2nd New Zealand Division

The losses trigger a diplomatic reaction almost as fast as the military one.

When word reaches Wellington that New Zealand troops, the same founding contingent Ralph Bagnold recruited out of the 2nd New Zealand Division back in the summer of 1940, have been committed to an entirely new theatre of war without New Zealand's government being consulted, the Prime Minister formally protests to London.

The remaining New Zealanders are shortly withdrawn from the unit altogether, closing out a connection that had defined the LRDG since its very first patrols.

Levitha is a prelude.

Are you going for a more rugged-y coastal look rather than a sandy desert?

It's going for a sort of desert-y look because it's going for the Mariff Line, which is where the New Zealand Division, including 8th Armoured Brigade, are trying to flank the German line to open the way for 8th Army.

They're sort of smacking to Niz.

But it's not like, how can I put it, it's not like overtly, obviously sandy desert-y.

In January 1943, an LRDG patrol becomes the first element of 8th Army to cross into Tunisia, locating an unmapped route through the hills that afterward becomes known as Wilder's Gap, after the New Zealand officer who found it.

Two months later, the New Zealand division uses that same route to outflank the fortified Axis defensive line at Marath from the south, a manoeuvre that helps break one of the last major defensive positions standing between 8th Army and total victory in North Africa.

It is, in miniature, everything the unit has done since Gebel, Sheriff and Murzuk, finding the way through ground everyone else has written off and letting a much larger force follow behind.

Axis forces in Tunisia surrender in May 1943, and with them goes the entire premise the long-range desert group was built around.