zooms back across the Atlantic to south-western Germany where all the German generals retired after the war. The ‘super highway’ of El Alamein runs from London-people, publishing houses, big film studios like Pinewood in the immediate post-war period-to New York publishing houses, Los Angeles, Hollywood. It’s a topic of enduring fascination to many people in many countries. You mentioned in your book that more than 300 books have been written on the battle of El Alamein. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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