Monty beaten back at El Alamein leads to a quicker Axis defeat

[Nonny]

Rommel held the British for 5 days at El Alamein in October 1942, despite being outnumbered 20 to 1. What if he had been given more troops by Hitler & a few more oil tankers had made it, so that he was able to fully beat them off. Although Rommel would not have enough had strength to launch a counter-offensive, Monty, a veteran of WW1 who was horrified at a repeat of the trench slaughter, also holds off, awaiting support. How would Operation Torch have been modified? With Rommel still holding a line in Egypt in December, would the Anglo-American landings have to be made much more east, behind his back in Libya, or even directly to support the 8th Army at Port Said, instead of in Morocco & Algeria as in OTL? With what consequences on British morale and leadership, being that El Alamein was the only battle in WW2 that the British won unaided by US troops? Would the Axis still have been ousted out of Africa by May 1943 as in OTL, or could it actually have led to a quicker ousting?

 

[Dunash]

Outnumbered 20 to 1? More like 50 to 1! By the time of El Almein there were 1 million Commonwealth troops in the Middle East versus the two divisions of the Afrika Corps. Not a very satisfactory state of affairs! The only time Montgomery ever cried in his life was when he visited in 1967 in Egypt the thousands of graves of all the Australians who needlessly died on day 3 of the battle.