In North Africa in late 1942 something happened that changed not just the war but also the trajectory of future war. It influenced two recent wars in Iraq, and foreshadowed how armies train for war today. This is the story of a final showdown between two titans of war in uninhibited warfare without buildings, cities or populations.

The British Army were being pushed back towards Cairo at a rate of almost 100 miles a day. Within a week, Rommel would take Egypt. The allies would lose the Mediterranean, Asia, the Iraq oilfields and its nascent American ally. At the moment of greatest peril, using unorthodox tactics and on the back foot, the British army fought the Panzerarmee to a standstill and then routed and decimated the German armour.

This is the story of the ‘forgotten’ Battle for Egypt, and the inside picture of the tactics that stopped the German tanks in their tracks. It was the turning point. Colonel Tim Collins with CGI re-enactment shows what actually happens in desert theatres under lightning-fast mobile conditions in mans' closest approximation to total war. Tim Collins uses his own experiences in Iraq and the Middle East to elucidate the phantom fluidity of desert war, and for the first time shows what it looked like. He gets inside the head of the British commanders facing Rommel in a hundred mile battlefield pitted with danger. He reveals the unorthodox ‘battle group’ tactics later taken up by modern NATO armies and the successful use of combined all-arms formations adopted by the British army today.

The strategic significance of Egypt and Iraq was crucial, its ramifications even greater than its significance today. Colonel Collins, having fought in the most recent desert campaigns in Iraq, will show how tactics learned in the 1940s influences Britain's role in Iraq, and how it shaped he tactics of modern NATO armies. Britain first mastered the desert through her navigation of the seas, also a treacherous, featureless terrain. However, whilst Germany deployed the new science of mobile war to devastating effect, the British army dismissed its desert experts as unorthodox and dangerous.

This is the story of four desert commanders: Auchinleck, Alexander, Montgomery and Dorman Smith. The story will be told with film archive, key military personnel and historians, as well as CGI re-enactment. This is ‘living’ history. Blistering controversy over the personalities involved provoke fierce military disagreement today. This will be a forceful, authorial signature tour-de-force with a forensic new take on the controversy.