“The clubhouse was cozy and rustic and typical of a small marina with teak furniture set among a plethora of maritime-related memorabilia and framed pictures of the battle of El Alamein.”
~ Excerpt From KV 66: League of the Sacred Ankh.
El Alamein is a town located on Egypt’s Mediterranean north coast, approximately 100 kilometers west of Alexandria. The city’s history, in fact, dates back to the Roman era, and at this time, it was known as the city of Leucaspis.
This ancient settlement was later destroyed in 365 by a tsunami triggered by an earthquake somewhere off the coast of Crete. Ironically, it was only recently discovered in the 1980s when engineers were building roads near our protagonists’ very marina as featured in League of the Sacred Ankh.
However, the area surrounding El Alamein is more associated with WW2 and the famed campaigns between General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army and Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
Winston Churchill surmised the importance of this encounter with two notable quotes.
The first was during a briefing to members of parliament immediately after victory in El Alamein, where he said:
“Now this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
The second was after the end of World War 2 where he recounted:
“Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat”