On August 19, 1942, 5,000 Canadian, 1,000 British, 50 American and 24 French troops attacked Dieppe, France. This was Operation Jubilee, World War II's first large amphibious operation. The Allies had hundreds of vessels, Churchill tanks, Commandos, Spitfires, Hurricanes, P-51 Mustangs, B-17s, Typhoons, etc. They expected an easy win. However, they met S-boats, determined German troops and hundreds of Luftwaffe aircraft including superb FW-190s, Stukas, Me-109s, Ju-88s, Do-217s and He-111s, flak and artillery. The sky flooded with aircraft, making it the Western Front's biggest air battle. Germany's pilots were superb. Though outnumbered, they shot down over 100 Allied aircraft. In hours, the landing Canadians had a massive defeat, losing five out of six men and all their tanks. But the lessons learned at Dieppe saved 10 times as many lives at Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. "Disaster at Dieppe" is a well-illustrated fast read. 167 pages, 9"" x 6"", 66 photos and maps.

Firsthand accounts and contextual narrative chronicling the U.S. war effort before D-Day. Sidebars on patrols, service troops, the replacement system, Rangers, and more. Based on interviews with more than 200 veterans.

This book details the events of World War II, day by day, telling of heroes and their bravery, villains and their victims, and stoic women and men who worked to aid the war effort.

A former Harvard professor of decision science and game theory draws on those disciplines in this review of controversial strategic and tactical decisions of World War II. Allied leaders--although outstanding in many ways--sometimes botched what now is termed meta-decision making or deciding how to decide. Operation Jubilee, a single-division raid on Dieppe, France, in August 1942, for example, illustrated the pitfalls of groupthink. In the Allied invasion of North Africa three months later, American and British leaders fell victim to the planning fallacy: having unrealistically rosy expectations of an easy victory. In Sicily in the summer of 1943, they violated the millennia-old principle of command unity--now re-endorsed and elaborated on by modern theorists. Had Allied strategists understood the game theory of bluffing, in January 1944 they might well not have landed two-plus divisions at Anzio in Italy.