El Alamein
Where The Eighth Army Stopped Rommel In 1942 And The North African Campaign Turned: A Desert Battlefield With Commonwealth, German And Italian Cemeteries And Memorials Within A Few Kilometres Of Each Other, A War Museum In The Town, And Minefields Still Being Cleared In The Desert Behind · El Alamein, Matrouh
In the summer and autumn of 1942 the North African campaign came to a stop on a forty-mile bottleneck between the Mediterranean and the impassable Qattara Depression, and the two battles fought here turned the war in the desert. Montgomery's Eighth Army held Rommel in July and broke him in October, and the ground is still marked by it: a Commonwealth cemetery of more than seven thousand graves east of the town, a German ossuary in a sand-coloured fort on a ridge, an Italian memorial further west, and a small war museum in the town with armour outside it. The cemeteries are the reason to come. They are quiet, beautifully kept, oddly moving in a way the museum is not, and they sit in open desert a hundred kilometres west of Alexandria on a coast now being built over with resort compounds. Behind the road the desert still holds minefields from 1942 that are being cleared, which is not a metaphor - stay on made tracks.
On the Mediterranean coast road about 105 km west of Alexandria, with the war cemeteries either side of the town, El Alamein, Matrouh, Egypt
The Commonwealth War Graves cemetery is open daily in daylight, free, with a register and a shelter at the entrance and a gardener usually on site. The German and Italian memorials keep their own daytime hours and are sometimes locked, in which case a caretaker nearby will open them; both are free or ask a small donation. The war museum in the town keeps daytime hours with a ticket and closes earlier in winter - confirm it before building a trip around it, because it has been shut for periods. Nothing here is busy at any time of year. The coast road from Alexandria takes about ninety minutes and buses run it; there is no useful transport between the three memorials, which are spread over fifteen kilometres, so a car is close to essential.