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Author: Terry Crowdy Publisher: Osprey Publishing ISBN: 9781846032769 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Osprey's study of Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents during World War II (1939-1945). On average an SOE agent would be dead within three months of being dropped in the field. Terry Crowdy tells the extraordinary story of these agents, some of whom were women as young as 22, following them through their experiences beginning with their recruitment and unorthodox training methods, particularly the unarmed combat training provided by the notorious Fairburn and Sykes partnership. As well as detailing these controversial techniques, the training chapter also covers the tough physical training course and parachute training that all recruits had to endure before being sent into occupied Europe. Crowdy also examines the SOE's unique system of codes, which included each agent composing their own poem as well as using quotations from famous pieces of literature to convey secret messages, and explores the strengths and weaknesses of this system. Full-color artwork and photographs show the innovative equipment, including the S-Phones and Eureka sets, which allowed the agent to communicate directly with pilots and other agents. Lastly, the book recounts the incredible combat missions of the SOE agents, including operations in the field with Yugoslav and Greek partisans, as well as sabotage missions ranging from blowing up bridges to the raising of full-scale partisan armies as they attempted to fulfill Churchill's directive to set Occupied Europe ablaze.
Author: Terry Crowdy Publisher: Osprey Publishing ISBN: 9781846032769 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Osprey's study of Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents during World War II (1939-1945). On average an SOE agent would be dead within three months of being dropped in the field. Terry Crowdy tells the extraordinary story of these agents, some of whom were women as young as 22, following them through their experiences beginning with their recruitment and unorthodox training methods, particularly the unarmed combat training provided by the notorious Fairburn and Sykes partnership. As well as detailing these controversial techniques, the training chapter also covers the tough physical training course and parachute training that all recruits had to endure before being sent into occupied Europe. Crowdy also examines the SOE's unique system of codes, which included each agent composing their own poem as well as using quotations from famous pieces of literature to convey secret messages, and explores the strengths and weaknesses of this system. Full-color artwork and photographs show the innovative equipment, including the S-Phones and Eureka sets, which allowed the agent to communicate directly with pilots and other agents. Lastly, the book recounts the incredible combat missions of the SOE agents, including operations in the field with Yugoslav and Greek partisans, as well as sabotage missions ranging from blowing up bridges to the raising of full-scale partisan armies as they attempted to fulfill Churchill's directive to set Occupied Europe ablaze.
Author: Adrian Searle Publisher: Pen and Sword ISBN: 1473877733 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 201
Book Description
It’s been a State secret for more than 70 years: The official line in the UK has always been that it never happened – but this new work challenges the assertion that no German force set foot on British soil during World War Two (the Channel Islands excepted), on active military service. Churchill’s Last Wartime Secret reveals the remarkable story of a mid-war seaborne enemy raid on an Isle of Wight radar station. It describes the purpose and scope of the attack, the composition of the raiding German force and how it was immediately, and understandably, ‘hushed-up’ by Winston Churchill’s wartime administration, in order to safeguard public morale. Circumventing the almost complete lack of official British archival documentation, the author relies on compelling and previously undisclosed firsthand evidence from Germany to underpin the book’s narrative and claims; thus distinguishing it from other tales of rumored seaborne enemy assaults on British soil during the 1939-45 conflict. After examining the outcome and repercussions of this astonishing incident, what emerges is an event of major symbolic significance in the annals of wartime history.
Author: John Warwicker Publisher: Frontline Books ISBN: 9781848327177 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
'A carefully researched book on a long-neglected subject which fills a major gap in our Second World War knowledge' - Norman Longmate, author of If Britain Had Fallen British Secret Intelligence Service officers and others in the War Office were never convinced that appeasement would prevent a Nazi invasion. Defying high-level opposition, they quietly worked instead on preemptive 'Last Ditch' survival plans. These included a secret resistance network known as the GHQ Auxiliary Units. It was the only one in Europe prepared in advance of an enemy assault. The Auxunits were civilian 'stay-behinds'. One section worked as Patrols, usually consisting of half-a-dozen men in hidden underground operational bases. They were hurriedly selected immediately after the Dunkirk evacuation then trained and equipped with firearms, explosives and booby-traps. Instructed to 'stay-behind' underground as the enemy passed over, they were then to emerge each night to commit mayhem for as long as they could stay alive. Others, men and women, would remain behind above ground, to spy on the enemy and communicate intelligence to the Defense Force by a covert radio network. These Units are still effectively secret and this is the most comprehensive history published to date.
Author: R.V. Jones Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141957670 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 930
Book Description
Reginald Jones was nothing less than a genius. And his appointment to the Intelligence Section of Britain's Air Ministry in 1939 led to some of the most astonishing scientific and technological breakthroughs of the Second World War. In Most Secret War he details how Britain stealthily stole the war from under the Germans' noses by outsmarting their intelligence at every turn. He tells of the 'battle of the beams'; detecting and defeating flying bombs; using chaff to confuse radar; and many other ingenious ideas and devices. Jones was the man with the plan to save Britain and his story makes for riveting reading.
Author: Arthur Ward Publisher: Casemate Publishers ISBN: 1783469358 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 404
Book Description
By the spring of 1940, the phoney war suddenly became very real. In April Hitler's forces, invaded Norway and a month later began their assault on France and the Low Countries. The Anglo/French allies were routed. The British escaped to fight another day after evacuating the bulk of their armies at Dunkirk. When on 10 May Winston Churchill became Prime Minister he soon discovered that the nation's defenses were in a parlous state and a Nazi invasion was a very real possibility. By the end of the month, nearly a million British citizens had joined the Local Defense Volunteers, soon to become the Home Guard, of Dad's Army fame. Churchill, however, realized the Home Guard was initially of little more than PR value, an important morale booster. A more serious deterrent needed to be created if Hitler's panzer divisions and the full might of the blitzkrieg were to be thwarted. Consequently, to supplement the sorely ill-equipped regular forces (all of their tanks and most of their artillery had been abandoned in France) a new, British resistance force was required. The intentionally blandly named Auxiliary Units might have been the answer. Formed in the Summer of 1940, in great secrecy, this force of 'stay behind' saboteurs and assassins was intended to cause havoc behind the German front line should the Wehrmacht gain a foothold in Britain. Their mission was to go to cover, hiding in underground bunkers for the first 14 days of invasion and then springing up, at nightfall, to gather intelligence, interrogate prisoners, destroying fuel and ammunition dumps as they went about their deadly business. Each Auxilier knew his life expectancy was short, a matter of weeks. He also knew he could not tell a soul about his activities, even his spouse. 'Dads Army' they were not. Following the publication of his 50th anniversary history of the Battle of Britain, A Nation Alone, written in association with the RAF Museum, Arthur Ward looked deeper into the story of the Invasion Summer of 1940 and enjoyed unique opportunities to interview those involved with Auxiliary Units at the very top and in the front line, as volunteers in a six-man cell.
Author: Peter Dixon Publisher: ISBN: 9780993508035 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
Winston Churchill formed the Special Operations Executive in 1940 to take the fight to the enemy through subversion and sabotage. But there was a group of men whose job was to keep SOE secure, to give secret agents the skills that might just keep them alive, deep in enemy territory. Some became agents themselves. This book tells their stories.
Author: Patrick J. Buchanan Publisher: Forum Books ISBN: 0307405168 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 546
Book Description
Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen– Winston Churchill first among them–the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations. Among the British and Churchillian errors were: • The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France • The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler • Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest • The greatest mistake in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, ensuring the Second World War Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “the Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.
Author: Peter R. Mansoor Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107136024 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
A broad-ranging study of the relationship between alliances and the conduct of grand strategy, examined through historical case studies.
Author: Max Hastings Publisher: HarperCollins UK ISBN: 0007344112 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 94
Book Description
'I would choose this account over and above the rest. It is a fabulous book: full of perceptive insight that conveys all the tragedy, triumph, humour and intense drama of Churchill's time as wartime leader; and it is incredibly moving as a result' James Holland, Literary Review
Author: Martin Mace Publisher: Pen and Sword ISBN: 1783376643 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
The Special Operations Executive was one of the most secretive organizations of the Second World War, its activities cloaked in mystery and intrigue. The fate, therefore, of many of its agents was not revealed to the general public other than the bare details carved with pride upon the headstones and memorials of those courageous individuals.Then in 2003, the first batch of SOE personal files was released by the National Archive. Over the course of the following years more and more files were made available. Now, at last, it is possible to tell the stories of all those agents that died in action.These are stories of bravery and betrayal, incompetence and misfortune, of brutal torture and ultimately death. Some died when their parachutes failed to open, others swallowed their cyanide capsules rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo, many died in combat with the enemy, most though were executed, by hanging, by shooting and even by lethal injection.The bodies of many of the lost agents were never found, destroyed in the crematoria of such places as Buckenwald, Mauthausen and Natzweiler, others were buried where they fell. All of them should be remembered as having undertaken missions behind enemy lines in the knowledge that they might never return.
Author: Terry Crowdy
Author: Terry Crowdy
Author: Adrian Searle
Author: John Warwicker
Author: R.V. Jones
Author: Arthur Ward
Author: Peter Dixon
Author: Patrick J. Buchanan
Author: Peter R. Mansoor
Author: Max Hastings
Author: Martin Mace