![]() ![]() If Hitler's Wehrmacht smashed the Red Army, he could no longer hope for a lightning conquest, but the Fuhrer could expect the Soviet strongman to sue for peace on terms advantageous to Germany. ![]() The winner could expect to reap very high stakes indeed. Endless rolling plains – ideal “tank country” – vast forests, sprawling cities, and enormous tracts of agricultural land formed the environment over which millions of men and thousands of the era's most formidable military vehicles fought for their respective overlords and ideologies. Rommel was back on the defensive-a definite turning point in the war in North Africa.The vast expanses of southern Russia and the Ukraine provided the Eastern Front arena where the armies of Third Reich dictator Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin wrestled lethally for supremacy in 1943. Reinforced by American supplies, and reorganized and reinvigorated by British General Bernard Montgomery, British, Indian, South African and New Zealand troops battled Rommel, and his by now exhausted men, to a standstill in Egypt. And Hitler anticipated adding Egypt to his empire.īut the Allies were not finished. Naturally, Benito Mussolini saw this as his opportunity to partake of the victors’ spoils. The Italian troops that had preceded Rommel’s German forces in North Africa, only to be beaten back by the British, then saved from complete defeat by the arrival of Rommel, were now back on the winning side, their dwindled numbers having fought alongside the Afrika Korps. Rommel’s Afrika Korps was now in Egypt, in El Alamein, only 60 miles west of the British naval base in Alexandria. In fact, Rommel managed to push the British into Egypt using mostly captured vehicles. ![]() But Rommel repelled repeated air and tank attacks, delivering heavy losses to the armored strength of the British, and finally, using his panzer divisions, managed to force a British retreat-a retreat so rapid that a huge quantity of supplies was left behind. In June, the British had succeeded in driving Rommel into a defensive position in Libya. ![]() On July 1, 1942, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is brought to a standstill in the battle for control of North Africa. ![]()
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