‘The end of the beginning’: Montgomery & El Alamein

To beleaguered Britons in the autumn of 1942, the hard-fought victory of the Eighth Army under its new commander General Bernard Montgomery at the Second Battle of El Alamein came as much-needed relief. It followed a year in which the country had suffered a catastrophic run of military setbacks: from the fall of Singapore (described by Winston Churchill as ‘the greatest disaster to British arms which our history records’) to the humiliation of the ‘Channel Dash’ (when three large German warships were able to sail through the Straits of Dover in broad daylight), this truly was the darkest hour. Public morale was in crisis, with Churchill’s own position as Prime Minister also under t