Eighty years ago, the British army in North Africa enounters Erwin Rommel for the first time

British commitment to the southern Balkans was signalled unambiguously when the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill, visited Turkey then Greece. The duo were rapturously received by the public in Turkey, which provided some consolation when they were told by their hosts that the country was far to weak militarily to intervene against the likely German attack on Greece. The Turks tried to save British face further by accepting that was supplies intended for them might be diverted to Greece. The meetings in Athens formally set the seal on the British decision to send troops to support the Greeks. The British army had already encountered the Wehrmacht (and the Luftwaffe ) in Libya, where the first elements of what was to become the Afrika Korps had arrived under the command of Erwin Rommel, then an unknown name to the British. Operation Unternehmen Sonnenblume (Operation Sunflower) was intended to rescue the Italians from the r