Word: alamein
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Dates: during 1942-1942
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...battered Eighth Army had been taken over by no less a person than the British Commander in Chief of the Middle East, General Sir Claude John Eyre ("The Auk") Auchinleck. The Auk decided to plug Rommel at the neck of a funnel-the 35-mile gap between El Alamein on the coast and the northern tongue of the steep-sided, marsh-bedded Qattara Depression.* El Alamein is 70 miles from Alexandria...
Rommel Halts. Full-steaming into the funnel's neck, Rommel hesitated, then massed his forces and launched them at El Alamein. Thirteen of his Stukas, dive-bombing the British guns, were crumpled by fighters from South Africa, and the guns kept firing. Meanwhile, from the south a British light force sped around to harry Rommel's flank. After eleven successive days of relentless attack, Rommel's weary battalions had to withdraw to reform and prepare for a new attack...
...cannon-some of the guns 25-pounders which the Germans had captured from them. Between the lines of counterattack, Rommel's five divisions of armor and infantry contracted into a solid, sinister oval, pointed at the British center. If that oval should crunch through, the El Alamein defense line that Auchinleck hoped to organize would be lost...
Egypt smiled because Rommel stopped, but the truth was that Egypt's plight was almost as desperate as when the German charged into the El Alamein funnel. He was still there, he was always dangerous, he was nearly intact. Moreover, he had a card up his sleeve, and it was sticking halfway out of his green gabardine cuff: parachute and glider troops concentrated in Crete, ready to help him by an assault from the rear...
Though a lull continued in the main battle for Egypt, British ground and air patrols hammered relentlessly at the hooked, 55-mile line west of El Alamein, where Marshal Erwin Rommel's German Africa Corps was stalled within 65 miles of the Alexandria Naval Base...