There were no decisive battles in World War II. This might seem a strange thing to say as the war is usually viewed through the prism of its famous engagements. As this book was being completed, the seventieth anniversaries of El Alamein, Stalingrad, Kursk and Midway have been remembered. It has led to a great deal of reflection on this pivotal period of the war. Each battle is usually discussed with superlatives which invariably include how it changed the course of the war or was responsible for leading the Allies to victory.

El Alamein, the famous tank battle in the Egyptian desert in October and November 1942, between Bernard Montgomery's British 8th Army and Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps, is most remembered in the United Kingdom and parts of what was the British Empire. The destruction of most of Rommel's panzers, which started the German retreat from North Africa that would culminate in the surrender of a large German force in Tunisia in May 1943, is depicted as a crucial marker heralding German defeat. In the words of Winston Churchill, it may not have represented the beginning of the end, but it was “the end of the beginning.” Later he would say that before El Alamein the British never had a victory, and after they never had a defeat.