Attack

By the light of the waning moon Rommel made his last-minute preparations. As dawn cracked over the desert, he attacked. It looked at last like the offensive for which the British had waited.

The Long Wait. For more than two months General Sir Harold Alexander's British had crouched along the 35-mile front stretching from the Qattara Depression to the sea. Daily they had made sorties and feints, lashing at Rommel's advance posts, scuttling back to their own lines to bind their wounds and bat the flies. The flies were the worst. They swarmed over the unburied dead. They swarmed over the living, drove soldiers close to madness, until morale ran out and men prayed only for some kind of action. Now they had it.

It was scarcely possible that the Eighth Army had received anything like the reinforcement that Rommel had got over shorter supply lines which the British had been unable to sever. To Rommel from Crete had flown a complete German infantry division -- the 146th. From Italy, a full infantry division. Also reported in the desert were German and Italian parachute troops, and on hand were two veteran Panzer divisions and Rommel's tough, veteran 19th light motorized infantry division. One estimate of his strength: 125,000 to 140,000 men, rested and equipped.

How many the British had was their own secret. Over the tortuous Allied supply lines--by plane across Africa, by ship around Africa's tip--some men and equipment had reached them, but their losses at Tobruk had been great. Last week members of a U.S. ground crew established camp, raised the U.S. flag over a tiny sector of the desert. Medium bombers flown by U.S. pilots have been flying alongside British bombers for some weeks; harassing Axis supply lines. The British had superiority in the air before the fall of Tobruk. They probably still had it.

The attack began with a tentative push against El Hemeimat, 25 miles south of El Alamein. Early this week it was not clear what Rommel intended or where the main force of his drive would center.

As for the British, their strategy was to maul Rommel as they advanced, to lash at him in unexpected places--and they probably had a surprise up their sleeve. At best, superior Allied air power would be able to disrupt superior Axis ground power and give Allied infantry, artillery and tanks a fighting chance to turn the tide. At worst, the British would be routed, hurled out of Alexandria and Suez, and the Allies driven from the whole Mediterranean theater.

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