The RAF and the Unfinished Counter-attack

On 28 October 1942, the Royal Air Force broke up German armour reforming in the Western Desert for a possible counter-attack. The action came during the Second Battle of El Alamein, which had begun five days earlier as Operation Lightfoot. New Zealand Division had captured Miteiriya Ridge in the opening phase. The German armour was regrouping; the counter-attack remained a possibility, not an attack already under way. The RAF disrupted that concentration before it could become a counterstroke.

The days around the air action had brought a change in German command. On 24 October, General Georg Stumme died of a heart attack near the front, and Erwin Rommel returned to North Africa the following evening. On 28 October, the RAF interrupted German armour as it re-formed. Rommel’s panzer divisions were bombed for some two and a half hours and could not form up. The immediate event was a disruption of preparations, not a clash with German tanks already moving forward.

The battle’s next major step came on 2 November, when Operation Supercharge began. Allied forces broke Axis forces at El Alamein, and New Zealand Division opened the way for British armour. The sequence gave the 28 October action a clear place in the battle: it fell between the New Zealand capture of Miteiriya Ridge and the later Allied break-through. It did not itself mark that break-through. It interrupted German armour while it was gathering for a move that might have challenged the Allied advance.

That was a modest entry in a campaign measured by advances and counter-attacks, but not an empty one. The RAF’s intervention denied the regrouping its quiet interval. The Germans had not yet launched the possible counter-attack; the Allies had not yet begun Operation Supercharge. On 28 October, the air action sat between those two moments, a short interruption in a battle still being fought for position.