Abstract
Simon Ball’s book Alamein is dedicated to the contesting interpretations of El-Alamein in wartime and post-war accounts. The book seems at first a strange contribution to the Oxford University Press series ‘Great Battles’ of which it forms a part. Rather than demonstrating the great importance of the battle itself, Ball uncovers the overwhelming reluctance of many commentaries and popular depictions to portray El-Alamein as a great battle. Yet it is this focus on the continuous struggles over meaning that points to this battle’s ongoing significance and makes this book an unconventional and fascinating contribution to the research on El-Alamein.
The book opens with ‘Names’, an introductory chapter that throws the reader into the controversy that surrounded El-Alamein from an early stage. The disagreements concerned first the naming and dating of this battle and then its function and role within the North Africa campaign. In fact, it becomes quickly apparent that the campaign, rather than the battle itself, stood at the centre of attention, and the different versions on it testify to the opinions on ‘what might – should – have been done rather than what actually happened’ (p. 2). In exploring opinions and interpretations, Ball stresses that the depictions of El-Alamein cannot be reduced to any official narrative. Rather, he treats them as products of a multifaceted and transnational exchange (British–German–American) between a whole array of representations and perspectives. Nevertheless, Ball claims that this exchange did produce a kind of main narrative or attitude that portrayed the battle, an unambiguous military victory, as ‘something akin to cultural defeat’ (pp. 185–6).
Ball’s exploration of the ‘cultural afterlife of Alamein’ proceeds with the ‘words produced during the battle’ itself. In tracing accounts of the different participants, documented in meetings’ minutes and war diaries, the second chapter unravels some of the concepts and issues that would later play a part in depictions of the battle. Yet, the chapter also shows that during the fighting no coherent story and interpretation of the battle had emerged. The battle’s narratives started to appear shortly after November 1942 and these are explored in the remainder of the book. Unlike many studies of memory, which examine the changing images of the past chronologically, that is, in relation to shifting tendencies and discourses, what guides Ball’s analysis are the experiences and perspectives of the persons involved. Each chapter is therefore dedicated to a group of people who addressed the battle from a particular position and how this has shaped the story they told about El-Alamein.
The first group is prisoners. As in subsequent chapters, Ball examines here the place of each group in various narratives of the battle, and concentrates on those among them who expressed an ambiguous position toward it. In this chapter, ambiguity appears primarily in the accounts of British POWs who were liberated from Italian camps in North Africa and were thus among the first to write and publish their memoirs. Since most of them were captured when the Eighth Army was retreating, they focused on captivity and escape rather than on the victorious battle: ‘Alamein came to be portrayed … as a foregone conclusion, and therefore lacking in human drama. Instead, the dramatic pivot of the desert lay in June and July 1942, not October and November 1942’ (p. 63).
In the chapters on correspondents, generals, and soldiers (and especially the last, which is the strongest in the book), Ball demonstrates great skill in combining biographical and situational aspects in explaining the emergence of certain narratives of the battle. One of his intriguing findings presents the eagerness of many British and Imperial writers to downplay the extent of the British achievement, and their willingness to accept the German claim that the defeat of the Axis was the result of German fuel shortages rather than the Eighth Army’s military competence and heroism. As for the generals, they and their supporters were engaged in a struggle over the question who was the true victor, Montgomery or Auchinleck, thus mutually weakening each other’s status, whereas Rommel’s military genius was celebrated by most. And, as the final chapter shows, wartime strategy considerations, such as the Western Allies’ position toward Stalin and British–American cooperation, also contributed to toning down the significance of El-Alamein.
While some of its observations may be disputed, Ball’s Alamein offers a well-written study that succeeds in integrating such diverse sources as popular movies, memoirs, and war diaries and combining insights of military and cultural history. It constitutes not only an indispensable work on the cultural afterlife of El-Alamein itself, but also an outstanding reference point for research on the memory of war in general.