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.