At the Second Battle of El Alamein (October 23 – November 4, 1942) Allied forces broke the Axis line and forced them in a retreat that pushed them all the way back to Tunisia.
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After the defeat at El Alamein and the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria Operation Torch, the OKW once more upgraded its presence in Africa by creating the XC Army Corps in Tunisia on 19 November 1942, and then creating a new 5th Panzer Army headquarters there as well on 8 December, under the command of Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim.
After the Axis defeat at El Alamein, the German commander—Generalfeldmarshall Erwin Rommel—had executed a retreat into eastern Libya as the Allies advanced.
This position had been identified long before by Erwin Rommel as a preferred defensive position; he had unsuccessfully argued with his superiors for a controlled withdrawal to it immediately after the Second Battle of El Alamein.
This was built in 1992 by Lady Margaret Fortescue, on the site of the former Sham Village, in memory of her only brother Viscount Ebrington, who was killed in action with the Royal Scots Greys at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, in 1942, aged 21, and whose mural memorial marble tablet can be seen in the Fortescue Chapel in Filleigh Church.
Sir Robert Lusty, the acting chairman, commented that "it was like inviting Rommel to command the Eighth Army on the eve of Alamein".
Both were important for the course of the war; the first battle, fought in July 1942, halted the advance of Axis forces into Egypt and the second, fought in October and November 1942, routed them, and is considered a turning point in the Western Desert Campaign.
During the Battle of El Alamein, he played a key and indeed some would say heroic and self-sacrificing part in the Operation Supercharge phase.
The seat had become vacant when the Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Somerset Maxwell had died in December 1942 from wounds received at the Battle of El Alamein.
General Sir Richard McCreery GCB, KBE, DSO, MC (1898 - 1967), Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Harold Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis, at the time of the Second Battle of El Alamein and later commanded the British Eighth Army in Northern Italy during 1944-45, died in Templecombe.
The estate was bequeathed to his son Grant Singer but he was killed in action during World War II at the 1942 Second Battle of El Alamein while serving with the Royal Armoured Corps, 10th Royal Hussars.