In late October 1942, the fate of the Suez Canal and Middle Eastern oil was defended by packing crates, calico cloth and a fake wooden water pipeline. This episode explains why the 40-mile gap between the Mediterranean and the impassable Qattara Depression made flanking impossible, and why the intelligence picture was so lopsided: Ultra decrypts gave Montgomery Rommel’s order of battle and fuel state, while Rommel had gone blind after Australians captured a signals unit revealing the compromised American code of Colonel Bonner Fellers, stolen from the US embassy in Rome by Italian agents.

Operation Bertram conditioned Axis reconnaissance to ignore static rubbish dumps that were later filled with shells and petrol, while dummy tanks and a deliberately slow pipeline in the south convinced Rommel to split his armour. We then walk through the Devil’s Gardens of half a million Teller and S mines, the thousand-gun barrage of Operation Lightfoot, why infantry went in ahead of the tanks, sappers probing sand with bayonets, General Stumme’s death by heart attack, Montgomery’s crumbling phase, the stand of the Rifle Brigade at Outpost Snipe, tankers sunk in the Mediterranean, Operation Supercharge, and Hitler’s stand-fast telegram that froze Rommel for 24 fatal hours.

• How the Fellers code leak and its discovery flipped the intelligence war in the desert
• The psychology of Operation Bertram and the sun shields that disguised tanks as trucks
• Why Teller mines let infantry walk over them and how sappers cleared 24-foot lanes under fire
• Outpost Snipe and the arithmetic of 81 German tanks against 800 British
• Hitler’s hold-at-all-costs order and the abandonment of Italian infantry without trucks