Late in April 1941, the DAK captured Halfaya Pass for the first time. The narrow opening through an escarpment at Salem, Egypt was close to the Libyan border and held high strategic value as it was one of only two such openings in the escarpment which ran in a perpendicular direction from the Mediterranean coast.

Bach and his 1st Battalion of the 104th Schützen Regiment were tasked with the defense of the critical point, and it wasn’t long before his command was put to the test. Using five eighty-eight millimeter flak guns that had been dug into the hillside, he successfully defended Halfaya Pass in June 1941 by destroying eleven of the twelve Matilda tanks that formed the vanguard of the British attack.

Smaller-scale British raids followed, each proved unsuccessful in their attempt to root out Bach and his men from the pass, which by then had unceremoniously been renamed Hellfire Pass by those attacking it. Bach’s staunch and unwavering defense of Halfaya Pass not only earned him the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, but more importantly the admiration and respect of his men, his superiors, and even those who were fighting against him.

In mid-November the British launched another major assault. The goal of Operation Crusader was to smash through the German lines and end the siege of Tobruk, and it was not long after the beginning of this campaign that Bach and his men were completely cut off from the DAK without any hope of resupply.

Under the assumption that a full-out assault of their position would soon follow, Bach prepared for the worst; however, in hindsight of their previous losses at Hellfire Pass, the British decided instead to starve out the isolated German and Italian troops. For good measure the Brutish also bombed the pass on a daily basis, which forced its defenders to live in the caves that lined the escarpment during the day.

By the end of December provisions had reached a critical low and out of desperation the Luftwaffe made an attempt to supply Bach by air, but failed due to British air superiority in the area.

With his men dying of hunger and thirst, on January 17, 1942, Bach finally reached the difficult decision to surrender. A bitter moment for any commanding officer, in Bach’s case the surrender must have been further tainted with a profound sense of déjà-vu as it was the second time in his military career that he had become a prisoner of war. Bach was both wounded and captured at the same time during World War One by the British, who interred him in England until he was finally released a full year after the end of the war.

One final order was carried out before Bach’s Battalion marched itself into captivity; their coveted flak guns that had ruled the pass were destroyed in order to prevent their use by the enemy. It was one of the ironies of the war that Rommel would recapture Halfaya Pass a few months later in June 1942.

Having surrendered to a South African contingent, Bach was first sent to a POW camp in South Africa before being relocated to Canada. However, his internment this time would be short-lived. On December 22, after having been hospitalized with cancer, Bach succumbed to the disease at the Charley Park Military Hospital in Toronto.