The Second Battle of El Alamein began on the full-moon night of 23 October 1942 with a thousand-gun barrage, firing more than half a million shells before dawn. For nearly two months, since the Axis failure to break through at the Battle of Alam el Halfa, the two sides had faced each other across a 40-mile front, from the Mediterranean south to the treacherous low-lying area, notorious for its quicksand, known as the Qattara Depression.
Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery had been appointed to command the Eighth Army in August and had a clear plan for what he was confident would be the turning-point battle of the Desert War. He would concentrate his attack on the northern half of the front, where XXX Corps under Lieutenant-General Oliver Leese would press the offensive with four infantry divisions leading the armoured divisions of X Corps through the German lines. In the south, XIII Corps under Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks would threaten the enemy to prevent the Panzerarmee Afrika from concentrating in the north to repel the assault. Monty’s plan relied on keeping the enemy confused as to where and when the principal assault would come. It involved two deception plans: Operation Bertram to disguise where the inevitable Allied attack would come; and Operation Treatment to fool the Axis as to when it would take place.
Unorthodox tactics
As the commander who first encouraged the art of deception as a key part of his strategy in the Middle East, General Sir Archibald Wavell was one of the least typical officers in the British Army. Whereas most British commanders in the 1930s looked inwards, to the traditions and rituals of their regiment, Wavell was a scholar who wrote a biography of his First World War hero General Allenby and lectured on the theories of command and leadership at Cambridge University. He loved poetry and the ancient classics, and spoke several languages including fluent Russian. When he was appointed Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East, he was given responsibility for a vast area, not just Egypt and the Western Desert but Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and also East Africa. He had about 90,000 Commonwealth troops to protect this huge territory – but when Italy came into the war they had more than half a million soldiers in the region. With a passion for unorthodox warfare, Wavell appointed an officer to come and lead a unit tasked with devising ways to deceive the enemy. The unit would be known as ‘A’ Force, and the man Wavell brought out to run it was Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Clarke. He would become one of the principal pioneers of deception-planning in the British Army.
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