A twenty-five pounder British gun opens fire on the night of October 23rd, 1942. The following day, a catalogue of misfortunes and a spirit of despondency gripped the Axis forces, which defied frantic efforts to restore morale and regain the advantage. Over the next eleven days, casualties among the Axis powers came to just over 2,000 dead and nearly 4,000 wounded, but the most surprising figure was the 15,000 Italians and 8,000 Germans who surrendered, contributing to an unlikely victory for the hard-pressed Allies and to a turning point in the war. Allied casualties included some 4,810 killed and 8,950 wounded.
Part 1 of 2
ON October 23rd, 1942, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commanding the Eighth Army, faced German and Italian forces in the Egyptian desert at El Alamein, a few miles along the coast west of Alexandria. At stake were British Mandatory Palestine,* the Suez Canal, and India beyond.
Allied Command chose the site as defensible; but of as much significance to the 1st Brigade of Free Greeks was having Abu Mena at their backs, a ruined (thanks to the Arabs) Christian monastery dedicated to the martyr St Menas.
Menas had died in the persecutions of the early fourth century, and something had moved Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, to bury his body in the desert; the precise spot, near Lake Mariout, was chosen by his camels, who refused to budge.* The grave soon disappeared beneath the sands, but it was rediscovered after a sickly sheep made a miraculous recovery by rolling around on that spot,* and this time a monastery and basilica were built to mark St Menas’s resting place.
A region of former Ottoman Syria placed under British control by a mandate from the League of Nations, after the First World War. See British Mandatory Palestine. It was here that the brigade of Free Greeks — Greece had been occupied since her unexpected defiance on The Day of ‘No’ — received their British military training. Besides the Greeks and Free French there were troops from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, as well as India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), all of whom were very much ‘next on the list’ had the Axis powers triumphed at El Alamein.
Something similar happened when the monks carrying the body of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne around Viking-ravaged Northumbria ended their long wanderings at Durham. See Cuthbert and the Dun Cow.
A tale reminiscent of our own St Oswald, King of Northumbria. See On Holy Ground.
Précis
The Second Battle of El Alamein in the Second World War took place near a ruined monastery, which stood over the grave of St Menas, a Roman-era martyr. The Allies chose the place for military reasons, but the saint had been buried there back in the fourth century because the camels of his funeral cortege would go no further. (59 / 60 words)
Part Two
An icon of St Menas on his horse, painted by Georgios Kastrofylakas of the ‘Cretan school’ in 1738 for the Church of St Menas and Pantanassa in Heraklion, at one time the cathedral of the city; the present-day cathedral is also dedicated to St Menas. The icon is now kept in the nearby Museum of St Catherine. St Menas (or Minas or Mina) is venerated throughout the Orthodox world, and churches have been dedicated to him from Egypt to Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Russia.
WHEN the Allied bombardment began, just before ten at night on October 23rd, a brilliant moon was shining on the desert. Suddenly, the Greek brigade saw a cavalryman in ancient Roman battledress riding up behind them, from the direction of the monastery; and no one who had seen the icons of Menas in Heraklion and a hundred other churches could mistake him. Through the Allied lines he rode, until he was lost among the enemy.*
Only hours later, what historians dub ‘the crumbling’ began. The German commander Georg Stumme succumbed to a heart attack. Axis forces began surrendering in their tens of thousands. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was rushed in to take over, but momentum was gone, and the battle ended on November 4th with the enemy in a headlong retreat. It was to prove a turning point in the whole war. “It may almost be said,” mused Winston Churchill later, “‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat’.”
Reports of this appeared in the Egyptian Gazette for November 10th, 1942; a year later, Patriarch Christophoros of Alexandria recalled it in a sermon for the feast of St Menas on November 11th. Further insights later came from Dr Naguib Pasha Mahfouz (1882-1974), a Coptic Christian and a pioneering Professor of Gynaecology at Qasr Al-Ayni Hospital (Cairo University), who was often called in by Montgomery to treat members of Allied military families, and came to know ‘Monty’ quite well. He testified that Montgomery had told him how, on the night before the battle, he had dreamt that a man calling himself ‘Mena’ repeatedly gestured towards the enemy forces, and drove them away. See The Great Egyptian and Coptic Martyr, the Miraculous Saint Mena.
Précis
Shortly after the battle began, at night on October 23rd, 1942, some Greek soldiers in the Allied lines seemed to see St Menas ride up from the monastery behind them and into the enemy lines. A few hours later the Axis forces suffered a catalogue of mishaps, and tens of thousands of them surrendered, leading to victory for the Allies and a turning point in the whole war. (67 / 60 words)
