Rommel Hands the Desert to Stumme

Erwin Rommel had pushed the Eighth Army back into Egypt through the summer of 1942, but at Alam Halfa in the first days of September, Bernard Montgomery, who had taken command of the Eighth Army on 7 August, stopped him and drove the Panzer Army back to its start line. It was Rommel's first clear defeat in the desert, and he did not recover from it quickly.

Within weeks Rommel handed the Italian-German Panzer Army over to General Georg Stumme and flew home to Germany. Stumme had commanded a panzer corps on the Eastern Front but had never fought the British in North Africa, and he took over an army that was no longer advancing. It sat dug in behind its own minefields at El Alamein, waiting to see what Montgomery would do next, with the coast on one flank and the Qattara Depression on the other closing off any room to manoeuvre.

Stumme had little time to learn the ground. On 23 October, Montgomery opened Operation Lightfoot, the Second Battle of El Alamein, and the New Zealand Division pushed onto the Miteiriya Ridge in the opening hours of the assault. The next morning, 24 October, Stumme went forward in his command car to see the battle for himself. The car came under fire, and he died of a heart attack. His body was not found until the following day.

Rommel, still convalescing in Germany, was recalled at once and was back in Africa by the evening of 25 October, taking charge of an army that was already losing ground. The command he had left behind in late September, expecting to return to a quiet front, was instead collapsing by the time he got back to it. The North African campaign had been running since June 1940, sliding back and forth across the same strip of desert between Libya and Egypt, and this handover, brief and largely forgotten next to the battle that followed, left the Axis side without settled leadership at the exact moment the British finally attacked in force. Stumme's short, fatal tenure between two of Rommel's stints in command is one of those details that gets skipped in accounts that jump straight from Alam Halfa to Lightfoot, but it decided who was actually running the Panzer Army when the guns opened up on 23 October, and for the first two days of the battle it was not Rommel at all.