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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: 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: Damien Lewis Publisher: ISBN: 9781848668539 Category : Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
In the bleak moments after defeat on mainland Europe in winter 1939, Winston Churchill knew that Britain had to strike back hard. So Britain's wartime leader called for the lightning development of a completely new kind of warfare, recruiting a band of eccentric free-thinking warriors to become the first 'deniable' secret operatives to strike behind enemy lines, offering these volunteers nothing but the potential for glory and all-but-certain death. Churchill's Secret Warriors tells the story of the daring victories for this small force of 'freelance pirates', undertaking devastatingly effective missions against the Nazis, often dressed in enemy uniforms and with enemy kit, breaking all previously held rules of warfare. Master storyteller Damien Lewis brings the adventures of the secret unit to life, weaving together the stories of the soldiers' brotherhood in this compelling narrative, from the unit's earliest missions to the death of their leader just weeks before the end of the war.
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: Ian Hall Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN: 9781532793387 Category : Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
Was principled gentleman Winston Churchill also the master of nasty tactics? You bet he was! Winston Churchill had done it all. In the British Army, he had fought in India and Egypt, been under fire, and returned it; he'd killed the enemy. Churchill was captured, put in a PoW camp, and escaped, surviving behind enemy lines for weeks. He'd invented tanks, floating harbors, grenade launchers; turns out Germans did the worst thing possible... they'd attacked Britain and made Churchill mad. With his back to the wall in 1940, & Nazi invasion imminent, not only did Churchill use every trick in the book... with the uncovering of new WW2 secrets, it turns out he actually wrote the book! Literally! But Churchill's Secret Armies is not a biography of the famous leader; it is a look at the fruits of his labor, the book discloses the plethora of special forces, units, and departments, Churchill formed to "get the job done." This was not a gentleman's war; this was back-to-the-wall fighting dirty, and Churchill was a master. From the birth of the well-known British Commandoes to the obscure Cichociemni (Polish Special Forces)... From the code breakers at Bletchley Park to the men of the 712th Survey Flotilla (who surveyed the Normandy beaches)... Churchill's Secret Armies is a page-turner for the history buff, and an absolute must-read for anyone who 'thinks' they know 'all' about World War Two.
Author: Peter Dixon Publisher: ISBN: 9780993508042 Category : 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: Damien Lewis Publisher: ISBN: 9781623659189 Category : HISTORY Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
When France fell to the Nazis in 1939, Churchill declared that Britain would resist the advance of the German army-alone if necessary. Churchill commanded the Special Operations Executive to secretly develop of a very special kind of military unit that would operate on their own initiative deep behind enemy lines. The units would be licensed to kill, fully deniable by the British government, and a ruthless force to meet the advancing Germans. The very first of these "butcher-and-bolt" units-the innocuously named Maid Honour Force-was led by Gus March-Phillipps, a wild British eccentric of high birth, and an aristocratic, handsome, and bloodthirsty young Danish warrior, Anders Lassen. Amped up on amphetamines, these assorted renegades and sociopaths undertook the very first of Churchill's special operations--a top-secret, high-stakes mission to seize Nazi shipping in the far-distant port of Fernando Po, in West Africa. Though few of these early desperadoes survived WWII, they took part in a series of fascinating, daring missions that changed the course of the war. It was the first stirrings of the modern special-ops team, and all of the men involved would be declared war heroes when it was all over.The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare focuses on a dozen of these extraordinary men, weaving their stories of brotherhood, comradely, and elite soldiering into a gripping narrative yarn, from the earliest missions to Anders Larssen's tragic death, just weeks before the end of the war.
Author: Noreen Riols Publisher: Pan Macmillan ISBN: 023077170X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
‘My mother thought I was working for the Ministry of Ag. and Fish.’ So begins Noreen Riols’ compelling memoir of her time as a member of Churchill’s ‘secret army’, the Special Operations Executive. It was 1943, just before her eighteenth birthday, Noreen received her call-up papers, and was faced with either working in a munitions factory or joining the Wrens. A typically fashion-conscious young woman, even in wartime, Noreen opted for the Wrens - they had better hats. But when one of her interviewers realized she spoke fluent French, she was directed to a government building on Baker Street. It was SOE headquarters, where she was immediately recruited into F-Section, led by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster. From then until the end of the war, Noreen worked with Buckmaster and her fellow operatives to support the French Resistance fighting for the Allied cause. Sworn to secrecy, Noreen told no one that she spent her days meeting agents returning from behind enemy lines, acting as a decoy, passing on messages in tea rooms and picking up codes in crossword puzzles. Vivid, witty, insightful and often moving, this is the story of one young woman’s secret war, offering readers an authentic and compelling insight into what really went on in Churchill’s ‘secret army’ from one of its last surviving members.
Author: Madhusree Mukerjee Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited ISBN: 935305009X Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 371
Book Description
Winston Churchill has been venerated as a resolute statesman and one of the great political minds of the last century. But, as Madhusree Mukerjee reveals in this groundbreaking historical investigation, his deep-seated bias against Indians precipitated one of the world's greatest man-made disasters -- the Bengal Famine of 1943 -- resulting in the deaths of over four million Indians. Combining meticulous research with a vivid narrative, Churchill's Secret War places this overlooked tragedy into the larger context of World War II, India's freedom struggle and Churchill's legacy.
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: Arthur Ward
Author: Arthur Ward
Author: Damien Lewis
Author: Martin Mace
Author: Albert Edward Cocks
Author: Ian Hall
Author: Peter Dixon
Author: Damien Lewis
Author: Noreen Riols
Author: Madhusree Mukerjee
Author: John Warwicker