Famous Tank Battles

The sacrifice of 9th Armoured Brigade came at the moment when Second El Alamein was trying to change from a grinding battle into a breakthrough. Operation Supercharge had begun on the night of 1 to 2 November 1942, after more than a week of minefield fighting, artillery barrages, infantry attacks, and Axis counterblows. Montgomery needed to force a rupture in the German and Italian defensive system, not merely take another piece of ground inside it. The 9th Armoured Brigade, attached to the New Zealand Division for the operation, was given the terrible task of driving through the anti-tank screen that guarded the way toward the Rahman track and the deeper Axis rear. Its attack matters because it shows armored warfare at its hardest edge: tanks used not in open maneuver, but to break a lethal defensive crust so that larger forces could exploit behind them.

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By the time 9th Armoured Brigade moved forward, the battlefield had already been shaped by infantry and engineers. New Zealand and British infantry had attacked under heavy artillery support, seeking to clear the way for armor to pass. Engineers had worked through mines and obstacles, trying to turn darkness and confusion into routes that tanks could use. The plan was still recognizably the same combined-arms logic that had guided Lightfoot: infantry first, engineers opening the doors, armor passing through when the way ahead was prepared. But the enemy had depth, and the depth was protected by guns. The tanks of 9th Armoured Brigade were not being sent into a clean gap. They were being sent toward a gun line that had survived enough of the barrage to remain deadly.

The brigade was commanded by Brigadier John Currie, and it included British cavalry regiments that had been converted to tanks, men whose unit names carried older traditions into a very modern battlefield. These were not ceremonial horse soldiers in new machines; they were armored crews facing mines, anti-tank guns, shellfire, and the pressure of a plan that depended on them. Their tanks included Shermans and Grants, machines that had given the Eighth Army better firepower and reliability than it had possessed earlier in the desert war. Yet no tank, however useful, could ignore physics or tactics. A Sherman that had to advance against prepared anti-tank guns in daylight was not a symbol of easy superiority. It was a target unless supported, concealed, and able to maneuver.

The task placed on the brigade has often been remembered in stark terms, sometimes with later retellings emphasizing how clearly the commanders expected terrible losses. The exact phrasing of conversations before the attack should be treated carefully, because memory and legend can sharpen wartime exchanges into dramatic scenes. What is beyond doubt is that the mission was understood to be exceptionally dangerous. The brigade had to push forward against anti-tank guns placed to stop precisely such an advance. It had to do this after a night of movement, through a battlefield still confused by mines, routes, smoke, and fire. The operation demanded not merely courage, but acceptance that a formation might be spent to open the way for others.

When the attack went in after dawn, the advantage shifted toward the defenders in several cruel ways. Daylight allowed German and Italian gunners to see more clearly. The ground over which the tanks moved offered limited protection, and the routes available to them had been shaped by mines and the earlier fighting. Anti-tank guns, including the feared German 88-millimeter weapons and smaller but still dangerous guns, opened fire from prepared positions. A tank hit at long range might burn, stop, or block the movement of others. Crews had to keep advancing while seeing neighboring vehicles disabled around them. This was not the fast, fluid desert warfare of earlier campaigns. It was an armored assault into a carefully arranged killing zone.

The brigade’s regiments pressed on despite the losses. Some tanks fired on gun positions, others tried to keep moving through the fire, and some crews reached or approached the areas they had been ordered to attack. The purpose was not simply to survive as an armored formation; it was to smash, expose, or overrun enough of the Axis anti-tank screen that the line behind it could no longer hold. In that sense, the attack had a grim logic. If the anti-tank guns remained intact, larger armored formations waiting behind could not move freely into open country. If the guns were forced to reveal themselves, suppressed, destroyed, or overwhelmed, even at enormous cost, the defensive system would begin to crack. The brigade was being used as the blade against the hardest part of the shield.

The losses were severe by any reasonable measure. Accounts differ in exact numbers, depending on whether they count tanks knocked out, temporarily disabled, later recovered, or still running at a particular hour. What is clear is that of roughly ninety tanks committed, only a small minority remained immediately fit for action after the attack. Many crews were killed, wounded, or shaken by the destruction around them. These losses should not be romanticized as if the burning of tanks were somehow beautiful because the operation succeeded. They were the deaths and injuries of men inside metal compartments, men who had trained, waited, advanced, and then met a defensive system designed to kill them. The word sacrifice is appropriate only if it keeps that human cost at the center.

The attack also shows why judging a battle by vehicle losses alone can mislead. If the purpose of 9th Armoured Brigade had been to preserve itself as a mobile reserve, the attack was disastrous. If the purpose was to help break the anti-tank belt and force the Axis defense into a crisis, then the meaning becomes more complex. The brigade’s advance drew fire, located guns, inflicted damage, and helped open the way for the armored formations behind it to press the fight at Tel el Aqqaqir and beyond. This is the uncomfortable arithmetic of some battlefield decisions. A formation may be damaged almost beyond immediate use and still contribute decisively to the larger result. That does not make the cost smaller. It makes the cost harder to dismiss.

The Axis defenders fought with the skill that had made them so dangerous throughout the desert war. German gun crews and armored units understood how to use range, concealment, and interlocking fields of fire. Italian troops in the wider defensive system also contributed to the resistance and suffered under the pressure of the attack. The Axis line did not collapse because it lacked courage or tactical ability. It began to fail because it was being asked to absorb more punishment than its fuel, reserves, communications, and manpower could bear. The attack of 9th Armoured Brigade struck at one of the system’s strongest points, but the system had already been weakened by days of artillery, infantry pressure, air attack, and the northern fighting that had drawn attention and reserves.

For the Eighth Army, the attack reinforced the central lesson of El Alamein: armored warfare was not simply the art of preserving tanks until a clean opportunity appeared. Sometimes the opportunity had to be forced, and forcing it could be brutally expensive. Tanks were not invulnerable instruments of victory; they were crewed machines whose power depended on ground, timing, support, and enemy weakness. At Supercharge, they were used to turn an infantry break-in into a deeper rupture. The infantry and engineers had opened the approach, artillery had prepared and supported the assault, and armor was now made to test whether the enemy’s anti-tank system could still hold. The answer came at a terrible price.

The sacrifice of 9th Armoured Brigade also belongs in the longer story of tank warfare because it shows how anti-tank defense had matured by 1942. Tanks could dominate open ground when they had space, surprise, and support, but they could be devastated when forced into predictable movement against prepared guns. The answer was not to abandon armor, because without armor there could be no exploitation and no decisive pursuit. The answer was to integrate armor more carefully and accept that the line between necessary pressure and wasteful loss could be painfully thin. El Alamein was a victory of preparation, but preparation did not remove tragedy. It only made tragedy serve a larger operational purpose rather than collapse into confusion.

By the end of the action, 9th Armoured Brigade had been badly mauled, but the battlefield had changed. The Axis anti-tank screen had been battered and exposed, the pressure on Rommel’s weakened line had intensified, and the larger armored forces of the Eighth Army could begin to press into the crisis the brigade had helped create. The men of the brigade did not win the battle alone, and they should not be turned into a simple legend detached from the infantry, engineers, artillery, and airmen around them. But their attack was one of the decisive costs of Supercharge. It bought, with burned tanks and lost crews, the crack through which the battle could finally move. El Alamein’s breakthrough was not clean. It was forced open by men ordered into the hardest fire of the battle.