7 - Victory in North Africa

Summary

By the end of July 1942, Churchill had lost faith in Auchinleck, his Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) in the Middle East, who, at the time, was also commander of Eighth Army. On 13 August, after flying to Cairo to assess the situation for himself, he replaced Auchinleck with two men; General Bernard Law Montgomery was placed in charge of Eighth Army, and General Harold Alexander was appointed the new theatre commander.

Montgomery, whose whole career had been built towards this moment, would go on to become the most famous British general of the war (see Illustration 7.1). He had spent twelve years of his childhood in Tasmania before passing into Sandhurst in 1907, seventy-second out of 170. He passed out rather better, in thirty-sixth place, and was duly commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He spent four years in India before the outbreak of the First World War. Between 1914 and 1918, he was wounded three times (including a bullet through the lung), mentioned in dispatches six times and was awarded a DSO and the Croix de Guerre.