Forty, Simon/Forty, George Afrikakorps at War, 1941-43

A volume from the Casemate Illustrated Special series. The battles in North Africa occupy a special place in the history of the Second World War. German commander Erwin Rommel was praised in the British Parliament and press, and achieved almost mythical status as a general. The fighting was considered one of the few clean wars of the Third Reich, characterised by mutual respect between the opponents. And the desert landscape was dramatic: scorching heat during the day and falling temperatures at night, violent sandstorms and flash floods, from the Qattara Depression in Egypt to the Atlas Mountains in Tunisia an arena that still bore the traces of battles from Roman times, when Scipio fought Hannibal. The weather and terrain made this a feared theatre of war. It was also here that US forces first entered the fight against Hitler in a significant way, where the men who would later lead the campaign in Normandy joined forces with American and British troops and won a victory that saw a quarter of a million German and Italian soldiers taken prisoner. This richly illustrated, completely revised edition of George Forty's classic offers eyewitness accounts of what it was like to fight and survive in the desert, examines the importance of intelligence and code-breaking, and reassesses Rommel's reputation as a military commander.