为期3年的北非战役始于1940年6月,轴心国和同盟国军队在一系列进攻与反攻中在沙漠里反复拉锯。利比亚成为意大利的殖民地已有几十年,英军则从1882年起就驻扎在邻国埃及。1940年意大利对同盟国宣战后,两支军队几乎立刻就发生了小规模战斗。1940 年9月,意大利军队入侵埃及,在随后的12月反攻中,英国与印度联军俘虏了约13万意军。希特勒对这次失利的回应是,派去埃尔文.隆美尔将军率领的新组建的“非洲军团”。在跨越利比亚和埃及的几场持久、血腥的拉锯战后,1942年末,双方迎来战事转折点——第二次阿拉曼战役,伯纳德.蒙哥马利中将的英国第8集团军突破防线,将轴心国军队从埃及一路赶到突尼斯。11月的火炬行动中,英美联军数千部队在北非西部登陆,加入攻势,最终迫使剩余的轴心国部队于1943年5月在突尼斯全部投降,结束了北非战役。”
Beginning in June of 1940, the North African Campaign took place over the course of three years, as Axis and Allied forces pushed each other back and forth across the desert in a series of attacks and counterattacks. Libya had been an Italian colony for several decades and British forces had been in neighboring Egypt since 1882. When Italy declared war on the Allied Nations in 1940, the two armies began skirmishing almost immediately. An Italian invasion of Egypt in September of 1940 was followed by a December counterattack where British and Indian forces captured some 130,000 Italians. Hitler's response to this loss was to send in the newly formed "Afrika Korps" led by General Erwin Rommel. Several long, brutal pushes back and forth across Libya and Egypt reached a turning point in the Second Battle of El Alamein in late 1942, when Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery's British Eighth Army broke out and drove Axis forces all the way from Egypt to Tunisia. In November, British and American forces landed thousands of troops across western North Africa in Operation Torch, which joined the attack, eventually helping force the surrender of all remaining Axis troops in Tunisia in May of 1943, ending the Campaign for North Africa.