The Phantom Major

The Phantom Major

by Virginia Cowles
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 31/01/2020

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An action-packed biography of “one of the legitimate storybook heroes of World War II” and the special forces regiment he founded (The New York Times).


In the dark and uncertain days of 1941 and 1942, when Rommel’s Afrika Korps was sweeping toward Egypt and the Suez Canal, a small group of daring raiders made history for the Allies. They operated deep behind German lines, driving hundreds of miles through the deserts of North Africa. They hid by day and struck by night, destroying aircraft, blowing up ammunition dumps, derailing trains, and killing many times their own number. These men were the Special Air Service.


The SAS was the brainchild of David Stirling, a deceptively mild-mannered man with a brilliant idea. Under his command, small teams of resourceful, highly trained men penetrated beyond the front lines of the opposing armies and wreaked havoc where the Germans least expected it. From Virginia Cowles, whose biographies have been praised as “splendidly readable” (Sunday Times) and “fascinating” (Kirkus Reviews), this is a classic account of these raids, an amazing tale of courage, impudence, and daring packed with action and high adventure. Her narrative, based on the eyewitness testimony of the men who took part, gives a compelling insight into the early years of the SAS.

ISBN:
9781848849648
9781848849648
Category:
Second World War
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
31-01-2020
Language:
English
Publisher:
Pen & Sword Books
Virginia Cowles

Virginia Cowles was born in Vermont in 1910. She gravitated to journalism in her youth to earn her living after the death of her mother, writing features for Hearst Newspapers.

She became a trailblazing war correspondent for the Sunday Times, reporting from Civil War Spain in 1937 before covering wartime Europe for the BBC and NBC. Cowles wrote up her testimony in Looking for Trouble, a bestseller on publication in 1941, and later reported from North Africa as special assistant to the American Ambassador in London.

In 1945, Cowles married Aidan Crawley, a British journalist who had been a fighter pilot and spent years in a German POW camp, later becoming a politician and filmmaker; they had three children. As well as writing a play with Martha Gellhorn, Cowles was also a historian and biographer, whose subjects included Winston Churchill and the Romanov, Rothschild, and Astor families. She was killed in an automobile accident in France in 1983.

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