Top Highlights

• One of the 200-odd deletions from the second edition of Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer’s Operation Dark Heart was the term TAREX, defined in the first edition’s glossary as ‘TARget EXploitation. Small-unit, up-close, intelligence-gathering operatives. Usually two-to-three man units.’
• They were an aggressive force of ‘Striking Companies’ intended to mount ‘butcher-and-bolt’ or ‘hit-and-run’ raids against the German forces along Europe’s coastline.
• Class or status didn’t matter, only their competence as irregular front-line warriors.
• Although Fleming originated the idea of what he first called an ‘advance intelligence unit’, then an ‘intelligence assault unit’,
• she was now captained by Commander Robert Ryder VC. Ryder had won Britain’s highest gallantry award just five months earlier, leading the daring Operation CHARIOT that rammed an old American destroyer packed with twenty-four depth-charges into the gates of the graving dock at St-Nazaire, to prevent the huge German battleship Tirpitz from berthing t...