Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid (Paperback)

by Brian Loring Villa (Author)

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Product Details

Paperback: 327 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; New ed edition (Dec 1 1994)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195410610
ISBN-13: 978-0195410617
Shipping Weight: 490 g
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Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #496,494 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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Review

"There have been many books on this national trauma, but I suspect Villa's will be the one that stands the text of time." Now Magazine (January 1994)

`a painful reminder of the fearful price men pay when governments fail to play by the rules' The Ottawa Citizen

`challenging book ... Mr Villa has written what is virtually an exciting detective story' Geoffrey Powell, Birmingham Post

`a book which is lucid, ingenious, well-documented' Philip Ziegler, Spectator

`a meticulous, well-documented and perceptive academic analysis ... very well worth reading' British Army Review

"Villa's book is historical writing at its best." Victoria Times-Colonist (January 1994)

"It is well worth reading." Calgary Herald (9 October 1994)

Product Description

One of the most memorable events of the Second World War took place on 19 August 1942, when the largest amphibious raiding force in modern history made its way across the English Channel towards the German-occupied French port of Dieppe. The result, a few hours later, was a disaster. That some 3,300 Canadian soldiers and officers should wait over two-and-a-half years for combat and then be killed, wounded, or captured in a single morning is one of the greatest tragedies of the Second World War. For more than forty-five years a cloud of mystery has hung over the event, which has seemed to defy all rational explanation. On the basis of much new research and a meticulous and sensitive analysis of all the forces - political, military, diplomatic, and personal - that shape the disaster, Villa casts new light on why it was executed when it was known to court failure, and who was responsible. This book contains revealing studies of Britain's chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force who - in the midst of a war that seemed on the way to being lost - acquiesced in the ill-fated raid, and of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, whose responsibility of Dieppe becomes clear as in no other study to date. This is an engrossing analysis of decision-making, and of the numerous motivations that lay behind the execution of the raid on Dieppe. It is also a brilliant revisionist contribution to the literature of the Second World War. This new edition has been revised to include an epilogue with new evidence in support of the book's premise that the decision-making process was subverted.

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