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.

4 juin 1944, 18h30, sud de l'Angleterre. Des officiers de liaison montent a bord de vingt-deux batiments francais. Enfermes avec les commandants, ils leur remettent une grande enveloppe cachetee. Des le depart des Anglais, les " pachas " decouvrent leur mission dans l'operation " Neptune " (nom de code donne au debarquement des troupes alliees en Normandie). Les equipages sont reunis. Les hommes decouvrent qu'ils seront les premiers Francais a contribuer au debarquement. Beaucoup parmi ces marins venus de France qui vont participer a la plus vaste operation navale de tous les temps ont rejoint de Gaulle en Grande-Bretagne. En revanche certains, a commencer par leur chef l'Amiral Jaujard, sont plus reticents a l'egard du general. 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 debarque en Norvege un commando charge de faire sauter une usine d'eau lourde; ou Levasseur avec l'Aconit qui a coule deux U-Boote en douze heures. La participation des marins francais est rarement, voire jamais, evoquee lorsqu'on celebre les anniversaires du debarquement en Normandie. Il n'est que temps de reparer l'injustice faite a ces hommes, a leurs batiments et a la Marine Nationale.

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

Quatre ans avant le debarquement allie en Normandie, le littoral francais a ete le theatre d'un autre episode majeur de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Il s'agit de l'Operation Dynamo, nettement moins connue que le Jour J. Et pourtant, il suffit de rappeler quelques chiffres pour mesurer l'importance de cette page de l'histoire de la Campagne de France : entre le 27 mai et le 4 juin, pres de 350 000 soldats britanniques et francais ont ete evacues de la poche de Dunkerque par une flotte heteroclite de 850 bateaux. Pres de 80 ans apres, Jean-Charles Stasi, auteur de plusieurs livres a succes aux editions Heimdal, revient sur ce fait majeur du dernier conflit mondial, de la genese a ses consequences, dans un ouvrage au style alerte, illustre de nombreuses photos en noir et blanc et en couleurs, mais aussi de cartes, d'infographies, de profils d'avions et de bateaux.

Ils sont un peu les oublies de l'histoire du Debarquement. Dans la nuit du 5 au 6 juin 1944, alors que les hommes des 82e et 101e divisions aeroportees americaines et ceux de la 6e division Airborne britannique s'appretent a sauter sur la Normandie, trente-six commandos francais sont largues sur la Bretagne. Ils appartiennent au Special Air Service (SAS), une unite des forces speciales britanniques creee en juillet 1941 et dont la devise est " who dares wins " (qui ose gagne). Si leur effectif est bien plus modeste que celui de leurs camarades parachutistes allies, leur mission n'en est pas moins capitale : coordonner et entrainer la Resistance - tres active dans cette region - pour empecher les Allemands qui y sont stationnes d'aller renforcer les troupes deja positionnees sur la cote ou a proximite. Les trente-six hommes qui vont sauter sont des elements precurseurs, ils doivent creer deux bases permettant l'arrivee du reste de l'effectif et de materiel dans les jours suivants afin de lancer des operations de guerilla et de sabotage : Samwest, dans la foret de Duhault (Cotes d'Armor), et Dingson, dans la foret de Saint-Marcel (Morbihan). Tout au long de la bataille de Normandie, l'effectif des SAS francais ne va cesser de croitre et ils vont jouer un role majeur pour la liberation de la Bretagne. C'est leur histoire meconnue qui est racontee dans ce livre, de leur entrainement en Grande-Bretagne jusqu'a leurs derniers combats en Hollande, en avril 1945. Avec de tres nombreuses photos d'epoque, des objets et des armes ayant appartenu a certains de ces parachutistes, des cartes et des infographies pour revivre au plus pres le quotidien de ces combattants d'elite au cours de l'ete 1944. Ouvrage edite en partenariat avec le Musee de la Resistance bretonne de Saint-Marcel (Morbihan). Journaliste et ecrivain, Jean-Charles Stasi est l'auteur d'une vingtaine d'ouvrages dont plusieurs consacres a la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Apres avoir relate l'epopee du commando Kieffer (Commando Kieffer, les Francais debarquent en Normandie, Heimdal 2014), il tenait a raconter l'histoire de ces autres combattants francais ayant pris part aux combats du Jour J.

In June 1944, Johannes Boerner is 19 years and Leon Gautier 21. These two elite soldiers will take part in the battle of Normandy in the frontline, each convinced to fight for the good cause. One will experience the thrill of victory, the other the humiliation of defeat and prison camps. Seventy years later, they live in the same place, Ouistreham, a seaside resort of the Calvados where Leon Gautier landed among the 177 French of the mythical Commando Kieffer. Johannes Boerner, him, married a Norman and became French in 1956. They are friends and reflect together their experience so that humanity never again know the horror of World War II.

Tuesday, 6th June 1944: 130,000 Allied soldiers arrived on the beaches of Normandy. Among them, 177 Frenchmen. If this number seems modest, its symbolic weight is immense. These men who had refused the Nazi occupation rediscovered the land of their birth, arms in hand, four years after having left. They formed part of the commandos, those elite corps created by Churchill after the disastrous evacuation of Dunkirk. At their head, Philippe Kieffer, a banker for 40 years, whose enthusiasm and obstinacy had combined to convince the British to accept the French at the heart of their shock troops. But the importance of "Commando Kieffer" to the success of Operation Overlord is not simply limited to the symbolic. On D-Day, the French Green Berets would achieve, at the price of heavy losses, all of their objectives, notably the taking of the casino at Ouistreham, transformed by the Germans into a powerfully fortified bunker. Illustrated with many photos, maps, plans, and infographics which plunge the reader into the heart of the action, this book permits one to follow the extroardinary course of action more closely than ever, from their exhaustive training in Great Britain up until the final raids at the beginning of 1945.

More than seventy-five years after wards, "Chariot" is still thought of as the most daring and most spectacular commando operation of the whole of WWII, called on the other side of the Channel "the greatest raid of all time". Indeed you had to be mad or British to go up the estuary of the River Loire at night, into Saint-Nazaire in order to ram an old destroyer full of explosives on a time fuse against the Joubert docks. And all this was done to make the only dry-dock vast enough to take the super cruiser Tirpitz, the terror of all the Allied navies, totally unusable. This raid had as tremendous an impact in France as it did in Britain, proving to the Allies and to all of occupied Europe that the Third Reich was not invulnerable. To tell the story of this extraordinary coup de main, Jean-Charles Stasi has consulted the German, British and French archives, interviewed former commandoes as well as the inhabitants of Saint-Nazaire who witnessed the raid. His tale is lively and alert and is illustrated with a lot of period photographs, as well as maps, drawings and boat profiles, to plunge the reader into the heart of the action and to allow him relive the preparations for this extraordinary operation. Text in French.

Marcel Migeo is a big name in the heroic epoch of French aviation, even though he is not as famous as Mermoz, Guillaumet or Saint-Exupery - he knew all three of them. Refusing a path all mapped-out as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance, he chose aviation because of his taste for travel and adventure. In January 1923, he left for Syria, sent there as a fighter pilot in the 53rd Escadrille of the Levant, based at Deir-ez-zor. On a Breguet XIV he took part in peace keeping operations in Syria, earning himself the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille du Levant and bar. Each day he wrote down the important events of his daily life in his moleskin notebook: his flying missions, his relations with the local population, his discovery of Syrian towns and countryside. These notes gave rise to a manuscript, unpublished until today. He became an insurance broker in his native city, Reims. Marcel Migeo wrote ten or so books most of which were devoted to flying. We owe him accounts of the war, like Batailles dans le ciel (Grand Prix Litteraire de l'Aero-Club de France) and biographies of Saint-Exupery, Henri Guillaumet, Maryse Bastie and Dider Daurat. Almost a hundred years later, his writings on Syria have a pertinent and astonishingly contemporary flavour since the country is being torn apart by a six-year-old civil war which has taken on an international dimension. The journalist and writer, Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, himself from Reims, has written the preface to this book as a tribute to the memory of Marcel Migeo whom he knew and whose tales of youth in turn have something to do with developing his own interest in that heroic period of aviation.

The Normandy Landings of 6 June 1944 were a major and decisive episode of the Second World War and have been, for more than sixty years, the object of countless books, films, investigations, reports and television series. However, is it known that D-Day was preceded by, on 27 April 1944, a tragic rehearsal that resulted in over nine-hundred deaths and which remained a secret for decades ? Is it known that the beautiful Lily Sergueiev, an artist and great traveller, was considered by the Allies as their best disinformation agent....and by the Germans as their most efficient agent in Great Britain ? Or is it known that, Lionel Crabb, the Royal Navy's star frogman, was the inspiration for Ian Fleming's character, James Bond ? Is it known that the Germans' favourite song Lili Marlene, was also very popular with the allied soldiers ? These are some of the surprising revelations contained in this book which is both original and informative, based on over half a century of research undertaken by Philippe Bauduin and which casts a new light on D-Day and the Battle of Normandy. Fascinated by new technology that he discovered during the summer of 1944, a time when he was still a teenager, Philippe Bauduin went on to undertake a scientific career which notably led him to set up the GANIL in Caen (Large Heavy Ion National Accelerator). He is the author of seventeen books and numerous articles on various aspects of the Landings. Jean-Charles Stasi has worked as a journalist since 1985 and is the author of twenty books, most of which deal with the Second World War. He was awarded the Prix Grand Temoin 2007 and the Grand Prix de la Legion d'Honneur 2008 for his book L'Epopee du Normandie-Niemen, co-written with Roland de la Poype.

The period between the two World Wars is an extremely interesting but largely unknown part of the German aviation history. Signed in June 1919 and promulgated in January 1920, the Treaty of Versailles included many measures to limit the Germany's rearmament: it revoked the right to having tanks, artillery and military aviation, which caused the dissolution of the Luftstreitkraften. However, the Treaty did not damage the aeronautical industry as much, which indeed managed to bypass the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty regarding building vehicles and equipment, especially in other countries. For pilot training and equipment testing, Germany could count on the secret aviation school in Lipetsk, USSR, allowing the Weimar Republic to develop aeronautical expertise without France and the UK knowing. The school of Lipetsk closed in September 1933, a few months after the Nazis seized power in Germany. In 1935, the Third Reich restored its air force: the Luftwaffe, which will become in 1939, on the eve of World War II, the most powerful military aviation of the Western world. Historian Jacques Pernet - an expert in German and American aviation - and journalist and writer Jean-Charles Stasi vividly tell us the story of German aviation in this richly illustrated book.

A major event of the Second World War, the landing of June 6, 1944 has been, for more than seventy years, the subject of countless books, films, surveys, reportages and TV series. Nowadays many are aware of the unprecedented technological achievements implied in the planning and construction of two artificial harbours, or of the heroic sacrifice of the Rangers under Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder's command, who stormed the Pointe du Hoc; or again of the martyrdom the of GIs of the 29th and 1st Divisions of the American infantry on Omaha Beach, which went down in history by the sad name of "Bloody Ohama ". But did you know that the D Day was preceded in late April 1944 by a similar event that took place off the Slapton Sands coast, in Devon, and that caused the death of more than seven hundred soldiers, yet remaining a secret for decades? Did you know that the beautiful Lily Sergeyev, artist and traveller, was considered by the Allies one of their best agents... and by the Germans as one of their most effective spies in Britain? Did you know that Lionel Crabb, sentinel diver of the Royal Navy on the Normandy coast, inspired Ian Fleming to create the character of James Jump? Did you know that the US troops, when completely surrounded in Mortain, were supplied with penicillin, morphine and plasma by dropping empty bomb shells stuffed with chocolate bars used as a cushion to avoid damages? Did you know that Lili Marlene, the Germans' favourite song, was also popular among Allied soldiers? These are only some of the original and instructive revelations you will find in this book, which is based on the rigorous research carried out in over half a century by Philippe Bauduin, who is passionate about the Landing and the Battle of Normandy since his childhood, and is author of a dozen books on the subject as well as numerous articles.