(A chance insult by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who called its defenders "the rats of Tobruk," led the Eighth Army to call itself the Desert Rats, an accolade its successor formations adopt to this day.) During the subsequent withdrawal eastward, the British lost the deepwater port of Tobruk, which had held out against all Axis attacks since April 1941 and had become a worldwide symbol of defiance to Germany. ![]() In June 1942 the British-led Commonwealth army had been defeated at Al-Gazala by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, an outstanding armored commander whose skill, daring, and tempo on the battlefield outclassed his rivals. Prior to the October 1942 battle of El Alamein, the British Eighth Army had been consistently outperformed and out-maneuvered in North Africa by a German-Italian force known by the name of its German contingent, the Afrika Korps. ![]() The settlement itself was an unremarkable railway halt short of the Libyan-Egyptian border and fifty miles west of Alexandria, with the extremely inhospitable, if not impassable, Qattara Depression lying forty miles to the south. El Alamein transformed British military fortunes in World War II and its victorious general took the name as part of his aristocratic title after the war.
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