Search results for ""Author Jean-Charles Stasi""

At the beginning of 1942, the Tirpitz, the heaviest battleship ever built by a European navy was on the cusp of breaking out into the north Atlantic. The prospect of a huge German battleship patrolling the Atlantic posed a grave threat to the convoys that served as the lifeline for an embattled Britain. After attempted bombing raids failed, a new and far more daring plan was created; to ram a battleship loaded with explosives into St. Nazaire, the only dry dock capable of supporting this unstoppable juggernaut.This volume in the Casemate Illustrated series gives a clear overview of the planning and execution of the raid and its aftermath, accompanied by 125 photographs and images, including colour profiles and maps.

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Four years before the Normandy landings, the French coast was the scene of another major episode in the Second World War. This was Operation Dynamo, much less well known than D-Day. And yet you only have to look at the statistics to see how important this part of the story of the Campaign of France was: between 27 May and 4 June, almost 340 000 French and British troops were evacuated from the Dunkirk pocket by a miscellaneous fleet of 850 boats, among which hundreds of fishing vessels, pleasure boats, lifeboats or Merchant Navy vessels. Thanks to the sailors’ courage but also the RAF pilots’ skill, this operation without precedent was a success which enabled the British to continue to fight the Germans, even though they had to leave behind most of their equipment and weapons. Replaced in its context, Operation Dynamo is here narrated in detail with numerous period photos, maps, aircraft profiles and uniform plates. This military operation and human adventure without precedent breathes again, 77 years later thanks to the film director Christopher Nolan, the author of the Batman trilogy and Interstellar which, with Dunkirk, has become an international blockbuster, to which a chapter of this book is devoted

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4 juin 1944, 18h30, sud de l'Angleterre. Des officiers de liaison montent à bord de vingt-deux bâtiments français. Enfermés avec les commandants, ils leur remettent une grande enveloppe cachetée. Dès le départ des Anglais, les « pachas » découvrent leur mission dans l'opération « Neptune » (nom de code donné au débarquement des troupes alliées en Normandie). Les équipages sont réunis. Les hommes découvrent qu'ils seront les premiers Français à contribuer au débarquement. Beaucoup parmi ces marins venus de France qui vont participer à la plus vaste opération navale de tous les temps ont rejoint de Gaulle en Grande-Bretagne. En revanche certains, à commencer par leur chef l'Amiral Jaujard, sont plus réticents à l'égard du général. C'est l'histoire de ces bateaux et de ces hommes qui forme le coeur du livre. Parmi eux, Querville avec son sous-marin la Junon qui a débarqué en Norvège un commando chargé de faire sauter une usine d'eau lourde; ou Levasseur avec l'Aconit qui a coulé deux U-Boote en douze heures. La participation des marins français est rarement, voire jamais, évoquée lorsqu'on célèbre les anniversaires du débarquement en Normandie. Il n'est que temps de réparer l'injustice faite à ces hommes, à leurs bâtiments et à la Marine Nationale.

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