The first complete biography of Britain’s WWII spymaster presents an intimate look at his life and career, as well as an insider’s look at the SOE. Major General Sir Colin Gubbins was the driving force behind Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the secret military organization established by Winston Churchill in 1940. First as its Operations and Training Director, and then its Commander, Gubbins orchestrated every aspect of the SOE’s worldwide covert operations. Though Gubbins made enormous contributions to Allied victory, his life and work have remained shrouded in secrecy until now. With copious research and unprecedented access to family archives, biographer Brian Lett reveals the war hero’s early experiences in the Great War, as well as in Russia, Ireland, Poland, and as Head of British Resistance. The result is a fascinating biography that reveals as much about SOEs extraordinary activities as it does about the man who inspired and commanded them.

In the mountains and jungles of occupied Burma during World War II, British special forces launched a series of secret operations, assisted by parts of the Burmese population. The men of the SOE, trained in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, worked in the jungle, deep behind enemy lines, to frustrate the puppet Burmese government of Ba Maw and continue the fight against Hirohito's Japan in a theatre starved of resources. Here, Richard Duckett uses newly declassified documents from the National Archives to reveal for the first time the extent of British special forces' involvement - from the 1941 operations until beyond Burma's independence from the British Empire in 1948. Duckett argues convincingly that `Operation Character' and `Operation Billet' - large SOE missions launched in support of General Slim's XIV Army offensive to liberate Burma - rank among the most militarily significant of the SOE's secret missions. Featuring a wealth of photographs and accompanying material never before published, including direct testimony recorded by veterans of the campaign and maps from the SOE files, The SOE in Burma tells a compelling story of courage and struggle in during World War II

For several months in 1943, seven young airmen, all volunteers, were moulded into an RAF crew tasked with undertaking perilous operations over Occupied Europe. Drawn together from England, Argentina, and Canada, the crew, led by their captain, Flight Lieutenant Peter Bartter, were assigned to 138 (Special Duties) Squadron, based at RAF Tempsford. It was there that they flew low, over dangerous territory to deliver agents and equipment to aid the Resistance in Occupied Europe. When the Allies opened new fronts in North Africa and Italy, Bartter’s crew was seconded for some weeks to 624 Squadron flying from Blida in Algeria and Protville in Tunisia. On their return to the UK, they had the additional task of bringing back Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph. The crew’s last operation would be to fly Flemming Muus, as head of SOE in Denmark, to Roskilde in Denmark. However, tragedy struck when their Halifax Mk.II, BB378, was shot down approaching its destination on the night of 10/11 December 1943. Exemplary piloting skills from Peter Bartter brought the aircraft down in a frozen field with no injuries. Muus thankfully escaped. The crew, meanwhile, split into two groups – the officers, and the NCOs. The officers managed to evade capture and reach Sweden. One of the officers, Ernesto Howell, went on to re-join 138 Squadron, but was sadly killed flying over the North Sea in November 1944. The NCOs’ luck gave out, and they were all captured, spending the rest of the war in the notorious Stalag IV-B. From there, one of the NCOs managed to escape just before the camp liberated by the Russians. In this book, the crew are traced from their recruitment, to training, deployment and, for the survivors, their post-war lives. The next generation, René, son of agent Ernest Gimpel, and Nigel Atkins, son of Brian Atkins, the co-pilot, have become firm friends. Nigel Atkins traveled across Europe on a journey of discovery as he has met and interviewed many people while visiting multiple locations the crew only visited from above. From daring flights over occupied Europe to meetings over seventy years later, the excavation of the crash site and new friendships formed, this book has it all.

During the Second World War, the British military and intelligence agencies had plans in case Germany invaded Spain and Portugal. This involved training British and Spanish agents to be secretly infiltrated to undertake sabotage operations on important lines of communication and liaising with pro-British locals. At the same time the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence agency, paid young Spanish and Portuguese collaborators to undertake sabotage missions against Allied military and economic targets in Iberia but they had limited success. Italian saboteurs from the Decima Flotigglia MAS were more successful using underwater divers to attack Allied shipping. Using declassified files from Britain's National Archives, autobiographies, biographies and newspaper articles, this documentary history sheds new light on an unusual aspect of Iberian history telling a human story of international diplomacy, political intrigue, secret agents, clandestine warfare, military strategy, nationalism, and deception.

Whenever leadership emerges within a group, there will be resistance to that leadership. Discontent may manifest in a number of ways, and action will always be determined by factors such as resource, numbers, time, space, and the legitimacy of the resistance. What, then, turns discontent into mutiny? Mutiny is often associated with the occasional mis-leadership of the masses by politically inspired hotheads, or a spontaneous and unusually romantic gesture of defiance against a uniquely overbearing military superior. In reality it is seldom either and usually has far more mundane origins, not in the absolute poverty of the subordinates but in the relative poverty of the relationships between leaders and the led in a military situation. The roots of mutiny lie in the leadership skills of a small number of leaders, and what transforms that into a constructive dialogue, or a catastrophic disaster, depends on how the leaders of both sides mobilise their supporters and their networks. Using contemporary leadership theory to cast a critical light on an array of mutinies throughout history, this book suggests we consider mutiny as a permanent possibility that is further encouraged or discouraged in some contexts. From mutinies in ancient Roman and Greek armies to those that toppled the German and Russian states and forced governments to face their own disastrous policies and changed them forever, this book covers an array of cases across land, sea, and air that still pose a threat to military establishments today. The critical theoretical line also puts into sharp relief the assumption that oftentimes people have little choice in how they respond to circumstances not of their own making. If mutineers could choose to resist what they saw as tyranny, then so can we.

An incisive analysis of South Africa's ANC power-as party, as government, as state South Africa's African National Congress (ANC) is in decline, its hegemony has been weakened, its legitimacy diluted. President Cyril Ramaphosa's appointment suspended the ANC's electoral decline, it also heightened internal tensions between those who would deepen its acquired status as corrupt and captured, and those who would remodel it as redeemable. These are the incontrovertible knowns of South African politics; what will evolve from this is less certain. In Precarious Power, renowned political scientist Susan Booysen uses in-depth research and analysis to distill that which is bound to shape South Africa's political future, Booysen focuses on contradictory party politics and internal ANC dissent that is veiled for the sake of retaining an electoral following. Also exposed is the incongruous, populist policymaking, protest politics and the use of soft law to ensure it does not alienate angry citizens, fueling further discontent and protest. The ANC's power has become exceedingly precarious. Precarious Power is the name of the political game, for the foreseeable future. The comprehensive analysis in Precarious Power will appeal not only to political scientists and postgraduate students, but to all who take a keen interest in current affairs.

This comprehensive reference work gives an overview of the industrial development and current state of industrialization and deindustrialization in Asia, specifically Southeast Asia and China. It introduces typologies of industrial policies and discusses the manufacturing sector and its evolving role in the region. Designing Integrated Industrial Policies examines the integration of SMEs in global value chains and provides macro-econometric and firm-based micro-econometric analyses of (de)industrialization. This book will be a very useful reference particularly as a how-to guide on industrial promotion and designing integrated industrial policies not only for economic growth and job creation but also for "inclusive" development. It presents country cases and illustrates useful tools for industrial policy simulation and for evidence-based policy making through these concrete examples.

The historian and author of Postwar Counterinsurgency and the SAS reveals the full story of how the Special Air Service Regiment began during WWII. Britain’s elite Special Air Service Regiment is one of the most revered special-ops units in the world. Its high-profile operations include the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 and the hunt for Osama bin Laden in southern Afghanistan following 9/11. Since its inception during the Second World War, the SAS has become a byword for the highest possible standards in both conventional and unorthodox methods of warfare. In SAS Zero Hour, military historian and SAS expert Tim Jones offers fascinating new insight into how this elite regiment began. It is commonly held that the unit was the brainchild of just one man, David Stirling. While not dismissing Stirling’s considerable contribution, Jones’s historical investigation reveals many other factors that played a part in shaping the SAS, including the roles of military deception specialist Dudley Clarke, Field Marshals Archibald Wavell and Claude Auchinleck, and others. Drawing extensively on primary sources, as well as reassessing the more recent regimental histories and memoirs, SAS Zero Hour is “The most comprehensive and enlightening version of these seminal events yet” (Sir Ranulph Fiennes, from the Forward).