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FROGMEN IN WARTIME
Warriors from the Deep, Book, Eric Micheletti, Histoire & Collections
Apart from the fact that it appears to have been translated directly into English by a Frenchman from the original French, bringing about some confused explanations of the role played by frogmen in recent wars, I found Warriors from the Deep a compelling page-turner.
Not only does this cocktail-table-sized book have more photographs of frogmen in action than most of us have seen before, but author Eric Micheletti has collected material from the archives of the Italian Arditi Incursori, who gave us a lot of trouble by sinking British warships in Alexandria and Gibraltar.
Also included are the German Kampfschwimmer with their Neger human torpedo attacks during D-Day operations; and the French combat swimmer activities in Indochina and Algeria before they went on to operations later in the Balkans, Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan.
There is little mention of the exploits of the British and Dutch SBS, the SAS, the US Navy Seals or Russian and Norwegian frogmen. The author claims that this is because 'the British and American combat swimmers have been and still are much more land-orientated than the counterparts from the Mediterranean rim.'
I am not sure that we should accept this explanation for the dearth of Yanks and Brits in a book sub-titled The Extraordinary History of the Combat Swimmers.
I suspect that the SBS, SAS and Seals - heavily involved today in counter-terrorism - were not prepared to give information as generously as the units that make up the core of this book.
However, despite these shortcomings, this is a book that many divers will want to read, led into diving as many of us were by gripping tales about frogmen. Here is a chance to see pictures of these pioneers in action.
Kendall McDonald
# Warriors from the Deep by Eric Micheletti (Histoire & Collections, ISBN 2913903843). Hardback, 208pp,£29 |
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