She was the John Harvey, one of those Atlantic sea-horses that had sailed to Bari to bring beans, bombs, and bullets to the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force, to Field Marshal Montgomery's Eighth Army then racing up the calf of the boot of Italy in that early December of 1943.

He saw action in the First World War, where he was seriously wounded, and during the Second World War he commanded the Eighth Army from August 1942 in the Western Desert until the final Allied victory in Tunisia.

He subsequently commanded the Eighth Army in Sicily and Italy before being given responsibility for planning the D-Day invasion in Normandy.

In 1942, a new field commander was required in the Middle East, where Auchinleck was fulfilling both the role of commander-in-chief Middle East Command and commander Eighth Army.

He had stabilised the Allied position at the First Battle of El Alamein, but after a visit in August 1942, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, replaced him as C-in-C with Alexander and William Gott as commander of the Eighth Army in the Western Desert.

Montgomery's assumption of command transformed the fighting spirit and abilities of the Eighth Army.

The only common commander for Montgomery's all infantry and all armour corps was the Eighth Army Commander himself.

Rommel attempted to turn the left flank of the Eighth Army at the Battle of Alam Halfa from 31 August 1942.

By the time the offensive was ready in late October, Eighth Army had 231, 000 men on its ration strength.

He was recalled to advise the British forces in the Malayan Emergency and the U. S. Eighth Army in the Korean War.

The First Battle of El Alamein ( 1 – 27 July 1942 ) was a battle of the Western Desert Campaign of the Second World War, fought between Axis forces ( Germany and Italy ) of the Panzer Army Africa ( Panzerarmee Afrika ) commanded by Field Marshal ( Generalfeldmarschall ) Erwin Rommel, and Allied ( specifically, British Imperial ) forces ( Britain, British India, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand ) of the British Eighth Army commanded by General Claude Auchinleck.

Following its defeat at the Battle of Gazala in June 1942, the British Eighth Army had retreated from the Gazala line to Mersa Matruh, roughly inside the Egyptian border.

On 25 June, General Claude Auchinleck — Commander-in-Chief ( C-in-C ) Middle East Command — relieved Ritchie and assumed direct command of Eighth Army himself.

X Corps meanwhile, having made an unsuccessful attempt to secure a position on the escarpment, were out of touch with Eighth Army from 19: 30 until 04: 30 the next morning.

The British Army in Egypt recognised this before the war and had the Eighth Army begin construction of several " boxes " ( localities with dug-outs and surrounded by minefields and barbed wire ), the most developed being around the railway station at Alamein.

Rommel had driven them forward ruthlessly, being confident that, provided he struck quickly before Eighth Army had time to settle, his momentum would take him through the Alamein position and he could then advance to the Nile with little further opposition.

Rommel's plan was for the 90th Light Infantry Division and the two Afrika Korps armoured divisions — 15th and 21st Panzer — to penetrate the Eighth Army lines between the Alamein box and Deir el Abyad ( which he believed was defended ).

To relieve the pressure on the right and centre of the Eighth Army line, XIII Corps on the left advanced from the Qattara box ( known to the New Zealanders as the Kaponga box ).

Meanwhile, the Eighth Army was reorganising and rebuilding, benefiting from its short lines of communication.

The Eighth Army now enjoyed a massive superiority in material over the Axis forces: 1st Armoured Division had 173 tanks and more in reserve or transit, while Rommel possessed only 38 German tanks and 51 Italian tanks although his armoured units had some 100 tanks awaiting repair.

Once more, the Eighth Army had failed to destroy Rommel ’ s forces, despite its overwhelming superiority in men and equipment.

The Eighth Army was exhausted, and on 31 July Auchinleck ordered an end to offensive operations and the strengthening of the defences to meet a major counter-offensive.

More than that, Allied air had complete superiority in the Eighth Army's sector.

* 1270 – The Eighth Crusade and siege of Tunis end by an agreement between Charles I of Sicily ( brother to King Louis IX of France, who had died months earlier ) and the sultan of Tunis.

In " Boom Town " ( 2005 ), the Ninth Doctor implied that he had stopped trying to fix the circuit quite some time ago because he had become rather fond of the police box shape – a claim the Eighth Doctor made in the 1996 television movie.

Before Robinson, the Eighth Amendment had only been applied against the federal government.

Justice Scalia ( joined by Chief Justice Roberts ) wrote in dissent that " the proposed Eighth Amendment would have been laughed to scorn if it had read ' no criminal penalty shall be imposed which the Supreme Court deems unacceptable.

Levi, who had said Bruckner ’ s Seventh Symphony was the greatest symphony written after Beethoven, believed that the Eighth was a confusing jumble.

The Germans had moved up about half of the units of the Eighth Army, reinforced by small groups of the Königsberg garrison, to positions east of Königsberg near the border.

The U. S. Army had accomplished little desegregation in peacetime and sent the segregated Eighth Army to defend South Korea.

General Harold Alexander arrived in Tunisia in late February to take charge of the new 15th Army Group headquarters, which had been created to take overall control of both the Eighth Army and the Allied forces already fighting in Tunisia.

McGann had signed a contract to appear as the Eighth Doctor in a new Doctor Who series, if Fox or Universal exercised their option.

Thus no new series was produced until 2005, after all the contractual rights had returned to the BBC, and the movie became McGann's only televised appearance as the Eighth Doctor.

They never topped the British charts again, but had two US Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s with " Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter " ( originally sung by Tom Courtenay in a 1963 British TV play ) and " I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am " ( a British music hall song by Harry Champion dating from 1910, which Peter Noone's Irish grandfather had been in the habit of singing when Noone was young ).

" During the El Alamein Campaign, the 9th Division suffered 22 % of the British Eighth Army's casualties ; 1, 177 Australians were killed, while 3, 629 were wounded, 795 were captured and 193 were missing.

The Eighth Army suffered heavy casualties, ordering a complete withdraw to the Imjin River, south of the 38th parallel, having been devastated by the overwhelming Chinese force.

The overstretched Eighth Army suffered heavily with the Chinese offensive, who were able to benefit from shorter lines of communication and with rather casually deployed enemy forces.

Half of the U. S. Army Air Force's casualties in World War II were suffered by Eighth Air Force ( more than 47, 000 casualties, with more than 26, 000 dead ).

The stiffness of the German defences sorely tested VI Corps and it suffered heavy casualties before German attempts to throw the American force back into the sea were thwarted by the artillery of its 45th and 36th Infantry Divisions, strongly supported by naval gunfire, bombing and the approach of British Eighth Army from the south.

Kang suffered a severe reversal of fortune at the Central Committee plenum that followed the first session of the Eighth Congress, when he was demoted to alternate, nonvoting membership of the Politburo.

Bobby was asked not to attend the Sedgwick Christmas gathering in California ( according to Saucie, his father told Bobby he was a " bad influence " on the other children ) and on December 31, 1964 Bobby suffered critical head injuries when his bike slammed into the side of a bus on Eighth Avenue in New York City ; he never regained consciousness and died in hospital twelve days later, aged 31.

The airforces involved in the operation also suffered casualties ; 56 aircraft in total were lost during the 24th, 21 out of the 144 transport aircraft transporting the 17th Airborne were shot down and 59 were damaged by antiaircraft fire, and 16 bombers from the Eighth Air Force were also shot down during supply drops.

The city suffered further damage when it was bombed on 6 and 7 June by B-17 and B-24 bombers of the U. S. Eighth Air Force.

The Eighth Army suffered heavy casualties, ordering a complete withdraw to the Imjin River, south of the 38th parallel, having been devastated by the overwhelming Chinese force.

The 2nd and 25th Infantry Divisions had suffered so many losses that both divisions were designated combat ineffective, and were relegated to the Eighth Army's reserve to rebuild.

A second offensive the next month was similarly unsuccessful, as Chinese and North Korean forces suffered heavy casualties but were unable to push back the Eighth Army forces.