THE VAAGSO RAID by Devins, Joseph H, jr

Philadelphia, 1967, Chilton, VG/VG- ( slight wear to dj extremities), US First edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 222 pp, illus, 2 maps. 6x9,  ----------------------------------------------------------------In the dark, early morning hours of Saturday, December 27, 1941, a small force of British warships escorting two camouflaged excursion steamers slipped past a German lookout station and sailed boldly into one of the great fjords of occupied Norway. Aboard the two steamers a tense group of British and Norwegian commandos rechecked their weapons and waited for the reaction of the nearby German coastal batteries. The target: Vaagao Island.Earlier thrusts by British raiding parties had deliberately avoided heavily defended sectors of the enemy coast. This was to be the first raid of the war on a fortified position, a demonstration that the offensive spirit was strong in Britain despite the Nazi conquest of the Continent and the humiliation of Dunkerque.But the consequences of this sortie would reach far beyond the snow-covered mountains which reverberated that Saturday with the thud of explosions and the snarl and rattle of sub-machine guns. The British gained vital experience in interservice cooperation and information that would prove invaluable in subsequent . raids on Dieppe and St. Nazaire. But in Berlin, Hitler was astonished at the daring and apparent readiness of the British to hurl their forces into the teeth of a prepared defense. As a result, he made decisions of major strategic importance. This is the story of a group of courageous men, of how they developed a new type of fighting force, how they fought, how they died, and how they altered the course of the war.