Popski's Private Army (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

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All used books might have various degrees of writing, highliting and wear and tear and possibly be an ex-library with the usual stickers and stamps. One day, while they were hiding in a grove of trees awaiting dark, two shabbily dressed men approached. This became known as the ULTRA programme, and was increasingly successful from 1941 onwards in penetrating German enciphered radio traffic.

Soon afterward, Popski was asked to send a patrol to destroy a bridge over the River Capa d’Acqua in front of a position held by a Guards brigade on the Garigliano Front. But across the river they ran into heavy opposition and barely escaped destruction by mortars as they retired. Operating on a global scale, SOE’s headquarters in London were supplemented by subsidiary missions on every continent. Somewhere he heard that amphibious DUKW vehicles had arrived in the country, and he quickly acquired some and began training with them at Ancona. Throughout history, governments and military commanders have tried to keep their communications secret by the use of codes and ciphers.

I first met Victor Gregg on a freezing afternoon in 2009 when we were to talk about his experiences in the second world war. In Egypt he married Josephe Louise Colette "Josette" Ceysens, an Egypt-born Belgian, on 10 November 1928. On one occasion Popski took his men out with a patrol of the LRDG to find a route by which Montgomery’s armor could outflank the Mareth Line. He filched a Sergeant Major Waterson from the King’s Dragoon Guards (an armored car regiment), a ferocious looking one-eyed Corporal Locke from the LRDG, a young surveyor named Petrie from a survey unit, and several drivers from the Royal Army Service Corps.

Book brown boards,gilt lettering in black box to spine,top page edges dyed black,other edges browned, maps to endpapers,section of plates,contents clean. During WW2, Peniakoff sustained two injuries to his left hand: the first, during the desert campaign, resulted in the loss of a finger, while the second, towards the end of the war in Italy, necessitated amputation of the entire hand. He told me: “It was simple, you’ve got the Mediterranean to the north, the sun in the south and, at night, the Southern Cross overhead.

They spent the next three days keeping the ford open, chasing away any Germans who came close; nights were spent at the Castle Ripalta whose chatelaine was a lovely English girl married into the Parlato family.