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Where to buy the book at up to 49% off

Operation Basalt is now available for purchase online from a number of booksellers.  Here’s a partial list, sorted in order of discount:

This list is accurate as of 6 June 2016.

Please post your reviews of the book to Amazon no matter where you bought the book.

 

Mrs Pittard and the Commandos

Autumn-15-coverI’m very pleased to report that the current issue of Sark Life magazine contains my article “Mrs Pittard and the Commandos”.

Here is an excerpt:

They found no Germans.  Instead they found, as one commando later recalled, “an elderly woman in a nightgown, sleepy eyed and looking at them with astonishment.”  The woman was Mrs Frances Noel Pittard.  She was 40 years old.

“Is the house on fire?” she asked.  (She assumed the uniformed men with blackened faces were firemen.)

To read the full article, you’ll need to order a copy of the magazine — which is a gorgeous, full-colour quarterly well worth buying — from the website at Small Island Publishing.

Sergeant Joseph Henry “Tim” Robinson and the men from E Troop 12 Commando – by Graham Robinson

I am very happy to be able to publish here Graham Robinson’s essay about his father Tim, who served with the Small Scale Raiding Force — the group that carried out Operation Basalt.  My book has an appendix addressing the issue of who were the “other ranks” who participated in the raid; the names of the officers are well documented.  I think Graham’s essay makes an important contribution to solving the mystery of who those men were.  — Eric Lee


My father Joseph Henry Robinson, known to everyone as “Tim” had an eventful war. He signed up with the Territorial Army at the age of 20 in April 1939, he said, in order to go on the summer camp. The camp lasted a little longer than he anticipated!

Called up to the Berkshire Yeomanry he spent the early months of the war guarding airfields in the local area. At some point during this time he met Philip Pinckney. Although from very different backgrounds they came from the same town, Hungerford, and from that point until Pinckney’s death in Italy in September 1943 he followed Pinckney’s movements – first to Northern Ireland and E Troop 12 Commando, then the Small Scale Raiding Force and finally the 2nd SAS. This resulted in dad experiencing a gruelling and unconventional training regime and taking part in numerous operations behind enemy lines, serving in Norway, North Africa, Italy and France.

As children, and later as adults, dad talked to us about his experiences – the raid on the coast of France (Operation Chess); the trip to the Lofoten Islands (Operation Anklet); his 55 days behind enemy lines walking the length of Italy after blowing up a railway tunnel (Operation Speedwell); and his parachute drop into occupied France when he was shot in the ankle (Operations Hardy & Wallace) and had to be hidden by the Maquis while he was nursed by a countess. Dad kept in touch with some of his old comrades, went to reunions in France with the Resistance and even wrote up his part in Operation Speedwell for the SAS’s Mars & Minerva Magazine but the story that held our imagination most was his involvement in Operation Basalt – the raid on Sark in October 1942.

The raid itself, the reasons for it and the results of it, are already very well documented, not least the shooting of German soldiers with tied hands and the subsequent issuing of Hitler’s notorious “Commando Order”.


To read the rest of this essay, download the PDF here.