Defending the Rock by Nicholas Rankin
Two months before he shot himself, Adolf Hitler saw where it had all gone wrong. By failing to seize Gibraltar in the summer of 1940, he had lost the war. The Rock of Gibraltar, a pillar of British seapower since 1704, looked formidable but was extraordinarily vulnerable. Menaced on all sides by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Vichy France and Francoist Spain, Gibraltar also had to let thousands of foreigners across its frontier to work every day. Among them came spies and saboteurs, eager to blow up the Rock's twenty five miles of secret tunnels. Nicholas Rankin's revelatory book, whose cast of characters includes Haile Selassie, Anthony Burgess and General Sikorski, sets Gibraltar in the wider context of the struggle against Fascism, from Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, through the Spanish Civil War, to the end of the Second World War.
Nicholas Rankin worked for 20 years for the BBC World Service, winning two UN awards and becoming Chief Producer. His previous books include biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson and the war-correspondent George Steer, Churchill's Wizards, a study of camouflage, deception and black propaganda in both world wars, and Ian Fleming's Commandos, the history of a WW2 naval intelligence unit. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London and Kent.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780571307722 |
| ISBN 10 | 0571307728 |
| Title | Defending the Rock |
| Author | Nicholas Rankin |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Faber & Faber |
| Year published | 2019-04-04 |
| Number of pages | 672 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |