Word: rommels
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...mercurial people of Alexandria, who had shivered and shaken while Rommel rolled, smiled again and went back to their nightclubs. Those who had fled Alexandria talked of coming back "within a few days." Once more Cairo diffused through its screen of censorship a rosy mist of optimism-the same color as that which preceded the mist-shattering fall of Tobruk...
...lost the first round of the battle, was out, and command of the 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...
After launching more counterattacks, the British announced capture of 600 Germans and 40 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...
...Rommel Remains. This was all very well, but the object of modern desert war is to destroy the hostile armored forces, or to cripple them so badly that they must flee. That was what Rommel had done to the British before Tobruk, and the resulting vacuum had made easy his drive into Egypt. As yet neither British guns, tanks nor air force had made a dent on Rommel's Army...