70th Anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein Print Page

Two stained glass windows commemorate the 70^th anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein , which occured in North Africa in 1942 during World War Two.

The windows depict the parish namesake saints of Sebastian and Fabian, together with aspects of the El Alamein conflict incorporating an Australian War Memorial photograph of Father Byrne conducting a service at El Alamein.

On 1 September 1942, Australians from the 2/15th Battalion crossed a minefield and seized an enemy post about 3 kilometres from Tel el Eisa, near El Alamein. They were forced to withdraw, their brief raid costing 39 Australian lives, 100 wounded and 25 missing. Seven weeks later, on 23 October 1942, El Alamein in the western desert of Egypt became the scene of one of the major battles of World War II. The British Eighth Army, which included the 9th Australian Division under Lieutenant-General Sir Leslie Morshead, was pitted against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel with four German and eight Italian divisions.

During the next 10 days, aircrews of the Royal Air Force's Desert Air Force, which included men from the Royal Australian Air Force, flew many sorties in support of the ferocious ground battles. Rommel began to withdraw his troops to the Libyan border at dawn on 4 November, ending the Battle of El Alamein, but the Allies pursued their defeated enemies until May 1943 when the Axis forces in North Africa finally surrendered.

The Battle of El Alamein was the last great imperial battle. More than 13,500 men in the Eighth Army were killed, wounded or missing including 2,694 Australians from the 9th Division, approximately one-fifth of the Eighth Army's total casualties.

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