The Day Rommel Was Stopped

The true story of a forty-eight-hour showdown and the desperate gamble that prevented the Desert Fox from reaching the Suez Canal—and beyond. Biographer Sir John Wheeler-Bennett once wrote, “The actual turning of the tide in the Second World War may be accurately determined as the first week of July 1942.” This book argues that the time may be even more exact: about 2100 hours on July 2, 1942, when Erwin Rommel’s tanks withdrew for the first time since the fall of Tobruk on June 20, or, arguably