When radical Iranian students seize the U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran and take over fifty diplomats hostage the U.S. President has to negotiate with a government that wants only to humiliate the United States. When talks fail, the President must turn to the military to bring the Americans home by force. As preparations are made for an audacious rescue, an American intelligence officer hides alone in a Tehran safehouse with a secret. He is protecting a powerful weapon known as the Perses Device, which is now at risk of being captured and employed against the United States. The Agency Director orders that it must be brought out at all costs. But as a small American team clandestinely enters Tehran to lead the way for the rescue force, a traitor spills the secret and KGB Spetsnaz operatives begin their own search for the weapon. At the last minute, one more American is added to the advance team - his sole mission is to get the Agency officer and the Perses device to safety. When the rescue mission fails, only two Americans are left to run the gauntlet of enemy agents and get the weapon out. Getting in was easy…

Airborne assault was one of the great innovations of the 1930s and 1940s, adding a new ‘vertical’ dimension to infantry warfare. By the onset of World War II in 1939, Germany, Italy, and Russia were already advanced in their development of paratrooper units. Germany in particular demonstrated the tactical shock of paratroopers in Western Europe in 1940 and, most spectacularly, in Crete in 1941, galvanizing the UK and the United States to expand and train their own airborne forces, which they unleashed in 1943–45. The Allied paratrooper drops on D-Day (6 June 1944) and those of Operation Market Garden (17–25 September 1944) were the stuff of legend, huge in scale and ambition, but both Allied and Axis paratroopers were deployed in numerous other actions, including special forces raids.   It quickly became apparent that the physical and tactical demands placed upon paratroopers required men of exceptional stamina, courage and intelligence. To create these soldiers, levels of training were unusually punishing and protracted, and those who came through to take their ‘wings’ were a true elite.   The Paratrooper Training Pocket Manual provides an unusually detailed insight into what it took to make a military paratrooper, and how he was then utilized in actions where expected survival might be measured in a matter of days. Using material from British, US, German archives and other primary sources, many never before published, the book explains paratrooper theory, training and practice in detail. The content includes details of the physical training, instruction in static-line parachute deployment, handling the various types of parachutes and harnesses, landing on dangerous terrain, small-arms handling, airborne deployment of heavier combat equipment, landing in hostile drop zones, tactics in the first minutes of landing, radio comms, and much more.   Featuring original manual diagrams and illustrations, plus new introductory text explaining the history and context of airborne warfare, The Paratrooper Training Pocket Manual provides a detailed insight into the principles and practice of this unique type of combat soldier.

Ils sont un peu les oubliés de l’histoire du Débarquement. Dans la nuit du 5 au 6 juin 1944, alors que les hommes des 82e et 101e divisions aéroportées américaines et ceux de la 6e division Airborne britannique s’apprêtent à sauter sur la Normandie, trente-six commandos français sont largués sur la Bretagne. Ils appartiennent au Special Air Service (SAS), une unité des forces spéciales britanniques créée 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 alliés, leur mission n’en est pas moins capitale : coordonner et entraîner la Résistance – très active dans cette région – pour empêcher les Allemands qui y sont stationnés d’aller renforcer les troupes déjà positionnées sur la côte ou à proximité. Les trente-six hommes qui vont sauter sont des éléments précurseurs, ils doivent créer deux bases permettant l’arrivée du reste de l’effectif et de matériel dans les jours suivants afin de lancer des opérations de guérilla et de sabotage : Samwest, dans la forêt de Duhault (Côtes d’Armor), et Dingson, dans la forêt de Saint-Marcel (Morbihan).   Tout au long de la bataille de Normandie, l’effectif des SAS français ne va cesser de croître et ils vont jouer un rôle majeur pour la libération de la Bretagne. C’est leur histoire méconnue qui est racontée dans ce livre, de leur entraînement en Grande-Bretagne jusqu’à leurs derniers combats en Hollande, en avril 1945. Avec de très nombreuses photos d’époque, des objets et des armes ayant appartenu à certains de ces parachutistes, des cartes et des infographies pour revivre au plus près le quotidien de ces combattants d’élite au cours de l’été 1944.   Ouvrage édité en partenariat avec le Musée de la Résistance bretonne de Saint-Marcel (Morbihan). Journaliste et écrivain, Jean-Charles Stasi est l’auteur d’une vingtaine d’ouvrages dont plusieurs consacrés à la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Après avoir relaté l’épopée du commando Kieffer (Commando Kieffer, les Français débarquent en Normandie, Heimdal 2014), il tenait à raconter l’histoire de ces autres combattants français ayant pris part aux combats du Jour J.

Discover the fantastic history of the saboteurs during World War II in the French resistance. Trained by the British secret service, they destroyed hundreds of buildings, bridges, and industries. Leading up to D-Day they blocked the German forces by destroying transport links and sabotaged German military production in France. The actions of this small number of brave men and women made a huge contribution to the success of the Allies in the Second World War.THIS BOOK IS IN ENGLISH.

U.S. Air Force Pararescue is the most skilful and capable rescue force in the world, taking on some of the most dangerous rescue missions imaginable. PJs (short for para-jumpers), are members of an elite unit whose commando skills are so wide-reaching they often seem like something out of science fiction. They routinely tackle perilous operations that are beyond the capabilities of other rescue organisations, and sometimes dare the seemingly impossible. Since their inception in 1947, PJs have saved more than thirty thousand lives. They can pluck near-frozen climbers off jagged mountaintops as well as recover shot-down jet pilots stranded deep in hostile territory. In the dead of night, the PJs parachute into ominous black waves that loom twenty feet tall to save distressed seamen, and brave the cruellest and most desolate deserts to recover victims. U.S. Air Force pararescuemen have played a prominent role in every armed conflict since the Korean War, rescuing thousands of soldiers from behind enemy lines.Guardian Angel provides a rare glimpse at a PJ’s mind-blowing adventures. You follow Sgt. Sine’s trek across exotic lands and share his encounters with mysterious cultures. Learn what it takes to lower from a helicopter onto the slippery decks of storm-tossed ships to rescue dying sailors. Feel what it’s like to be caught in the middle of a bomb blast so powerful that it tears high-rise buildings in half, and flattens armoured vehicles hundreds of yards away. Soar high above towering jungle trees and experience the danger of swinging on a slim cable below a helicopter while performing a mid-air rescue of a pilot, dangling from his chute a hundred feet above a mountain slope. Go to war in Afghanistan and parachute onto a nocturnal battlefield surrounded by land mines to help a mortally wounded soldier. This is a deadly serious business: when things go wrong, they can go terribly wrong. Aircraft crash into mountainsides, killing all onboard, while some PJs live through horrendous helicopter crashes only to struggle with freezing temperatures, snapped limbs and torn flesh in a desperate fight for survival.This book presents true stories of uncommon courage told from the perspective of the actual men in the arena. PJ’s belong to an exclusive brotherhood and forge unbreakable bonds of loyalty, commitment, and sacrifice. They do these things for their country, to protect their brothers in arms, and to honour their motto: “That Others May Live.”

In 2004 the world was first introduced to The Filthy Thirteen, a book describing the most notorious squad of fighting men in the 101st Airborne Division who were the inspiration for the movie The Dirty Dozen. This is the long awaited work of Jack Womer, one of the squad’s integral members, and probably its best soldier. Womer was originally a member of the 29th Infantry Division and selected to be part of its elite Ranger battalion until, after a year of gruelling training under the eyes of British Commando instructors, they were suddenly dissolved. Bitterly disappointed, Womer asked for transfer to another elite unit, the Screaming Eagles, where room was found for him among the division’s most miscreant squad of brawlers, drunkards and goof-offs. Beginning on June 6, 1944, however, the Filthy Thirteen began proving themselves more a menace to the German Army than they had been to their own officers and the good people of England, embarking on a year of ferocious combat at the very tip of the Allied advance in Europe.In this work, with the help of Steven DeVito, Womer provides an amazingly frank look at close-quarters combat in Europe, as well as the almost surreal experience of dust-bowl-era GI’s entering country after country in their grapple with the Wehrmacht, finally ending up in Hitler’s mountaintop lair in Germany itself.Throughout his fights, Jack Womer credited his Ranger/Commando training for helping him to survive, even though most of the rest of the Filthy Thirteen did not. And in the end he found the reward he had most coveted all along; being able to return to his fiancée Theresa back in the States.

The Central Intelligence Agency was created by Congress with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. A civilian intelligence agency of the United States government responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior United States policymakers, the CIA also engages in covert activities at the request of the President of the United States of America. The CIA's primary function is to collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and to advise public policymakers. The agency conducts covert operations and paramilitary actions, and exerts foreign political influence through its Special Activities Division. For the first time in French, here are the CIA's secret operations, illustrated with hundreds of photographs and documents. From the end of World War II to the operations tracking Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2008, via the Cold War, the activities of the famous American secret service are analysed in this work. CIA agents have been present for more than 60 years in all the operational theatres and the world's trouble spots. There is not a single war, not a coup d'etat where America's men in the shadows have not played a part. Never has a secret service been so powerful: its representatives in posts in a number of capitals dealt directly with the most highly placed politicians.

This work offers a history of the Special Operations which preceded and followed the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, and the work done by the Special Forces sent into France under cover by the Allies during the Occupation. The book details the intelligence missions, the work of the Resistance, including a record of the Combats de l'Ombre which harassed the enemy forces during the Occupation. The famous Allied secret services of World War II, the British SOE, the American OSS and the French BCRA. Based on interviews with actual participants who lent their first had memories and original documents, the book features the men and women, the operations and the strategy of the Special Operations.