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. This is a trenchant reexamination of an event that has been cloaked in myth.