“Before Alamein, we never had a victory, after Alamein we never had a defeat.” There could be no doubting who had won the fight, and Churchill was so delighted that he ordered the church bells of England, silent since 1940 in case they should be needed to signal an invasion, to ring out in triumph all over Britain. In the Second Battle of El Alamein 50,000 Axis troops were killed or captured of the Allies’ 13,500, and Rommel’s force of tanks was virtually wiped out. Several long, brutal pushes back and forth across Libya and Egypt reached a turning point in the Second Battle of El Alamein in late 1942 when Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army broke out and drove Axis forces all the way from Egypt to Tunisia. Hitler’s response to this loss was to send in the newly formed German expeditionary force the “Afrika Korps” or German Africa Corps (German: Deutsches Afrikakorps, DAK) led by General Erwin Rommel who later became known as “The Desert Fox”. Adolf Hitler was shocked by the defeats being suffered by the Italian Army in January 1941. Italy invaded Egypt in September 1940, and in a December counterattack, British and Indian forces captured some 130,000 Italians. The two armies began skirmishing almost as soon as Italy declared war on the Allied Nations in 1940. British forces had been in neighbouring Egypt since 1882 and had only 36,000 men guarding the Suez Canal and the Arabian oil fields. At the beginning of the war, Libya had been an Italian colony for several decades and Benito Mussolini already had over 200,000+ men in the Italian Army based there. The North African Campaign of the Second World War began from the 10 th June 1940 and continued for 2 years, 11 months and 3 days, as Axis and Allied forces pushed each other back and forth across the desert.
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