Produced by the Army Film and Photographic Unit and the Royal Air Force Film Production Unit, this black-and-white film is Part 2 of “Desert Victory,” exploring the Battle for North Africa during World War II. The film starts cold with British tanks rolling across the desert during the Second Battle of El Alamein, and explanation that in the early going, the British Eighth Army had made a four-mile advance through German lines to the north, as well as advancements against the lines of German Field Marshall Erwin Rommell to the south and a central defensive line. Shells are shown flying across the desert as British troops advanced, despite counterattacks launched by Rommell, the narrator explains at mark 02:20.
“The air force was doing an incredible job. For the Luftwaffe, the skies became a place of deadly peril,” it is said near mark 03:30, as scenes of aerial dogfights continue.
On the fourth day of the battle, both sides squared off at Kidney Ridge, as the narration ceases and the film allows the horrors of war to unfold before the narrator informs the viewer (at mark 05:52) that Allies were able to take the area. Footage from the battle continues, followed by an explanation that many of Rommell’s troops were cut off during the fight. “Casualties suffered were heavy on both sides,” we’re told at mark 07:56, “but large groups of prisoners were in our hands.”
As bodies are shown strewn across the desert and wounded are tended to by medical personnel, the film again shows Rommell at mark 09:00 and discusses his decision to move Panzer divisions closer to the north to engage British troops, but the air force prevented them from becoming fully organized. By November, the battle was in Phase 4 of the fight, with the objective of destroying enemy armor and forcing the Germans to fight in the open, reducing the Axis stock of gasoline, and attacking and occupying enemy supply routes. As Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery is shown surveying the battle at mark 13:54, we learn that the German forces were sufficiently weakened to allow Allied armor to drive a wedge straight down the middle of the German lines. What follows are scenes of tanks rolling through the sands and firing on German targets.
At mark 17:35, the narrator explains, “Throughout this day, November 3, the heaviest armored battle of the campaign had been waged. Fighting went on along the whole front, but it was centered on el Aqqaqir (the base of the Axis defense) where a tank battle of the bitterest kind reached hour by hour a deeper and more bloody intensity. Three-quarters of the Axis tanks were burning our otherwise wrecked.”
At mark 18:42, we hear an announcement from the BBC news announcer Bruce Belfrage, who announces that Axis forces were in full retreat in Northern Africa. The camera pans to factory workers, who erupt in cheers.
With Rommell and the Afrika Korps in retreat, the Allies seized artillery left behind and took countless Italian soldiers prisoner, along with thousands of Germans including German General Wilhelm von Thoma, and buried 20,000 enemy dead. At mark 21:15, the narrator notes, “Pursuit was remorseless … (the Germans) tasted what they had administered in France and Poland.”
The Axis made a fighting withdrawal to El Agheila but Rommel’s troops found themselves exhausted and with few replacements, and the German general a text-book retreat, destroying all equipment and infrastructure left behind and peppering the land behind him with mines and booby traps. In January 1943, British forces entered Tripoli. At mark 26:42 the narrator explains, “The surrender of Tripoli by the governor of Libya and the mayor of the city extinguished the Italian overseas empire. Country by country, the British army had conquered it.”
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
