Pendulum of War: The three battles of El Alamein,
By Niall Barr, Jonathan Cape, £ 20

In the summer of 1942, the Nazi blitzkrieg seemed unstoppable. However by October the tables had turned decisively. The battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein, one can argue, had proven to be the turning points in the war.

Most war historians have studied the battle of Alamein with an eye on the warring generals ?Rommel, Auchinleck and Montgomery. However, in this book, Niall Barr moves away from studying generals and focuses on the British Eighth Army as an organization and how its bureaucracy functioned in the battlefield.

Barr argues that although Auchinleck was able to hold Rommel at Alamein, the Panzerarmee had not been defeated. But Churchill wanted a quick and spectacular victory, and Auchinleck was sacked. Auchinleck had served in the the Indian Army and, unlike Montgomery, was not close to the upper echelons of the British Army. Consequently, the baton of the chief of the Eighth Army passed to Montgomery.

Nevertheless, Montgomery stuck to Auchinleck?s plan to fight the Germans at Alamein, writes Barr. Luck was on his side too. Thanks to the American Lend Lease programme, the British received a large contingent of tanks and aircraft. In contrast, Rommel?s supply dwindled because of British air attacks on Italian ships in the Mediterranean.

More important, the Eighth Army was learning from its mistakes. It improved infantry-tank-artillery cooperation and streamlined its cooperation with the Desert Air Force.

Although Rommel managed a masterly withdrawal, Hitler?s order, stating victory or death, caused confusion within the Panzerarmee and enabled the Eighth Army to capture the enemy.

Barr?s narrative is based on exhaustive research in the archives of Britain, New Zealand and Australia. Unlike other scholars who had concentrated on the British divisions only, Barr points out the vital role played by the soldiers of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand in launching assaults across the German minefields.

Barr should be credited for contextualizing Alamein within a wider perspective. The Anglo-American Torch landing in Morocco, and not Alamein writes Barr, was more important in destroying the Axis presence in North Africa. However Barr fails to view Alamein in relation to Russia. At Alamein, the Germans lost 30,000 men, whereas the Wehrmacht lost half a million men at Stalingrad. Notwithstanding the victory in Alamein, the key to Allied success in World War II remains Germany?s defeat on the Russian front.