My favourites, for sentimental reasons, would be Stalingrad on land and Midway at sea because those were the two battles that originally sparked my interest in military and naval history. My introduction to Stalingrad was the “Stalingrad” episode of the TV series The World at War, and my introduction to Midway was the Charlton Heston movie of the same name. As I said, they’re sentimental favourites – but even with all the other battles I’ve learned about since then, they still both rank highly as battles that were of great historical significance, that have a lot to teach about the strategic, operational and tactical aspects of warfare, and which are riveting stories in their own right. And they both occured in the middle-to-late part of 1942 (with Stalingrad dribbling a bit into early 1943), which was the “deep war” phase of WWII: the phase after the period of initial Axis successes but before the period of Allied supremacy, the phase during which the ultimate outcome of the war was still in doubt for both sides.