Battle Studies, Country Studies, & Staff Rides

El Alamein was one of the pivotal (and controversial) battles of World War II. Based on an intensive reading of the contemporary sources, in particular the extensive and recently declassified British bugging of Axis prisoners of war, military historian Simon Ball explains the outcome of the battle as a cultural defeat for Britain. But it also shows how 'Alamein culture' saturated the post-war world, when archival sources mingled with film, novels, magazines, popular histories, and the rest of Alamein's footprint.

For Great Britain, there were two pivotal battles in the Second World War. One was the Battle of Britain. The other was El Alamein. There, in October 1942, in a remote part of the desert between Libya and Egypt, the British army won an epic battle of attrition with Rommel's Afrika Korps. It was a defeat from which Rommel would never recover and a turning point in the war, famously celebrated by Churchill as "the end of the beginning"--the line in the sand that Hitler's forces were never able to cross. Stephen Bungay's Alamein is a trenchant re-examination of an event that has been cloaked in myth.

In October 1942, after a two-year campaign across the wasteland of western Egypt and eastern Libya, the British Eighth Army not only achieved a significant military victory over the combined German-Italian Panzer Army but also provided an enormous psychological boost for the Allies. In this compelling account of the decisive World War II battle of El Alamein, Jon Latimer brings to life the harsh desert conflict in North Africa.

As the Allies scrambled to counter the Axis armies, the British Eighth Army confronted the experienced Afrika Corps, led by German field marshal Erwin Rommel, in three battles at El Alamein. In the first battle, the Eighth Army narrowly halted the advance of the Germans during the summer of 1942. However, the stalemate left Nazi troops within striking distance of the Suez Canal, which would provide a critical tactical advantage to the controlling force. War historian Glyn Harper dives into the story, vividly narrating the events, strategies, and personalities surrounding the battles and paying particular attention to the Second Battle of El Alamein, a crucial turning point in the war that would be described by Winston Churchill as "the end of the beginning."