By the 26th of October 1942, Montgomery's great offensive at El Alamein had been grinding on for three days and nights, and it had slowed almost to a halt, bogged down in the minefields and the dug-in defenses, the casualties mounting, the breakthrough that was supposed to come not coming. This was the crisis of the battle, the moment it hung in the balance, the phase Montgomery himself called the "dogfight," a brutal slogging match of attrition. I told you how the battle opened on the night of the 23rd with the colossal barrage. The plan had been for the infantry to clear lanes through the vast Axis minefields, the Devil's Gardens, so the armor could pour through into open country beyond. But it was not working cleanly. The minefields were deeper and the defense tougher than hoped. The lanes were congested, swept by fire, and the British tanks that tried to push through found themselves caught in the open, taking heavy losses from dug-in German anti-tank guns, the deadly eighty-eights that could kill a tank at long range. The advance stalled in a murderous tangle of mines, wire, and gunfire. Rommel had rushed back from Germany, taking command again on the 26th after the death of Stumme, which I told you about. But he returned to a battle already going badly for him and a fundamental problem he could not solve: he was desperately short of fuel, which crippled his ability to maneuver his armor, and he was being worn down in exactly the kind of attritional fight he could not win, because Montgomery could replace his losses and Rommel could not. The actions I described, like the stand of the Rifle Brigade at Outpost Snipe on the 27th where the six-pounders wrecked dozens of tanks, were part of this grinding phase, the two armies locked together, hammering each other, the British slowly, deliberately crumbling away the Axis strength. It took nerve for Montgomery to hold his course. The breakthrough had not come, the casualties were heavy, and there was pressure and anxiety all the way up to Churchill about whether the offensive had stalled. Montgomery, confident to the point of arrogance, refused to panic. He regrouped, pulled some units out of the line to reform them, and prepared to renew the attack with a fresh, concentrated blow. He was content to keep the "dogfight" going, to keep wearing Rommel down, trading losses he could afford for losses Rommel could not, until the Axis army cracked. And crack it did. The attrition of these days, the steady destruction of Rommel's tanks and the exhaustion of his fuel, set up the decisive breakthrough that came in early November, when Montgomery concentrated his armor and finally punched clean through the weakened Axis line. Rommel, against Hitler's orders, began the long retreat that would not stop until Tunisia. But that victory was built here, in the grim, unglamorous grinding of the dogfight around the 26th, the phase where the battle could have failed, where the breakthrough stalled and the casualties piled up, and where Montgomery held his nerve and kept feeding the attrition that would break the Desert Fox at last.