19421776 Club
Under a full moon, 882 guns open on Rommel's lines at El Alamein
Four infantry divisions push into half a million mines as Montgomery's Eighth Army attacks on a sixteen-mile front.
For months, Rommel's Panzerarmee Afrika had sat dug in at El Alamein, the last defensive line before the Suez Canal and the oil fields beyond it. At 21:40 on October 23, 1942, Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army opened with a barrage of 1,000 guns (882 field and medium guns firing the opening rounds) under a bright full moon, and twenty minutes later four divisions of XXX Corps moved forward across sixteen miles of front. Engineers tried to cut lanes through Rommel's minefields, nicknamed the Devil's Gardens, but dust from the advancing tanks cut visibility to nothing and the clearing fell badly behind schedule. By dawn only half the infantry had reached their objectives, and not a single tank had broken through…
