Nicholas Rankin

Abwehr Enigma machine was different from the one used by the German armed services: it was smaller and had no Steckerbrett plug board at the front, so the code-breakers did not have to worry about cross-plugging, but its rotors ‘turned over’ far more often, not once every 26 letters, but 11, 15 and 19 times respectively on the three different wheel

By August 1940 Winston Churchill could see that the Second World War was different from the First. It was ‘a conflict of strategy, of organization, of technical apparatus, of science, mechanics and morale’. The problem was that the Germans seemed to have stolen a march on the British in many of these fields. But the newly inducted naval lieutenant

Three years of fighting across arid parts of Egypt and Libya was now entering its final bloody phase among towns and fields. General Rommel had called the war in the desert Krieg ohne Hass – war without hate. Though dust and sand grimed and gritted everything, some people had still talked romantically of a ‘clean’ war, perhaps because civilians wer

Gubbins had won his MC as a gunner in the First World War, fought against the Bolsheviks in revolutionary Russia and against Sinn Fein in the Irish Civil War of 1922–3, and spoke French, Russian and Urdu.

July 1940 was a key month in Britain’s reorganisation for total war. Two days after Keyes’s appointment, Army Order 112 formally authorised the British army’s Intelligence Corps, which set up its depot in Oxford University. On the same day, 19 July, the Cabinet established another new organisation, SOE, ‘to co-ordinate all action, by way of subvers

Royal Marines.

Contents List of Illustrations Maps Abbreviations and Acronyms Prologue 1 Day Trip to Dieppe, 1942 2 The Godfather 3 Technology and War 4 The Philosophy of the Pinch 5 Doing Deals 6 The Commandos Get Cracking 7 Mapping the Future 8 Mayhem in the Maghreb 9 Testing the Waters 10 Invasion of the Islands 11 Freeing the French 12 Breakthrough 13 Operati

2 30AU in Nazi Germany. As Hitler’s Third Reich collapsed under assault from Allied forces, small, mobile parties of 30AU men were able to seize key targets: industrial factories, often using slave-labour from concentration camps, major naval bases and experimental workshops developing new weapons of war. In one brilliant coup, 30AU also captured t