Bøker av James Daly

The bitter fighting in the so-called Falaise-Argentan Pocket in August 1944, during which the Allies encircled and destroyed a substantial part of Hitler's forces in northern France following the D-Day landings, marked the last major battle of the Normandy campaign. Despite this, tens of thousands of German soldiers managed to escape through the infamous Falaise Gap. It was as the Allies continued to pursue the retreating enemy forces that the planners considered or drew-up a number of further airborne operations. As James Daly reveals, three operations, namely _Lucky Strike_, _Transfigure_ and _Axehead_, might well have been part of the last of the fighting in the breakout from, Normandy itself. The first of these, _Lucky Strike_, was intended to see General Montgomery's 21st Army Group strike to the north-east in the direction of the River Seine, where bridges near Rouen were to be taken by the British 1st Airborne Division. _Transfigure_ was to be a major operation with the aim of using the First Allied Airborne Army against the French road network with the object of cutting the German lines of retreat across the Seine. _Axehead_, meanwhile, was a plan to establish an air-head on the eastern bank of the Seine. In this assault the British 1st Airborne Division, along with infantry, Sherman DD amphibious tanks, and specialised engineers, would establish crossings of the Dives, Touques, Risle and Seine rivers. As the Allies advanced further east into the Low Countries, further Allied airborne assaults were suggested. In Operation _Linnet_, for example, airborne forces were to capture and hold Tournai on the Escaut river in the western part of German-occupied Belgium. In the event, they were all cancelled, usually as the Allied forces reached the intended dropping zones before the airborne forces could take off. In particular, several of these operations bear very strong resemblance to elements of the _Market Garden_ plan and show early signs of the mistakes. Operation _Comet_, for example, included a glider coup-de-main for the bridges at Arnhem, Nijmegen and Grave - why did this disappear for _Market Garden_?These operations and their planning show that far from being an operation that went wrong in September 1944, the flaws in the Arnhem plan were evident much earlier. They also show that divisions between the Allies emerged much earlier and ran much deeper than originally thought.

The airborne landings on D-Day played a major part in the success of the largest amphibious operation ever mounted. Yet just over three months later Operation _Market Garden_, the largest airborne operation ever attempted, failed to take all its objectives. It is notable, however, that in the film _A Bridge Too Far_ Dirk Bogarde‿s Lieutenant General ‿Boy‿ Browning refers to a large number of cancelled operations since D-Day. What were these operations? Why do we know so little about them? And what can they tell us about Allied airborne planning, and the way that the allies fought, in 1944?As James Daly reveals, plans were considered or drawn-up for a number of ambitious airborne assaults that could have formed part of the Allies‿ efforts to break out of the beachheads. Of these, three, operations _Wastage_, _Tuxedo_ and _Wild Oats_, might well have been part of the fighting in Normandy itself. Operation _Wild Oats_, for example, was to see the 1st Airborne Division help capture Caen in conjunction with the British I Corps and XXX Corps. Three others, operations _Beneficiary_, _Hands Up_ and _Swordhilt_, were to be combined airborne and amphibious descents to seize the vitally important ports of St Malo and Brest, as well as the Quiberon Bay area in southern Brittany. Airborne planning was frenetic and wide ranging during this period. One operation would have seen gliders landing on a beach; another would have seen the airborne troops taking off without maps. Some of them were months in the planning; others were merely an idea that lasted for a matter of days. Far from being standalone airborne operations, all of them were part of a wider strategy and several were major combined operations, effectively small-scale D-Days, complete with seaborne landings. For the first time, this book looks at each of these operations in detail. Using new research and drawing on original planning documents, including maps of planned drop zones and operational areas, most of which have never been published before, James Daly explores a little-known aspect of the Allies‿ landings in France in the summer of 1944.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Sir Robert Filmer's thought, its context, and its place in English political thought as a whole.