The Magnificent Bastards

Sierra Leone’s civil war lasted from 1991 until 2002.  It was marked by exceptional levels of cruelty and suffering.  During this civil war the United Nations, neighboring West African states, and the United Kingdom launched military interventions into Sierra Leone.  The United Kingdom’s intervention was called Operation Palliser.  In September 2000 eleven British soldiers participating in Operation Palliser were captured by a militia gang known as the West Side Boys.  When it became clear negotiating with the West Side Boys was proving futile, the British decided to take military action to free their soldiers.  William Fowler’s “Operation Barras” tells the story of what happened.

On November 20th, 1953 thousands of French paratroopers dropped into a place called Dien Bien Phu.  Dien Bien Phu is a small valley in the northern part of Vietnam close to Laos.  The French plan was to establish a base at Dien Bien Phu, keep it resupplied by air, and then use it as a place to launch operations against the Viet Minh.  The French underestimated the scale of the force the Viet Minh would concentrate around Dien Bien Phu.  Before long, the French were besieged and doomed to defeat.  This battle ended French rule in Indochina.  Bernard Fall explains what happened at Dien Bien Phu and why in “Hell in a Very Small Place”.  

The First Allied Airborne Army launched an attack into the German occupied Netherlands on September 17, 1944.  Eventually over the 41,000 troops went in by parachute and glider.  The idea was for this huge airborne force to seize nine bridges stretched across 64 miles of the Netherlands.  Seizing these bridges would allow the British Army’s XXX Corps to advance rapidly across the rivers and into Germany.  It was a bold plan that ultimately failed.  Cornelius Ryan explains why in “A Bridge Too Far”.  

On June 1942, Germany’s Army Group South started an offensive called Case Blue or Plan Blue.  The idea was to sprint out off eastern Ukraine, across the Russian steppe, and into the Caucasus to capture the oil fields there.  As part of this big effort, the German Sixth Army attempted to capture the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River.  The Sixth Army reached Stalingrad in August.  The fighting was ferocious.  In November the Soviets launched offensives of their own north and south of Stalingrad.  Those two pincers linked up and trapped the Germans in a cauldron.  Fighting continued in Stalingrad but now winter was closing in.  Starvation and the cold exacted a toll as harsh as the Soviets.  Despite Hitler’s attempts to resupply the Sixth Army by air and his exhortations to fight to the last, what was left of the German Sixth Army surrendered in late January 1943.  There was no way for Hitler and his propagandists to spin this crushing defeat.  Antony Beevor tells the story of history’s largest land battle and arguably the turning point of World War Two in “Stalingrad.”

On June 27, 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked by a group of Arab and German terrorists.  They demanded the release of 53 terrorists and diverted the plane to Entebbe, Uganda.  On July 4th, Israeli commandos disguised as Ugandan soldiers flew over 2,000 miles, assaulted the airport, killed the terrorists, and rescued all but three of the hostages within an hour. The Israeli assault force suffered one fatality: its commander, Yoni Netanyahu (brother of Israel's current Prime Minister).  Saul David’s “Operation Thunderbolt” is a definitive account of what happened.

By the end of 1914, World War One has stagnated into an industrial age nightmare.  The British and French sat opposite the Germans in trenches running through France from the coast to the Alps.  Things weren’t much different in the East where the early Russian advance had been defeated.  The British looked for options.  What could they do to alter the situation?  They looked at the Dardanelles Straits.  This narrow waterway connects the Black Sea with the Aegean Sea.  The Turks had mined the strait and fortified its coastline but if the British could land troops and their ships could force through the strait, they could threaten the Turkish capital.  So that’s what they tried to do.  The Australian author Les Carlyon tells the story of what happened in “Gallipoli”.

Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) was established in January 1964 to conduct unconventional warfare operations.  These included reconnoitering and disrupting North Vietnamese activities in Laos and Cambodia.  Given the sensitive nature of MACV-SOG’s work, its missions were classified.  John Plaster served three years with MACV-SOG and tells the unit’s story in “SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam.” 

Adolf Hitler ruled Germany from 1933 until he committed suicide in 1945.  Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953.  Between 1933 and 1945 these two brutal dictators oversaw the killing of 14 million noncombatants in the region comprised of the Baltic states, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine.  Timothy Snyder explains how and why the NAZI and Soviet regimes inflected such suffering in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

The Sherwood Rangers were a British tank regiment during the Second World War.  They served in North Africa where they fought in the battles of Alam El Hafa and Second El Alamein and helped drive Germany’s Afrika Corps out of Tunisia.  Next, the Sherwood Rangers landed in Normandy on D-Day.  They lead the drive out of France, across Belgium, and into Germany.  It was a hard slog, and they paid a price.  The Sherwood Rangers tank crews suffered 148% casualties just in the European campaign.  James Holland tells their story at a personal level in this book. 

Argentina seized the Falkland Islands on April 2nd, 1982.  The British government deployed a naval task force on April 5th to take them back.  As the force steadily converged from 8,000 miles away, the rest of the world wondered if the two countries would really fight over the remote and sparsely populated islands.  They did.  By the time it was over in June, 3,336 people had been killed or wounded; sixteen ships sunk; and 134 aircraft were lost.  The Falklands campaign is considered by many as the first technologically modern war.  In some ways it is a microcosm of what major fleet actions could look like.  Martin Middlebrook’s “Operation Corporate” gives us the details of what happened.