Prof. Greg Jackson

I guess the Italians will just have to swallow their pride and hope he does the same to their now common enemy, the British.

In February 1941, the first elements of Erwin Rommel's newly created Afrika Korps, whose ranks will soon swell to 30,000 men, stream into Libya to reinforce the reeling Italians.

This combined force quickly pushes back the British soldiers, aka the Tommies, and lays siege to Tobruk, a British-captured deep-water port near Libya's eastern border with Egypt.

the determined Rats of Tobruk, a garrison made up of mostly Australians, hold their position for 231 days until the Eighth Army comes to relieve them.

Then it's back and forth once more.

The Brits push as far west as El Agueila, then are forced back to Tobruk again.

And then it's into Egypt once more, where the British and Commonwealth forces hold back Erwin Rommel, or rather the Desert Fox, as he's now known, at the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942.

If it feels like you're watching a tennis match, you're not alone.

The campaign in North Africa is colloquially known as the Ding Dong War.

This is due, in no small part, to the difficulty of maintaining supply lines in the harsh and desolate climes of the desert, which makes being pushed back even a little necessitate falling back a whole lot more.

As the Brits and the Germans chase each other back and forth across Italian Libya and British-held Egypt, both sides litter North Africa's coast and Sahara Desert with miles of barbed wire tumbleweeds, minefields, burned-out vehicles, and endless papers.

Then, in August 1942, shrewd, sharp-faced Bernard Monty Montgomery takes command of the British Eighth Army.

Monty is the victor of the September battle at Alam al-Halfa in Egypt and a very slow-and-steady-wins-the-race type of commander.

And he does seem to be on to something.

After all, Monty is beating back the Desert Fox's advances.

Indeed, his British 7th Armored Division, aka the Desert Rats, are well dug in and ready for the next fight, as the Second Battle of El Alamein begins.

It's about 4 o'clock in the evening, October 28, 1942.

We're in El Alamein, on the northern Mediterranean coastline of Egypt, where the 29-year-old Londoner Reginald Lewis Crimp is lying in a sandy desert slit trench.

A part of the British 7th Armored Division 2nd Battalion Rifle Brigade, Reginald's company is situated on what he describes as, a sort of long, straggling island of soft sand a few feet higher than the flat, firmer desert which stretches off to a distant horizon.

On every side,