Andre Hue was a daredevil. By the age of twenty the Anglo-Frenchman had survived shipwreck and years undercover in France, sabotaging German supply lines. Returning to Britain, he was recruited by SOE to parachute behind enemy lines on 5 June 1944, to unite resistance forces in Brittany and paralyse local German troops during the Allied invasion. Though Hue's mission was fraught with difficulty - he missed his landing site, his secret base camp became the site of a pitch battle and a band of Cossacks tried to hunt him down - he knew that thousands of lives depended on his success or failure . . .

In 1993 Ewen Southby-Tailyour joined the British Foreign Office for duties with the European Community Monitoring Mission. He was also tasked, informally, by MI6 to report on a few characters. Monitoring the cease-fire violations along the Confrontation Line between Croatia and the Republic of Serbian Krajina plus the humanitarian and economic issues for the regeneration of Dalmatia were professionally satisfying; as were a covert beach reconnaissance, interviewing war criminals and pacing the length of a 'secret' airfield that was eventually used by US Predator unmanned surveillance aircraft to support Croatia's ethnic cleansing of all Serbs from Krajina. Closing in on hard evidence that Germany and the US were breaking UN Arms Embargo 713 the author was caught in the diplomatic cross-fire between the Greeks, who supported Serbia and the French who supported Croatia. To prevent the French knowing of any illicit arms embargo he was order by the Greeks to falsify his reports. He resigned from the mission. This is a thought-provoking, disturbing tale of deceit and duplicity between European countries (and, notably, the US) all supposedly supporting a common cause-peace in the Balkans-but, in effect, helping to ethnically cleanse 200,000 Serbs from their 500 year-old homeland.

Since he was in charge of the amphibious operations in the Falklands War, it goes without saying that there is no one better qualified to tell the story of that aspect of the campaign than Commodore Michael Clapp.
Here he describes, with considerable candor, some of the problems met in a Navy racing to war and finding it necessary to recreate a largely abandoned operational technique in a somewhat ad hoc fashion. During the time it took to 'go south' some sense of order was imposed and a not very well defined command structure evolved, this was not done without generating a certain amount of friction.
He tells of why San Carlos Water was chosen for the assault and the subsequent inshore operations. Michael Clapp and his small staff made their stand and can claim a major role in the defeat of the Argentine Air and Land Forces.