Raiders

During World War II several daring raids were carried out by Allied and Axis forces against targets carefully selected for their strategic or propaganda values. These raids were as individual in character as the men who carried them out and equally unique in their objectives. John Laffin relates more than 20 such operations mounted by British, German, American, Australian, Italian and Canadian forces. Raiding appealed to British military men's psyche - and on the whole, they were good at it. Therefore, "Raiders" emphasizes attacks mounted by the British because they were involved in more theatres of war than any other combatants. John Laffin examines the qualities of successful raiders as well as their selection and training before looking in detail at individual missions. The exploits recorded here range from a British commando strike against Rommel's supposed HQ in the North African desert in 1941, to the daring surveys of the Normandy beaches in prepartion for Operation "Overlord"; from the German glider-borne assault on the great Belgian fortress of Eben Emael in 1940, to SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny's dramatic mission to snatch Mussolini from imprisonment on an Italian mountaintop in 1943. Here are the Gironde river exploits of the Special Boat Service in 1942 when frogmen commandos caused serious damage to four large enemy ships, and Operation "Jericho" in 1944, when a low-level attack by RAF Mosquito bombers blasted a huge hole in the wall of a Gestapo prison in France to allow imprisoned Resistance leaders to escape.