Richard O'Connor might be the most underrated British general of WW2, and he came close to winning the desert war before Rommel ever showed up. September 1940. Italy invades Egypt with an army of roughly 150,000 men. Britain's Western Desert Force has about 30,000. O'Connor commands it. In December he launches Operation Compass. It was planned as a five-day raid. Instead his troops overrun the Italian camps at Sidi Barrani, then keep going. Bardia falls. Tobruk falls. In two months they push more than 500 miles across Libya. The finale is Beda Fomm. The Italians are retreating along the coast road. O'Connor sends a small force straight across the open desert, through terrain nobody thought vehicles could handle, to get ahead of them and block the road. When the Italian columns arrive, the trap is already shut. After two days of fighting, the Italian 10th Army is finished. His signal to headquarters read: "Fox killed in the open." The final count: around 130,000 prisoners, about 400 tanks, and hundreds of guns captured. British losses were under 2,000 killed, wounded, and missing. O'Connor wanted to push on to Tripoli and kick the Axis out of North Africa entirely. London said no. His best troops were pulled out and shipped to Greece, where the campaign went badly. Days after the Germans arrived in Libya, Rommel was on the offensive. In April 1941, O'Connor was driving through the desert at night when his car ran straight into a German patrol. He spent the next two and a half years as a prisoner in Italy, locked in a castle outside Florence with other senior officers. He never stopped trying to escape. After Italy surrendered in 1943, he got out, made his way through German-occupied territory, and reached Allied lines. Within months he was commanding a corps in Normandy. He was arguably the best British field commander of the early war, and he spent the years he could have done the most damage behind barbed wire.