To mark Australia Day, Michael E Haskew looks at the nation’s 9th Division, unsung heroes of the Desert War. We ask if victory in the Middle East could have been achieved without their daring push north at El Alamein in October 1942.
The annual Lord Mayor’s Lunch went on as usual at Mansion House, London, on Tuesday, 10, 1942. However, this day’s observance went well beyond the mundane, perfunctory proceedings that attending dignitaries had experienced in prior years.
An ebullient Prime Minister Winston Churchill rose to address the gathering. “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning,” he intoned. The auspicious event to which Churchill alluded was the dazzling desert victory the British Eighth Army had just won against the Axis Panzerarmee Afrika at the isolated railroad whistle stop of El Alamein in Egypt.
After the final victory against Hitler and the Nazis ended World War Two in Europe in 1945, Churchill wrote: “Before Alamein, we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.”
Indeed, the victory of Eighth Army, under the command of General Bernard Law Montgomery, against the vaunted enemy, led by Field Marshal Erw…
