I’ve just finished listening to the World War I memoires of Edward “Eddie” Rickenbacker, the American fighter ace and Medal of Honor recipient.

The book is a relatively light-hearted and adventurous romp over the skys of France and Germany. He goes into detail about the feelings and experiences of learning aerial combat and the technical aspects as they developed. The narrator of this audio version does an excellant job and is a joy to listen to. On more than a few occasions I had to turn off the audio, as I usually listen and work and I couldn’t work while listening with baited breathe to find out how a particular dog fight turned out. Or else I stopped everything and pay close attention to the wonderful details of the action. Continue reading →

I’ve been listening to “Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory” by Ben Macintyre from Audible.com. The true story of the World War II British intelligence services deception plan, codenamed “Operation Mincemeat“, to fool the Germans before the Sicily Invasion in 1943. A fantastic story that took over 50 years to be fully revealed.

“Operation Mincemeat” was an idea to trick the Germans into believing a lie, in hopes of taking their attention off the obvious buildup to the invasion of Sicily. Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley, RAF, of MI5 took an idea from a memo by Ian Fleming, yes, the same future author of James Bond, and with the help of Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, Royal Navy, planned to drop a dead body with fake documents off the coast of Spain, in hopes that the Spanish authorities would turn the body over to the Germans. With any luck, the Germans would accept the documents as authentic and make their plans to defend southern Europe accordingly. Continue reading →