Since the beginning of the war, the British, along with their commonwealth allies, fought the Italian Army, the biting sand flies, the blistering heat and cold, damp nights along with choking sandstorms as their front-lines seesawed back and forth in “the blue.” Eventually, the British pushed Mussolini’s troops to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, with triumph in their grasp. But their victory was short lived because in early 1941, Gen. Erwin Rommel—the famed Desert Fox of the Afrika Korps—took command of the Axis force and in less than 18 months took back everything the British had gained. Now it was the British and their beleaguered Desert Air Force that had their backs against the pyramid walls of Egypt. If they couldn’t hold there, the oil wells of Iran and Iraq, the Suez Canal and the rest of the Middle East would soon be in German hands—a devastating blow to the Allied war effort. The Allied doom and gloom began to change in early 1943, as American fighter groups began to pour into the region, bringing with them their “flying tanks of the desert”—the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. Follow along with one of these pilots as he blasts his way across the deserts of North Africa.
Bloody Sunday
During my time at West Point I was anointed with the nickname of “Fox” by my classmates. It was due in part to the similarity of my last name Rhynard to that of the Fox in called Master Reynard. I graduated in 1941, nickname in hand and was sent to the Army Air Corps. My training in the P-40 began in Charlotte, North Carolina, in April of 1942. Originally, I was part of the
