Playfair described the Western Desert of 1940 as being 240 miles wide (i.e. from the Nile to the Libyan border) and 150 miles wide (i.e. from the Mediterranean to the latitude of Siwa oasis), while the region to the south was referred to as the Inner Desert.[6] However, during the Second World War the term Western Desert came to apply not only to the coastal desert of Egypt but to the area fought over in Libya also, ranging beyond the Egypt-Libya border to Gazala, Cyrenaica and even El Agheila.