Robin Cross – författare

Winston Churchill was truly a man of the world. In his long career as a soldier and statesman, and latterly as a global celebrity and artist, he visited and wrote about the length and breadth of the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Cuba, the Indian subcontinent, North, South and East Africa and the Soviet Union. From colonial wars to Cold War, Churchill was witness to the decline of Britain from the era of imperial power to the age of austerity in a world dominated by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Both his own status and that of Great Britain can be viewed through prisms ranging from the apogee of Empire to the privations of the post-war era, from the South African veldt to the bleakness of the Soviet Crimea during the Yalta Conference in February 1945, where the ‘Big Three’ – Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill – settled the shape of Europe that emerged after the defeat of the Third Reich.Man of the World provides a journey through his life and thought as it was filtered through the landscapes he encountered in a career almost unimaginable today: the Kaiser’s Germany in the days before the Great War; the United States in the Roaring Twenties; being in New York on the very day of the Wall Street Crash; the curdled delights of the Crimea during the Yalta Conference of 1945 and the French Riviera of the post-war years – all left their mark on him as he did on them.Winston Churchill always found his bouts of foreign travel, particularly in the Second World War, more invigorating than exhausting, regardless of the outcome of any individual trip – an aspect of his inexhaustible passion for life.

A dramatic and expertly rendered narrative of the Allied liberation of the South of France during Operation Dragoon in 1944.Operation Dragoon is the story of the Allied invasion of the South of France on August 15, 1944. It was, in effect, the second D-Day, launched two months after “Overlord,” the Allied invasion of Normandy. As such, it has often been overshadowed by its predecessor, but it significance cannot be underestimated. “Dragoon” was a largely American-French operation in which the British, who had argued for action in northern Italy, played a smaller role. After nearly five years of conflict, British war stamina had been severely sapped. In contrast, the French, who had been excluded from the overall planning of D-Day, played an important role in Dragoon, supplying the majority of the ground troops in a campaign which began on the beaches of the Riviera and ended in the cool, clear air of the Alpes Maritimes, the sacred ground of France. Operation Dragoon provides for the first time a complete overview of the liberation of the South of France—from strategic decisions made from the Allied and German high commands to the intelligence war waged by Allied code-breakers; from the German defeat of French resistance forces on the Vergers to the exploits of individual OSS agents on the ground as they strove to keep pace with a fast-moving battlefield. This is the story of the Allies inflicting on the Germany Army a Blitzkrieg-style defeat, expunging the lingering memories of the catastrophe of 1940.

Highlighting the most important conventional weapons of all time the book also embraces concepts, communications and inventions that help to ensure victory in the theatre of war.