However, with the British weakened by the diversion of troops to Greece, in March 1941 the newly-arrived Rommel counter-attacked and recaptured much of the lost territory, though the important port of Tobruk, garrisoned by Australians, held out.

There were attacked by Major General Richard O'Connor's Western Desert Force which drove them back to El Agheila, half way to Tripoli. In 1940 the Italians advanced from Libya and crossed the frontier of British-protected Egypt, where they halted and dug in. But it was the umbilical cord that linked the armies that fought for Egypt and Libya with their main logistic bases, and the tide of war ebbed and flowed along it. During World War Two, it was a good deal worse. His insistence on fighting a well-prepared 'teed up' battle was properly understood by his soldiers.Д®ven today the road that runs along the very edge of North Africa, with the Mediterranean on the one hand and the desert on the other, is not exactly a super-highway. So in the overall scheme of things, El Alamein mattered, and among the strengths of that prickly and opinionated general, Bernard Montgomery, was a determination to resist political pressure to attack before he was ready. Small wonder that the Army was indeed, as Churchill described it, 'brave but baffled'. In the Gazala battles of mid-1942 the British time and time again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

However, sometimes the responsibility lay with the generals. In 1941, after a British offensive had bundled the Italians from the Egyptian frontier deep into Libya, the troops that might have clinched victory were diverted to Greece at Churchill's behest. Lastly, Hitler certainly did not regard North Africa as a sideshow, and his decision to send massive reinforcements to the theatre after El Alamein would eventually result in Axis losses in North Africa being greater than they were at Stalingrad.ДЄnd to the assertion that Montgomery, with numbers of men and equipment on his side, was bound to win at El Alamein, I respond that there were previous occasions when the British should have won the desert war but had failed to do so. A German mountain infantryman declared that the objective of the German thrust in south Russia in mid-1942 was simple: 'Down the Caucasus, round the corner, slice the British through the rear, and say to Rommel, 'Hello, General, here we are!' 'Д®ven if this was a strategic improbability, the psychological impact of the British loss of Egypt would have been enormous. There was even talk of an Axis offensive through Egypt linking up with a German drive down from Russia. Next, Egypt sat, like a spider in its web, at the centre of a crucial geo-strategic network that included the Eastern Mediterranean, Abyssina (invaded by the Italians in 1936 and liberated by the British in 1941), the Middle East and the Suez Canal. The humbling of Mussolini was an important objective in its own right, and after the German invasion of Russia in 1941, there was a strong case, military and political, for preventing the Germans from concentrating on the Eastern Front. Firstly, because there was nowhere else where, after the fall of France in 1940, British and Commonwealth troops could engage the Germans and Italians on land. I am unrepentantly revisionist as far as the desert war is concerned. Rommel's own character and performance were critically assessed, and the once-romantic 'Desert Fox' increasingly emerged as ambitious, crabby, and tainted by his association with Hitler.ДЄnd as our knowledge of the fighting on the Eastern Front grew, thanks first to the pioneering work of John Erickson and, more recently, as additional Russian archival material has become available, it became all too easy to dismiss the fighting in North Africa as a mere sideshow. Books like Correlli Barnett's The Desert Generals were (generally rightly) critical of the British high command, and as more information on British ULTRA intelligence became available, so repeated failure seemed all the more remarkable.

World conqueror 2 battle of el alamein