A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The cover for the British edition of Big Week.  © 2018 Penguin Books (UK) and Atlantic Monthly Press (a Penguin subsidiary)  On November 6, 2018, the Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Britain's Penguin publishing empire, released the U.S. edition of  Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War II.  Its British counterpart, Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War Two, had been published almost three months earlier (on August 6) and was a best-seller in Great Britain. Written by historian and BBC TV presenter James Holland, the 400-page book tells the story of the Anglo-American air forces' struggle to achieve air supremacy over Western Europe as a necessary pre-requisite for Operation Overlord, the planned Allied cross-Channel invasion of German-occupied France, which was scheduled to take place in May of 1944. As the book's title implies, Big Week focuses on Operation Argument, a series of air strikes by American and British bombers against Naz...

Cover designed by Kristen Haff. © 2014 Penguin Books The Battle of Crete - the first large-scale military engagement conceived and executed by airborne forces in history - has long been overshadowed by other World War II battles that took place in 1941. Planned by Luftwaffe General Kurt Student (the "Father of Germany's Airborne Force") and approved by a reluctant Adolf Hitler, Operation Mercury was a daring if rather risky endeavor: the capture of the Greek island of Crete by a large airborne force that was to be reinforced primarily via an "air bridge" from the mainland and only tangentially by a seaborne force embarked on a modest flotilla of caiques. Hitler greenlit Unternehmen Merkur almost at the last minute with one proviso: that the invasion of Crete be carried out with resources available in the Greek theater of operations and not much else lest it interfered with the Fuhrer's larger plan to invade the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The staff ...