Sublime

Colin Gubbins had been in his new job less than four weeks when the threatened invasion became a dramatic reality. On 16 July 1940 Adolf Hitler issued Directive No. 16, the Nazi invasion of Great Britain. Even Churchill felt that the final showdown was now just days away. ‘The scene has darkened swiftly,’ he wrote in a letter to President Roosevelt

Adolf Eichmann had been a Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and one of the architects of the Holocaust, a central figure at the Wannsee Conference that decided on the Final Solution, and, at the time of his capture, the highest-ranking Nazi official still alive. He had spent most of his time after the war living under a pseudonym in

Colin Gubbins’s office-based work came to an end shortly after five o’clock each Friday afternoon when he and Peter Wilkinson clambered into their Humber and drove down to Kent. Here, they spent the weekend helping to train Peter Fleming’s guerrilla unit. The work was exhausting and physically demanding. ‘Into this short time,’ wrote Gubbins, ‘we h

Greeks also suffered from the British blockade of Hitler’s empire—at least half a million died of hunger.

Try as he might, he could no longer stay awake. They had been in the boats now for five and a half days, and during that time almost everyone had come to look upon Worsley in a new light. In the past he had been thought of as excitable and wild—even irresponsible. But all that was changed now. During these past days he had exhibited an almost pheno

Senior figures in the War Office and Admiralty decided that sinking German ships would be more cost-effective than building British ones.

With a love of adventure and penchant for the impossible, dad, husband and captain Matt Knight was recommended to me by a mutual friend as the ideal man to lead my crew.

Gabriel Towerson,