The Allied landings on the coast of Normandy on 6 June 1944 - the long-awaited D-Day - was not only the greatest amphibious military operation of all time, it was also the decisive turning point of the Second World War. Its success opened the way for the liberation of western Europe from Nazi tyranny, and for the downfall of Hitler's criminal regime. Yet it could all have gone horribly wrong.
An opposed seaborne landing on a fortified and heavily defended hostile coastline is one of the most difficult of all military operations to pull off. Winston Churchill - with his painful memories of the slaughter following the Gallipoli landings in the First World War - was only one of several Allied leaders with grave doubts about the viability of the project.
D-Day was saved thanks to an extraordinary and wide-ranging series of deceptions that weakened and confused the Nazis. It was known overall as 'Operation Bodyguard'. Bodyguard involved the creation of phantom armies, complete with dummy aircraft, tanks and landing craft, and scores of equally bogus German spies under Allied control feeding dud imaginary information to their Nazi handlers: all aimed at convincing the enemy that the D-Day invasion would fall around Calais, or in Norway, or near Bordeaux - anywhere, in fact, but its real target in Normandy.
Operation Bodyguard was a spectacular success, one of the greatest intelligence coups in history. Evidence from German sources confirms that Hitler held back his panzers around Calais for an astonishing seven weeks after D-Day rather than the mere fortnight expected by Allied planners - believing that the landings in Normandy were a feint and that the 'real' invasion was yet to come.
Sex, surveillance and the most sinister Nazi of them all in wartime Berlin
There is no book in English about the wartime Berlin 'salon' run by Kitty Schmidt under the secret control of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution
Salon Kitty was the most notorious brothel in the decadent Berlin of the Weimar Republic - the city of Cabaret. But after the Nazis took power, it became something more dangerous: a spying centre with every room wired for sound, staffed by women agents specially selected by the SS to coax secrets from their VIP clients. Masterminded by Reinhard Heydrich, the spymaster whom Hitler himself called 'the man with the iron heart', the exclusive establishment turned listening post was patronised by the Nazi leaders themselves, not knowing that hidden ears were listening.
One of the last untold stories of the Second World War, Salon Kitty's sensational true history is now revealed by historians Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Dr Julia Schrammel. After years of painstaking research and investigation, the story they tell sheds new light on Nazi methods of control and coercion, and the way that they used and abused sex for their own perverse purposes.
A revised edition of the candid, sometimes shocking, biography of Rupert Brooke revealing the very different reality behind the golden-boy façade of an English literary icon
Paragon of youthful beauty, romantic symbol of a lost England, and precociously gifted poet, Rupert Chawner Brooke died in a hospital ship off the Aegean island of Skyros in April 1915, aged just 27. All England mourned his passing.
But behind the glow of myth lies a darker reality. At the height of his promise a disappointment in love triggered a mental and physical collapse that brought his inner complexities to the surface. Letters reveal a man who was bisexual, misogynistic, anti-Semitic – and sometimes alarmingly unstable.
This revised edition of Nigel Jones's admired biography, including an account of a previously unknown affair of Brooke's, reveals a more conflicted and troubled individual than the gilded Adonis of English literary myth.
-
Nigel Jones is an author, a former editor at History Today and BBC history magazines, and has been a TV and radio broadcaster. He is the author of several histories and biographies, including 'The War Walk: A Journey along the Western Front', 'Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth' and 'Sir Oswald Mosley'.
1914 dawned with Britain at peace, albeit troubled by faultlines within and threats without... Nigel Jones depicts every facet of a year that changed Britain for ever. From gun-running in Ulster, to an attack by suffragettes on a Velasquez painting in the National Gallery; from the opening of London's first nightclub, to the embarking for Belgium of the British Expeditionary Force, he traces the events of a momentous year from its benign domestic beginnings to its descent into the nightmare of European war.
