The last complete instruction signed by General Auchinleck for the Eighth Army, issued on 31 July, has already been mentioned. It directed that the army, adopting a defensive attitude, was to strengthen its defences, rest, reorganise, and train. It was accompanied by a detailed order, in effect a summary of previous plans, for withdrawal dependent on the ‘scale of attack and warning received’, from the forward positions to a ‘main zone’.
In this main zone, nine defended localities were noted as in preparation, with three new ones not yet started, to cover the western face of the zone. The basic garrison for each of these twelve localities was to be two infantry battalions with artillery and anti-tank support. Mobile battle groups were to operate in the gaps between the localities. This order gave the artillery for each locality as a field battery, that is, eight 25-pounders; in his later report Auchinleck increased this to a regiment of twenty-four guns. It seems evident that the allocation of a battery only was at first intended probably to spread the available artillery to the many tasks expected of it.
The planned localities were scattered over a large stretch of the desert and, at a regiment in each, would have absorbed most of the artillery, and almost all of the infantry, available. This would have left the armour, still far from recovered from the long retreat and the July battles, with little artillery support to form the mobile columns guarding the wide gaps between the twelve boxes.