Outmanoeuvring the wily Desert Fox, with help from Bletchley Park

IN May 1940, Captain Peter Vaux fought bravely in the first British tank battle of the war - seeing his friends killed at Arras as they tried to stop Rommel's panzers sweeping through northern France towards the coast. Two years later, as the intelligence officer for 7 Armoured Division at the battle of Alamein, he was able to submit a report containing a sentence he'd been longing to write: "The enemy is now in full retreat."

- By Phil Craig

The feared and famous 'Desert Fox', General Erwin Rommel, had finally lost a battle, and to a British Army led by Bernard Montgomery no less. It was the first time a German field marshal had been comprehensively beaten and forced to retreat in any theatre of the war.

Winston Churchill spoke proudly of a turning point being reached - the "end of the beginning", as he memorably described it - but it was a desperately close run thing. And it came at the end of a long and bitter North African campaign that at one point seemed destined to bring down the British Prime Minister, and threaten the newly-minted alliance of Britain, America and the Soviet Union.

It began well enough with a series of victories over the Italians in 1940 won by a force of British, Australian and Indian soldiers that came to be known as Eighth Army. Then, early in 1941, Hitler sent Rommel to the desert, along with his 'Afrika Korps', and suddenly the campaign became a lot more difficult.

The German tanks raced forward, pushing the allies back and besieging the key port of Tobruk. Months of heroic resistance by a mixed Australian and British force did much to restore hope and there were great celebrations when, during Operation Crusader, with New Zealand and South African troops also joining the fight, Tobruk was re-taken and Rommel's men driven back hundreds of miles to the borderlands of Egypt and modern day Libya.

But Rommel was far from finished.

Reinforced with new men and equipment, the German and Italian armies were already planning a new offensive and when it came in the spring of 1942 it almost broke the Eighth Army apart.

Operation Venezia was one of the most astonishing Axis operations of the war - fast moving, perfectly timed and flawlessly executed and Britain's desert generals could do little to stop it.