Reply To: North Africa Photos

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Great photos, @thunderchildobs !

I’ve never traveled these battlefields myself but in accounts and old photos you really do see a lot of green in certain places, along the Cyrenaican plateau (such as in “Northeast of Benghazi” photos thunderchildobs posts). And of course Tunisia, which in a lot of the fighting was barely a “desert” at all.

For some reason, it seems the higher the elevation, the greener the landscape. The really “desert” spots you see tend to be the lower areas, with the Qattara Depression being a borderline moonscape.

Kind of a generalization, and again, just going off old photos I’ve seen. I’m sure @thunderchildobs would know better. 😀

Those are exactly the kind of Roman / Ptolemaic ruins I was suggesting the guys build if they really want to do some ruins.

What I like most about your photos is how they show how absolutely FLAT a lot of that terrain is. Of course, hull down shielding is still possible using rises and folds in the ground barely perceptible from these vantage points, as we discuss in the Weekender episode. But these can be honestly challenging to recreate on the tabletop in proper proportion and scale.

And lastly, fortifications were all over the place in the desert. The Italians had fortifications along the Egyptian-Libyan frontier, there’s the Mareth line in Tunisia, the British “brigade boxes” at Gazala, then Mersa Metruh, and finally along the Alamein line, and of course Tobruk. German and especially Italian field works also became very elaborate during the buildup to Second Alamein.