(Daily Caller)—America’s Veterans Day is recognized in other English-speaking countries as Remembrance Day. With the anniversary this month of both the Battle of El Alamein and the North Africa “Torch” Landings, the observance has an added meaning.
In November 1942, for all intents and purposes, the outcome of World War II hung in the balance. On all fronts, the Axis forces were advancing while the Allies suffered setbacks in almost every theater of combat. But momentum began to shift; if the month began with pessimism and despair, it ended in a cautious optimism that the Allied cause had commanders who could win.
In an amazing feat of coordination and cooperation, the Allied forces under the command Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, made five surprise amphibious landings on North African beaches hundreds of miles apart. This would be America’s initial entrance into the European phase of the war. Most of the American troops boarded vessels in the United States and steamed away without being detected.
The North Africa landings would raise the profile of Gen. George Patton and set in motion the liberation of the Vichy French colonies. While the initial resistance to the landings came from French troops, they were persuaded to surrender and join the Allied cause.
This disrupted the French chain of command and caused the Nazis to realize the fickle commitment of Vichy France. Even more significantly, to prevent the repurposing of the French Fleet as Nazi vessels, the entire French Navy was scuttled.
The landings in French North Africa were the beginning of the gradual pacification of Axis hegemony. Prior to the landings, the Italians, and later the Nazis, were doing their best to prevent the British from controlling North Africa from Libya to Egypt.
When the Italians were within a whisper of losing their toehold, Hitler sent reinforcements in the form of Erwin Rommel. His active duty in the desert would earn him the sobriquet “Desert Fox.”
So even before the Torch landings, the British were directly engaged with Rommel and his Afrika Korps. And, for the most part, the Nazis were on the offense pushing the British almost to Cairo. Tired of organized retreats, Churchill sacked one commanding officer and through circumstances identified Gen. Bernard Montgomery to lead the British 8th Army.
Montgomery, too, would make his mark in the desert. While the desert war was frustratingly slow, Montgomery took his time to build up his troops, making sure he had the necessary supplies and, by surprise, take the offensive.
Rommel, on the other hand, was having a hard time acquiring supplies necessary to keep his troops fed and his equipment serviceable. The British enjoyed significant naval resources to limit shipping in the Mediterranean, and the Royal Air Force had almost complete air superiority. Waiting for the best time to engage allowed Montgomery to build up his resources and served to diminish Nazi supplies and troop morale.
When Montgomery did attack, he caught the enemy by surprise. Rommel had returned to Germany to fully recover from an illness, but his forces were no match for the well supplied British joint operations. Superiority in tanks, aircraft and in armor piercing artillery, ground the Nazi war machine down into a full retreat.
Having to fight a defensive battle, Rommel turned to land mines to prevent British tanks and troops from attacking his flanks. As a counter measure, Polish engineers developed an electronic mine detector allowing mine fields to be cleared in record time. This Polish invention allowed Allied troops to surreptitiously cut paths through mine fields, which further surprised the Afrika Korps.
Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein caused Churchill to famously remark that while the battle was not the beginning of the end, it was “the end of the beginning.” From this point on, the British would win battle after battle, pursing the Nazis from North Africa to Sicily and, eventually, to Rome.
As we celebrate our Veterans Day, the British will honor their war dead on Remembrance Day. At El Alamein, there will be a remembrance ceremony, for it was there that the might of the British Empire asserted itself and started the roll up of Nazi forces in Europe.
There is a cemetery at El Alamein for all the Commonwealth soldiers who died there. It is beautiful in its simplicity, and the symmetry of the marble headstones is a stark reminder of the cost of war.
To walk through the graves and read the short phrases on each marker is a moving and somber experience. There is a quiet reverence to be on hallowed ground. There are countless markers of teenagers who died for their country; but the most sobering headstones of all simply read “Known but to God.”
This year, as In past years, families of the dead will gather to remember their sons, brothers, and husbands who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Like so many other war cemeteries, it is the last touchstone many families have, and their trek to El Alamein is a pilgrimage to remember. Years ago, a father asked that his family spread his ashes at the tomb of his only son. While frowned upon, I am told this was not an infrequent occurrence.
At the Commonwealth cemetery, there is an old Egyptian warden who keeps watch over the graves. His English is slight, but he takes his job seriously and guides families to the graves of their relatives in a most reverent and respectful manner.
Of all the times in the Middle East when a tip or “baksheesh” might be in order, he refuses all gratuities and completely against type, acts insulted at the offer.
Remembering veterans this month is a good time to remember that in North Africa, American troops first engaged the enemy, and the British soundly defeated the Desert Fox while paving the way for ultimately victory. The cemetery at El Alamein reminds us of sacrifice and provides an object lesson in the cost of freedom.
Will Sellers is a graduate of Hillsdale College and an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of Alabama. He is best reached at [email protected].
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
