Just after midnight on 26th October 1942, the lead companies of the 9inth Australian Division started crossing open ground in the dark toward a German artillery observation tower southwest of Tel La in the northern coastal sector of the Elmagne line. The tower stood 6 m tall in open desert, sandbagged at the base and crawling with German spotters and machine gun crews at the top.

 It had eyes on every move the British Eighth Army made for kilometers around, and its guns  had been calling fire down on Australian positions for weeks. The Germans called it  Hill 28 on their maps, and the Australians called it Trigg 29. Taking it  would mean breaking the spine of Raml’s northern line at Elamine.

 And the men crossing the desert in the dark that morning knew it. The men moving on the tower came from the 26th Australian Brigade under Brigadier David Whitehead. Three Australian battalions made up the  brigade’s rifle strength, and every one of them had been at Tobuk through the long siege of  1941. Behind them in the dark rolled 30 British tanks from  the 40th Royal Tank Regiment, armored support attached to Australian infantry, not the other way around.

 Every digger in the assault wave  understood what that meant. The riflemen walking toward the German machine guns were Australian and the British armor  was working for them. The fight for Trig 29 took the rest of the night. Bren guns on fixed lines tore into the German parapets. Grenades went over the sandbags at point blank range and Australian sections  worked through the bunkers at the base of the tower one slit trench at a time.

 By first light, the position had fallen,  and 240 German and Italian prisoners were already on their way back toward the cages. The concrete tower that had dominated the Elmagne sector for  months, belonged to the 9inth Australian division. Raml, back from sickle in Germany only a day earlier,  looked at his maps in the divisional headquarters and understood what had happened.

 The British were trying to break through  in the north and the Australian position at Trig 29 was the leading edge of the attempt. He had no choice but to pull the 21st Panzer Division up from the southern sector and commit the last of his armored reserves against the Australians on the coast. The elite of the Panzer Army Africa was now fixed in place in front of a single Australian division while the rest of the eighth army front hadn’t yet shown its hand.

 The 9inth Australian Division was doing exactly  what Montgomery wanted them to do. They were the bait. While Raml poured his last fuel and his last armor into the northern sector against the diggers on the  coast, the actual breakthrough was being prepared in the center of the line just south of them against the part  of the front Raml had stripped bear to send help north.

 The Australians were a small fraction of  Montgomery’s army at Elmagne on the order of battle. Before the battle was over, the 9inth Division would take one  in every 5/8 Army casualties in 12 days of fighting, the highest per capita figure of any formation in Montgomery’s army by a wide margin.

 Montgomery picked the 9inth Australian Division for the Northern Sector for a reason that went back 4 months. In the brutal heat of July 1942, the same division had done something at Elmagne that no other eighth army formation had managed to do all summer. They had attacked a  German position in the desert and they had held it under counterattack.

 The eighth army had been retreating from one defensive position to the next for the better part of a year before that morning. To understand the price the diggers paid in October, you have to start with what they had done in July when the line was about to break. The ninth division arrived in Egypt in early July 1942 with a reputation already burned into the Vermacht.

 These were the men who had held Tobuk through 242 days of siege the year before. The original  rats of Tbrook. They had since been on garrison duty in Syria and were back in the desert just as Raml reached the gates  of Alexandria. The commanding officer was Lieutenant General Sir Leslie Moors Head and his own troops called him Ming the Merciless behind his back after the comic book  villain.

 He took it as a compliment. Leslie Moors Head was 53 years old when he brought the 9inth Australian Division back to the desert. He had served as a junior infantry officer on Gallipoli in 1915 and commanded a battalion on the Western Front through the rest of the First War. He was known in the Australian Imperial Force as a commander who would replace any subordinate officer who hesitated under fire.

 The Tbrook garrison had given him the Ming the merciless nickname during the siege the year before after the villain in the Flash Gordon newspaper strips of the 1930s. By July 1942, he had spent  the better part of three years training infantry to attack German positions in the dark, and the 9inth division was the result of that training.

 The eighth army Moorshead joined in July was a beaten force.  Tbrook had fallen the month before. 25,000 prisoners  had gone into the bag. The worst British surrender of the war so far and a defeat that nearly cost Churchill his  government in a commons vote of no confidence. The eighth had retreated 400 km back to the Elamagne line, a 60 km bottleneck between the Mediterranean coast and the impassible Qatara depression.

 There was nothing behind them now except the Nile Delta and the Suez Canal. And if the line broke at El Alamine, Egypt was gone with the British war effort in the Middle East gone with it. On the 10th of July, 6 days after disembarking from his troop train at the railhead behind  the line, Moors Head sent the 26th Brigade forward against the German positions at Tel Elisa.

 The attack was  brutal and direct. Australian infantry walked into Italian and German trench lines behind  a creeping artillery barrage. And by the end of the day, the low ridge at Tel Asa was an Australian position. 240 prisoners came in. So did something far more valuable than any of them.

 Inside the captured headquarters of the 621st German radio intercept company, Australian intelligence officers found the cipher equipment and the operational logs of the unit that had been reading 8th Army radio traffic for over a year. The implications were enormous for the British war effort across the entire Mediterranean theater.

 Raml’s ability to anticipate every British move in the desert had been built on that one company’s intercept work, and the 9inth Australian division had just blinded him in the radio waves. The captured documents were on their way to Eighth Army headquarters in Cairo within hours of the Australian sections clearing the building, and the German officer who had built the intercept operation from scratch in the desert was lost to wounds taken in the same action.

 The intelligence picture available to the eighth army in the months before operation lightfoot was the most complete it had ever been in the desert war. Code breakers at Bletchley Park were reading highlevel German signals through the ultra channel. The TL ASA capture had taken out one of Raml’s most  important tactical intercept units back in July.

 By October, the  Eighth Army knew the order of battle and the supply state of every German formation on the Elamagne line and could  time its buildup against the fuel deliveries Raml was getting from Italy across the Mediterranean. Through the rest of  July, the 9inth Australian Division kept attacking.

 They went in on Ruin Ridge on the 22nd, a position they were ordered to take  and then ordered to hold against German tanks they couldn’t stop. The casualties were heavy  through that fortnight with one of the 24th Brigades battalions taking severe losses in  a single morning’s action against dugin German armor.

 By the end of the month, the division had taken over 2,000  losses, but the line at Lamagne was holding, and the diggers hadn’t given a meter back. The Eighth Army’s  first offensive success of the Desert War had been delivered by Australian infantry walking forward into machine guns under a barrage. In August 1942, Bernard Montgomery arrived to take command of the Eighth Army.

 He sacked half the existing staff in his first  week and threw out the operational plans they had been working on for the summer.  He gave himself 3 months to build a new offensive from scratch. Fresh infantry came up from the Nile Delta and 300 American Sherman tanks  were landed at Alexandria for the buildup.

The 9inth Australian Division held the most exposed sector of the front through the whole period, dug in against the strongest  part of the Axis line and waiting for the order to attack. Montgomery’s plan, code named Operation Lightfoot, was a setpiece breakthrough on a 15 km front.

 Infantry would clear corridors through the Axis minefields under a massive artillery barrage, and tanks  would exploit through those corridors into the open desert beyond. Half a million mines had been laid across the Elamagne front through the summer, a defensive belt deeper than anything either army had built before in the desert.

 Lightfoot  depended on one thing above all. Axis armored reserves had to  be drawn away from where the actual breakthrough was going to happen. And that job, pulling the elite of the Panzer  Army onto themselves, went to the 9th Australian Division on the coast. The Panzer Army Africa facing them in late October was the cream of the Axis military in North Africa.

 Irwin Raml commanded the army on paper, though he was on sick leave in Germany when the battle started. His deputy Gayorg Stuma would lose his life to a heart attack in his staff car on the second day of fighting. The German 164th Light Division held the coastal sector north of Tel Isa with the 90th Light Division in reserve behind it, while the armored striking force was split between the  15th Panzer Division in the north and the 21st Panzer Division in the south of the Elmagne line.

 Italian formations made up the bulk of the numbers, including the Trento and Bolognia divisions on the central front, but the Germans were the spine of the whole defense. On the night of the 22nd of October, the 9inth Australian Division was in its forming up positions along the northernmost stretch of the Elamagne line.

 Every man in the formation knew the assault was going in the next  night. Most of them had already been at Tel El Asa in July and at Ruin Ridge in the  dust storms of August. The division had been at Elamagne continuously for 3 and 1/2 months,  and the original Tbrook veterans were thinned out across the battalions.

 What they had ahead of them was the heaviest setpiece attack in British Army history since  the Western Front of 1918. 23 October 1942. At 2140 hours local time, nearly 98th Army artillery pieces opened fire across the entire Lalamagne front. The bombardment was the heaviest of any battle the British Army had fought  since the Western Front a quarter of a century earlier.

 Australian sappers crawled  forward through the German minefields under the falling shells, lifting teller mines by hand with bayonets  and marking lanes with white tape for the infantry coming up behind them. The infantry behind them included the whole of the 9th Australian division.

 The first Australian wave came  up against the German 164th light division on the coastal flank. Brigadier Arthur Godfreyy’s 24th Brigade went in as a diversionary attack against the German  15th Panzer Division aimed at convincing Stuma that the main blow was coming along the coast road. The attack carried no specific objective beyond holding the German armor in place.

 Godfried’s brigade  went in at full intensity anyway and pinned the German armor exactly where Montgomery wanted it pinned, taking heavy casualties for the privilege. Godfrey himself was lost leading the attack on the night of the 23rd. The first Australian brigade commander to fall in action  since the first war.

 2 days into the battle on the morning of the 24th, General Stuma drove forward in his  staff car to see the front line for himself. He came under Australian small arms fire on the road and the strain of it brought on the heart attack that took him.  His driver kept going at full speed, not realizing for some kilometers that  the senior man in the back was already gone.

 The Panzer Army Africa was without a commander for over a day before the news caught up with Raml in Germany.  Hitler personally telephoned Raml at the hospital and asked him to fly back to North Africa immediately, which Raml did under his own steam the next night. Raml landed in North Africa on the evening of the 25th and took command back from his interim deputies the next morning.

 By then,  the 9inth Australian division was already moving against Trig 29 in the north. The attack went in just after midnight on the 26th, exactly as it had been planned in Morsad’s orders 3 days earlier. The 26th Brigade under Brigadier David Whitehead with the 30 British tanks of the 40th Royal Tank Regiment in close support took the tower complex in a single night and consolidated the position before dawn.

What the Australians found at Trig 29 confirmed what divisional intelligence had suspected. The tower had been one of the central artillery observation points for the entire German northern sector. With it gone, the Axis guns lost their eyes over a wide stretch of front. German counterattacks came in against the Australian position over the next two days, and every one of them was broken up by the new Australian artillery observers, now sitting in the tower, calling fire down on what had been their former garrison the night

before. The Trig 29 fight was the opening move. Moors Head’s orders were to keep attacking northward through the railway line and onto  the coast road that ran along the shore behind the German front. If the Australians could cut that road behind the German line, the entire force  holding the northern sector, most of the 164th Light Division and a chunk of the 90th Light alongside them would be sealed off in  a pocket between the Mediterranean and the Australian advance with no way back to Raml’s main body.

For the next four nights, the 9inth Australian Division pushed forward  against the strongest part of the Axis line. The fighting was at platoon and section level, small groups of men moving from one strong point to the next, clearing  trenches and holding ground until the next push went in.

 Australian sections worked the German trench lines with grenades and bayonet at close range, consolidating each strong point before moving on to the next one. The place names from those nights became the geography of the division’s memory. Thompson’s Post, Fig Orchard, the Saucer. Everyone was  paid for in casualties the brigades couldn’t replace, and the rifle companies kept going forward anyway.

Thompson’s Post was the worst of them. A small ring of German  strong points around a railway crossing northeast of Trig 29. It sat directly across the Australian line of advance toward the coast. The first attack went in on the night of the 28th and was caught in the open by German armor at first light.

 Australian companies held the ground they had taken through the morning under continuous tank fire and were still there when the Germans pulled back at dusk. By the end of the week, the position had changed hands more than once. By the night of the 30th of October, every battalion in the 9th Australian Division had been bled  to the point where they were running at half strength.

 Heavy losses had hit the formation  across the board over the previous 5 days of fighting. Moors Head still had one more attack in him,  and the Eighth Army needed it. The plan was direct. Australian infantry would cross the  coastal railway line in darkness and push through to the road and the sea beyond.

 If the attack succeeded,  the German pocket along the coast was finished, and Raml’s whole northern flank was cut from his main  body. The attack went in at 2200 hours on the night of the 30th. Casualties were heavy from the first 100 meters, but the Australians kept moving forward through the German artillery fire. By dawn on the 31st, they were across the railway line and pushing onto the coast road behind the German position within sight of the Mediterranean itself.

 They had done what no eighth army formation had managed to do in 18  months of desert war. They had broken through the German mainline by sheer pressure of infantry. Rammel’s response was immediate. He pulled the 21st  Panzer Division out of the southern sector where Montgomery had wanted it pulled out of for 9 days and threw it north toward the Australian breakthrough.

 The remains of the 15th Panzer Division followed within hours. Every drop of fuel the Panzer Army Africa had left was burned, moving German armor north against the 9inth Division. The southern half of the Axis line was now held by Italian infantry alone with no armored reserves sitting behind them  and no chance of reinforcement before the eighth army’s next blow landed.

 For the German tank crews now driving north against the Australians, the situation was clear within hours of going into action. The diggers were on the coastal escarpment and the road below it and the German armor that came up to dislodge them had  to attack across open ground with the Mediterranean on one flank and the wrecked railway line on the other.

Australian six pounder anti-tank guns dug in along the position they had just taken began stripping the German armor from the moment it came  over the rise. British tank squadrons attached to the ninth division joined in from longer range, hitting the German Panzers at the limit of their effective gun range.

 The 15th Panzer Division, which had been one of the most feared formations in the Vermach the year before, lost most of what was left of it in two  days of fighting against 9inth Division infantry and the guns supporting them. By the time Operation Supercharge went in on the night of the 1st of November, the German armored force in North Africa had spent itself against the Australians on the coast.

 Both Panzer divisions were down to a handful of operational tanks each. German anti-tank gunners were running short of ammunition along the front. Raml’s army had been fighting at maximum intensity for nine straight days against  the most aggressive opposition the eighth army could put in front of it and it had no reserves left to commit to the center of the line where the New Zealanders and the British armor  were now coming through.

Montgomery launched operation supercharge on the night of the 1st of November. The shape of the plan was identical to Lightfoot, but the location had shifted. Now the hammer was coming down south of the Australian salient. The target was the center of the line where the Italian Trento and Bolognia divisions still held the front with Raml’s armor no longer in position behind them.

 Behind a fresh artillery barrage of nearly 400 guns, the second New Zealand division and the 10th  Armored Division led the breakthrough through the Italian sector and into the open desert beyond.  Raml saw what had happened within hours of the New Zealand attack going in. The Italian infantry in the center couldn’t hold against  armor without German support behind them.

 There was no German reserve left to plug the hole because every panzer in his army was now  committed 30 km to the north, locked in front of the 9inth Australian division on the coast road and the railway line. By the morning of the 2nd of November, British armor had broken into open desert behind the Italian front and was driving southwest across the Axis rear.

 Raml sat down at his radio that same morning and signaled Berlin with the truth about what was happening to his army. His signal told Hitler that the Panzer Army Africa couldn’t break contact with the enemy. There was no petrol left in the army for a fighting withdrawal across the desert. The only option in front of Raml was to hold the ground at Elamine to the last man and the last tank.

 Hitler’s reply, sent back the same day, ordered him to do exactly that, to stand his position in the sand without retreat on the basis that German troops never gave ground in modern warfare. Raml ignored the order from Berlin and pulled back what he could save before the trap closed for good and the relationship between him and the Furer’s headquarters  never fully recovered from those 48 hours.

 The Axis general retreat began on the 4th of November. Raml had no petrol left for a  fighting withdrawal and no armor left in reserve to cover the units pulling back. Over the next 3  months, the Panzer Army Africa would fall back 2,400 km across the desert to Tunisia, losing 95% of its tanks on the way and abandoning fuel  dumps it couldn’t reach.

Tobrook, the port the same Australians had held against him for 242 days in 1941, was back in British hands  by the middle of November. The German army had been driven from a battlefield in a major operation for the first time in this war, and the British press in London understood instantly what had happened.

 In Westminster, Churchill found the line for what the Eighth Army  had just done in the sand. Before Elmagne, he wrote later, “The British had never had a victory in this war. After Elmagne, they never had a defeat. The political weight of that November in the desert was as large as the military weight of it. And the British government, which  had been one bad week from collapsing since the fall of Singapore in February and the loss of Tbrook in June, suddenly had something to  put in front of the public. The bells of churches across

England were ordered to ring for the first time since 1940,  and newspapers across Australia carried the casualty lists from the 9inth Division alongside the victory headlines through the following week. The cost  the 9inth Australian division paid for that result was the highest per capita figure of any formation in Montgomery’s army.

Across the Elamneagne campaigns from July through November, the division’s casualty list ran to 5,89  men. In the 12 days of the second battle alone, more than 620 diggers fell in action, and nearly 2,000 more were wounded in the fighting around Trigg 29 and Thompson’s Post. The division was a small fraction  of the eighth army by numbers, but it carried one in every five of the army’s casualties at second alamine.

 The dressing stations  behind the coastal road were the busiest in the British military through the first week of November. Montgomery knew it. He had won his first setpiece  victory against a German army, and the British press was about to turn him into the first major British hero of the war.

 But Montgomery himself in private letters and later in his memoirs kept coming back to the same point. The battle he wrote afterwards couldn’t have been won in 12 days without the magnificent 9inth Australian Division. And he didn’t know of any other Allied Division he could have asked to do what the 9th had done at El Alamine.

 A survivor of the 9inth Australian Division  asked decades later what Elamine had been like. told an interviewer he hadn’t really had time to be frightened by any of it. That was about the level of explanation the division ever offered for what it had done in the desert. They had broken the spine of a German army for Bernard Montgomery, and he had said in writing that he couldn’t have done it without them.

 The men themselves  when they came home to Sydney and the country towns most of them had come from  mostly just got on with the rest of their lives.