The World War II general who defeated his archrival

By October 23 he was ready to attack. It began with the largest British bombing since World War I. He was tired of the carnage of that war, in which he himself had been badly wounded, and was determined to avoid needless loss of life. According to historian Richard Holmes, the bombing reflected Montgomery’s “desire to let metal, not flesh, do its work wherever possible.”

Engineers cleared channels through deep German minefields, allowing Allied tanks to pass through them. While the weight of the tanks would have detonated the mines laid by the Germans, the soldiers were able to get through the area. Montgomery gave this part of his plan the appropriate name of Operation Lightfoot. Casualties mounted rapidly on both sides, but the Germans and Italians were outnumbered two to one. Rommel’s tanks, far from supply depots, were short of fuel.

On the night of 1 to 2 November, the second phase of the offensive, Operation Supercharging, began: British armored divisions pushed through the last layer of the Axis defences. Progress was still far from clear. On 3 November, the 9th Armored Brigade lost 102 of its 128 tanks. After the battle, Montgomery led his victorious Eighth Army across 2,000 miles into North Africa. Rommel started with 500 tanks: by the end of the first phase, he was down to just 100 tanks, and after a massive tank battle on the final day, he had only 30 serviceable tanks left. Elements of Rommel’s mobile forces were able to escape because, as was his wont, Montgomery refused to gamble during the pursuit. However, most of the infantry were captured. By May 1943, the remaining Axis forces in North Africa had surrendered.

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While Rommel did not live to see the end of the war, he was not killed in battle. When he was implicated in a 1944 plot to kill Hitler, the Nazis offered him the chance to commit suicide to avoid the spectacle of their famous general being publicly tried. Historians remain divided over Rommel. While some consider him an ambitious but fundamentally apolitical leader who fought a clean war, others see his career and status as tied to the brutal and murderous Nazi regime.