Churchill's Folly: Leros and the Aegean; The Last British Defeat of World War Two

Rhodes, Kos and other Greek islands of the Dodecanese are popular tourist resorts today. In late 1943 they were the scene of the last successful German invasion of the Second World War - and the last great British defeat. As Anthony Rogers' gripping account reveals, it was a very British catastrophe that harked back to the early campaigns of the war. Only six months before D-Day British regiments were bombed into submission by Stuka dive-bombers with hardly an Allied fighter plane to be seen. Strategy conceived over cigars and whisky far from the battlefield spelt disaster for the men on the ground.
Anthony Rogers has drawn on British, German, and Italian sources and uses graphic eyewitness accounts to tell the dramatic story of the battles for Kos and Leros that left much of the Aegean under German occupation until the end of the war.