This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of flame which came up and almost blinded us from our guns.

Late in 1942, after the success of Operation Torch, the Allies finally gained a foothole in North Africa.

What followed was a hard-fought and often overlooked campaign in Tunisia,

a brutal contest that would see some of the toughest fighting of the war, as British,

American and French troops faced seasoned Axis forces desperate to hold on to their last toehold on the continent. It was a campaign of contrasts, victory and miscalculation, operation and

rivalry. It would shape how the Allies fought together for the rest of the war.

To tell that story, I'm joined by historian and author Saul David,

whose new book, Tunis Grad, How the Allies Won North Africa and Set the Stage for Dede,

brings to life the drama, the chaos and the human cost of the campaign. So thanks for joining me.

So I think perhaps we should start by setting the scene. What was the situation in North Africa

in the run-up to the Tunisian campaign? Certainly November 1942 and it had proved to be a double blow for the Germans.

Well, the fighting began in North Africa a couple of years earlier in 1940. In fact, September

1940, so almost exactly two years earlier, when Mussolini decided to create his new Roman

empire in North Africa and bridge to the gap, gap actually between a colony that Italy had held

since 1911, that's Libya, and one that he recently got his hands on in East Africa, which

was Abyssinia. And the country in the way, or one of the countries in the way, was Egypt.

So if you can get your hands on Egypt, not only will you be able to create this lambridge down to Abyssinia eventually, but you can also get control of the Suez Canal.

Strategically, for the Italians, this would be interdicting the British supply lines to the rest of their empire, and it would allow them really to dominate the Mediterranean. So there was a lot of

sense in trying to get to the Suez Canal. But first of all, you had to get through a British

and Commonwealth force, which was in Egypt, not as part of, people often think of Egypt as an imperial

...