onward, 7 to 11 November On 7 November, waterlogged ground and lack of fuel stranded the 1st and 7th Armoured divisions. The 10th Armoured Division, on the coast road and with ample fuel, advanced to Mersa Matruh while its infantry mopped up on the road west of Galal. Rommel intended to fight a delaying action at Sidi Barrani, west of Matruh, to gain time for Axis troops to get through the bottlenecks at Halfaya and Sollum. The last rearguards left Matruh on the night of 7/8 November but were only able to hold Sidi Barrani until the evening of 9 November. By the evening of 10 November, the 2nd New Zealand Division, heading for Sollum, had the 4th Light Armoured Brigade at the foot of the Halfaya Pass while 7th Armoured Division was conducting another detour to the south, to take Fort Capuzzo and Sidi Azeiz. On the morning of 11 November, the 5th New Zealand Infantry Brigade captured the pass, taking 600 Italian prisoners. By nightfall on 11 November, the Egyptian wall was clear but Montgomery was forced to order that the pursuit should temporarily be continued only by armoured cars and artillery, because of the difficulty in supplying larger formations west of Bardia. Aftermath Analysis El Alamein was a British victory, although Rommel did not lose hope until the end of the Tunisia Campaign. Churchill famously (though hyperbolically) claimed, The Allies frequently had numerical superiority in the Western Desert but never had it been so complete in quantity and quality. With the arrival of Sherman tanks, 6-pounder anti-tank guns and Spitfires in the Western Desert, the Allies gained a comprehensive superiority. Montgomery envisioned the battle as an attrition operation, similar to those fought in the First World War and accurately predicted the length of the battle and the number of British and Commonwealth casualties. British artillery was superbly handled and British air support was excellent, in contrast to the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica, which offered little or no support to ground forces, preferring to engage in air-to-air combat. Air supremacy had a huge effect on the battle. Montgomery wrote, Historians debate the reasons Rommel decided to advance into Egypt. In 1997, Martin van Creveld wrote that Rommel had been advised by the German and Italian staffs that his army could not properly be supplied so far from the ports of Tripoli and Benghazi. Rommel pressed ahead with his