Desert Victory

7/7/2025

This wartime documentary has one advantage over many of it’s contemporaries. It’s a largely self-contained story of the planning and execution of a battle from the Second World War that was actually won. It’s also a much more internationalist depiction of the activities by soldiers of many different nations that fought against Rommel’s hitherto unbeaten Afrika Korps across Mesapotamia and towards El Alamein, a mere sixty miles from Alexandria and not much farther from the crucial Suez Canal. There is an astonishing collection of wartime photography to supplement a narration that is frequently quite journalistic in nature. It avoids rousing sentiment and delivers us a more factually-based chronology of reports, augmented by simple diagrams, on how this theatre of war perilously ebbed and fl