Tunisia (Torch) and Algeria were far more important than El Alamein mostly because of Hitler.
He freaked over the invasion and proceeded to occupy Vichy France and send hundreds of tanks including dozens of new Tigers into Tunisia that were never seen again.
All at the time (Nov 42') when Stalingrad really could have used the vehicles. Panzer divisions in Russia were starved of replacements so there was a reason that comparatively few tanks were lost.
Those tanks quite likely could have relieved the encircled 6th Army.
Then to make things worse, shortly afterward Hitler and Himmler decide to turn the Waffen SS divisions into armored formations and further starve Panzer divisions of replacements.
They were motorized infantry before. Experienced tankers were taken from the panzer divisions for this and more tanks were withheld.
Americans got a well needed scrimmage against the German forces and incompetent officers like Fredendall were weeded out.
They ran out of tanks attacking El Alamein, not before. El Alamein had port where the Italians could have landed fuel supplies if it had been captured and there was nothing to stop Rommel from rolling all the way to Ciro if he’d won.
Alamein wasn't much of a port. It was the end of a rail line running all the way to Alexandria though.
Germany never had manpower problems but they had huge production problems because their socialist production system was awful.
Germans had massive manpower issues thanks to catastrophes like Stalingrad.
That's how you get formations like the Volksturm (Old folks and kids) . And all army formations shrunk as the war went on.
>Germans had massive manpower issues thanks to catastrophes like Stalingrad.
That’s another Stalinistic myth that was widely pushed in the press. The German death to kill ratio with the Russians was 3/1 during the war.
>That’s how you get formations like the Volksturm (Old folks and kids) . And all army formations shrunk as the war went on.
The Germany army actually swelled in size in the last 2 years of the war thanks to the Volksturm divisions, but those divisions had very limited amounts of armament. They were effectively under-armed militia though many Vokstrum divisions fought quite well in the east. It was a last ditch attempt to build a military large enough to fight a 3 front war. Of course without enough weapons those divisions didn’t fight well.
Germany reduced their numbers of the eastern front not because they didn’t have enough men, but because they were fighting a 2 front war, then a 3 front war with a very large defensive force in the Balkans to stop any allied landings there. This require stripping units out of the east to fight in North Africa, Italy, and France.
However, the biggest problem for the Germans was the lack weapons. Army Group Centre in Byelorussia was utterly destroyed by the Russians in 1944 not because it didn’t have enough men(644,396) but because it had almost no tanks, guns, or airplanes. German war production was unable to fully equip the existing German army for combat on one front and when it went from 1 front to 2, then 3 + mass allied bombing things really got bad for German armies.
The reason we think that Germany ran out of manpower is Russian propaganda about bleeding the German army white in the east. In reality the German army kept right turning Russian offensives into disasters for the Red army right up until Operation torch opened up a second front with Germany. This weakened the Germany army in Russia to the point where offensive operations became quite difficult and getting replacement gear close to impossible. Even the battle of Kursk was well on it’s way to being a Germany victory before Hitler halted it due to the invasion of Italy and troops were stripped from the eastern front to protect Italy and the Balkans.