Bøger af Bernard O'Connor

The Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain's TOP SECRET subversive organisation during the Second World War, were informed before and after D-Day that some surrendered or captured German prisoners of war who had been brought to camps in England claimed not to be supporters of Hitler. They had been compelled to join the Wehrmacht, the German army, and, when asked, volunteered to be trained and infiltrated back into Germany by the Allies on sabotage, subversion and assassination missions. Bernard O'Connor's 'SOE BONZOS' has used recently released personnel files, country section correspondence, training reports and mission papers to tell for the first time the stories of about sixty prisoners who were brave enough to return to Germany on secret operations. Eight, termed PERIWIG BONZOS, were selected for similar missions which involved making contact with members of the German resistance. Such an organisation did not exist but SOE had a plan to convince the Gestapo that it did thereby diverting attention from the Allies' invasion plans. Three were reported to have been dropped with faulty parachutes and documents implicating leading Germans as members of a resistance group which used the symbol of a prancing horse. 'SOE's PERWIG BONZOS' is a documentary history which provides details of Gerhard Bieneke, Leonhardt Kick, Otto Heinrich, Frans Lengnick, Kurt Tietz, Siegel, Ciesinski and Schiller, the successes and failures of their missions and accounts of conditions in Germany towards the end of the war. There are also details of SOE's German Section officers who planned the operations, having to negotiate with the Bayswater Interrogation Section, SOE's Training, Camouflage, Forgery, Finance and Quartermaster Sections; officers in other country sections; the American Office of Strategic Services; the RAF who arranged parachute drops and the Special Forces operating with the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force operating in France, Belgium and Germany. Visit Bernard O'Connor's author page: www.lulu.com/spotlight/coprolite

Harold James Andrews, known as Mike, was born in 1897. Fascinated by planes, he joined the Royal Naval Air Force during the First World War and later the Royal Flying Corps flying bombers. After working as a test pilot, in the early 1920s he moved to Barcelona to train the Spanish Air Force in anti-submarine warfare. Returning to Britain in 1930 he was Blackburn's foreign representative, and t e photographs he took of airports and airfields across Europe were passed to the Secret Intelligence Service. He designed and later managed Liverpool airport and designed Kallang in Singapore. During the Second World War he was posted to Lisbon as Air Attaché but this was just a cover. His mission was to help a secret organisation operating in France, Spain and Portugal to get escaped prisoners-of-war, downed pilots, aircrew and other evaders back to Britain. Based on his grandson Simon's stories, autobiographies of other intelligence officers, contemporary documents, this book tells his story.

Following the German occupation of Holland, the Special Operations Executive parachuted in over fifty secret agents. Most were captured and executed. Eleven of the RAF planes that brought them were shot down. Using recently released documents from the National Archives, this book tells the story of three remarkable women, Antonia Hamilton, Trix Terwindt and Jos Gemmeke who, despite these setbacks, volunteered to be flown out of RAF Tempsford, 'Churchill's Most Secret Airfield', and parachuted back to play vital roles on top secret missions prior to liberation.

In 1843, an Oxford University professor reported to British academics and agriculturalists on a deposit of phosphorite he had visited in Logrosan, Extremadura, Spain. A mineral much in demand by manure manufacturers, once crushed, it was dissolved in sulphuric acid to produce superphosphate, the world's first artifical chemical manure. Once the railway between Madrid and Lisbon was constructed in the 1860s, the industry took off. Although competition from cheaper overseas phosphates caused many of the phosphate companies to go out of business in the 1890s, demand from Spanish superphosphate manufacturers ensured the industry's survival until the mid-1900s. Today, with the assistance of EU funding, a number of these mines have been developed as tourist attractions as part of Spain's geo-mining heritage. Bernard O'Connor and Leyre Solano's book investigates the origins, development and eventual decline of the Spanish phosphate industry.