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War on Film: The Desert Rats (1953)
The battle scenes are, in the main, well made, especially in showing what it was like for men hiding in dugouts and wadis in the desert under intense artillery-fire.
The see-saw war in North Africa went back and forth after Mussolini ordered an initial incursion from Italian Libya over the border into Egypt in September 1940. The next round went to the British under General Richard O’Connor, whose troops advanced 500 miles in two months and captured 130,000 prisoners, 400 tanks, and 845 guns. At home, cinema audiences cheered the newsreels showing long lines of Italian prisoners winding off into the distance.
Then Hitler appointed his most daring general, Erwin Rommel, to come to the aid of his Italian ally. With just two German divisions at first, he pushed the British back towards Egypt. But behind his advance, he left the Libyan port of Tobruk in
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