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SKELTON - IN - CLEVELAND
IN HISTORY |
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"WE WILL REMEMBER THEM"
327105 Trooper GEORGE WILLIAM BRECKON.
Queen's Own Yorkshire Dragoons, Royal Armoured Corps.
who died, aged 21, on the 24th of October 1942.
Son of George William and Annie Breckon, of Skelton in Cleveland, North Yorkshire.
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El Alamein War Cemetery.
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Alamein is a village, bypassed by the main coast road, approximately 130 kilometres west of Alexandria on the road
to Mersa Matruh.
The campaign in the Western Desert was fought between the Commonwealth forces (with, later, the addition of
two brigades of Free French and one each of Polish and Greek troops) all based in Egypt, and the Axis forces
(German and Italian) based in Libya.
The battlefield, across which the fighting surged back and forth between 1940 and 1942, was the 1,000 kilometres
of desert between Alexandria in Egypt and Benghazi in Libya.
It was a campaign of manoeuvre and movement, the objectives being the control of the Mediterranean, the link
with the east through the Suez Canal, the Middle East oil supplies and the supply route to Russia through Persia.
El Alamein War Cemetery contains the graves of men who died at all stages of the Western Desert campaigns,
brought in from a wide area, but especially those who died in the Battle of El Alamein at the end of October 1942
and in the period immediately before that.
The cemetery now contains 7,240 Commonwealth burials of the Second World War, of which 815 are unidentified.
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