Green Beach

London: BCA. Very Good/Very Good. 1975. Hard Cover. 8vo 0688002951 BCA, London. Reprint. Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. Photographs on plates. 250 pages. Yellowing to pages. What and where was 'Green Beach'? Why did one man land there in Canadian Army uniform when he was neither a Canadian nor a soldier, under security conditions so strict that no one was told his name ? And what secret did he know so vital to the Allies that he travelled with a personal bodyguard of ten sharpshooters whose orders were to kill him rather than let him be captured ? 'Green Beach' was the code name for Pourville, a small seaside town near Dieppe where, on 19 August 1942, Canadian and British troops landed in Operation Jubilee, an essential rehearsal for the D-Day landings two years later. Jubilee Force, six thousand strong, had been set 16 special objectives; target 13 was to discover the importance and accuracy of a German radar station on the cliff-top just outside the town. The man in Canadian uniform was a British radar expert who had volunteered for this assignment: Jack Maurice Nissenthall, an RAF flight sergeant from Bow, in East London. What happened to him and his bodyguard in Jubilee's fearful nine hours of fighting on the sun-burned beaches is one of the war's strangest episodes, a story of heroism and ironic humour; one man's determination to pay a debt of honour to the country which had given his parents a home. How this debt was paid - and at what terrible cost - is told in the most gripping and moving book of the decade. .