North Africa, 1942. Dust, heat, thirst, flies. For those who liked that sort of thing, it was a good clean fight: nothing to harm but the sand, the enemy and yourself. Striking hard and escaping fast, Fanny Barton's squadron play Russian roulette, flying their clapped out Tomahawks on ground-strafing forays. On the ground, the men of Captain Lampard's SAS patrol drive hundreds of miles behind enemy lines to plant bombs on German aircraft. This is the story of the desert war waged by the men of the RAF and SAS versus the Luftwaffe and the Afrika Korps - a war of no glamour and few heroes in a setting often more lethal than the enemy.