With a foreword by historian Richard Ollard. Historians of the Second World War have neglected the role of the German Junkers 87 Stuka dive-bomber, when they inflicted the worst defeat on the Royal Navy since 1666 when the Dutch Fleet destroyed almost a third of the then English Fleet in the Battle of the Four Days off the Thames Estuary.

This book tells how Andrew B. Cunningham, regarded as Britain's greatest Admiral since Nelson, won clear command of the Mediterranean Sea which Italian dictator Mussolini boasted that he would make it Italy's Mare Nostrum. Because of his ally's defeats, Hitler reluctantly intervened south of the Alps to safeguard his right flank during his planned offensive against the Soviet Union.

Stukas had earlier replaced big guns spear-heading German Panzer columns in their conquests of Poland, Denmark, Norway and Western Europe. But in the Battle of Britain they proved sitting ducks to Spitfires and Hurricanes, and were withdrawn from combat. The central Mediterranean, where Stukas operated beyond range of the few British fighter planes that could be spared when Britain faced invasion, proved an ideal area to bring them back into operations. These Stuka dive-bombers proved the most dangerous weapon against warships caught without friendly air cover.

In their first Mediterranean operation the Stukas achieved six direct hits on the new British aircraft carrier Illustrious, saved from sinking by her heavily armoured deck, but severely damaged and out of action for over a year. During the futile attempt to aid Greece against German invasion the British Fleet operated with little air cover, but successfully evacuated most of our army. During the German air-borne invasion of Crete soon afterwards the Mediterranean Fleet succeeded in preventing two enemy surface convoys reaching Crete with reinforcements and heavy equipment even though the Aegean Sea was far beyond the range RAF fighter bases in Egypt.

The next day, May 22, 1941, the whole weight of two Fliegerkorps, each with over 600 planes, was thrown against warships from dawn till nightfall. Three cruisers and eight destroyers were sunk, and two battleships and seven destroyers damaged. These battles are told in the words of many who took part; with fine focus on the experiences of survivors of the doomed cruiser HMS Fiji. With these disastrous losses the British battle fleet was forced to retreat to its base at Alexandria.

This defeat was unnoticed by the British people because of an event in the Atlantic during those four days in May : the sinking of the battle-cruiser HMS Hood, a Royal Navy icon, by the new German battleship Bismarck shocked the nation. That, and subsequent joy at the successful hunt and sinking of the enemy battleship, dominated the news. It still dominates recollections of the period. In his biography of Churchill, published in 2001, Roy Jenkins recorded Churchill's gloom at the sinking of HMS Hood but makes no mention of the Mediterranean Fleet's severe losses in the same week.

The Mediterranean battle raged on, with further heavy naval losses, between the Stukas and warships escorting rare convoys to beleaguered Malta and regular convoys carrying vital supplies to the garrison in Tobruk under siege 200 miles behind the Afrika Korps desert front line. After victory at El Alamein and the Anglo-American invasion of French North-Africa, Allied air superiority was established in the central Mediterranean , and the Stukas transferred to the Russian front. After the Italian surrender in the autumn of 1943, the Stukas returned to the Eastern Mediterranean and again triumphed over British warships operating mostly without air cover, making the waters around the Dodecanese islands untenable to British warships in daylight, and so perilous even at night that it became known as the Destroyers' Graveyard. Bitter comments by men who fought in this futile campaign, including survivors of earlier warships sunk by Stukas during the Battle for Crete, are quoted. They regarded the failure to provide them with adequate air cover at this late stage of the war as criminal. The author has photographs of the action, and of participants.

"These chaps have stolen a cannonball and don't have the cannon to fire it" the Special Adviser on Nuclear Security told the Prime Minister after the most sensational aircraft hijacking since the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001.

A veteran freelance pilot and his charter plane, Tango George, hired to carry Nigerian Muslim pilgrims to Saudi Arabia, was taken over by the Palestinian co-pilot in the name of a previously unknown Palestinian liberation organisation. Forced at pistol point to divert to Faro airport in the Algarve, Portugal, the lone hijacker is joined by a well-armed Arab gang and its leader takes over command of the plane. Tango-George secures fuel and provisions in exchange for all but ten Nigerian hostages, and flies on to Carlisle airport after demanding that the pilot's one-time lover, now married and living in the area, be brought to the airport, a ruse for the aircraft to rendezvous with other members of the gang who have stolen plutonium from the British nuclear weapons establishment at Windscale.

The plutonium is loaded aboard Tango-George as British security forces close in, but the hijacked aircraft takes off from Carlisle after a brief fire-fight with security forces, whose actions have been hampered by the prime minister's fears of disaster. The PM ignores the advice that the plutonium is a mere cannonball and can't be made lethal without special technical equipment. The world holds its breath as Tango George meanders through the skies above Europe and the Middle East. Life in major cities is brought to standstill as organisations trained for a terrorist disaster are mobilised, first in the Carlisle area, then in Birmingham and London. Tango George flies low over them, circling Buckingham Palace and flying on to circle Nato headquarters in Brussels. As Tango George flies on eastwards, Russian nuclear forces are poised to react to what they believe may be a nuclear attack from the west in frightening hours before the aircraft changes course, flying across Switzerland and down the western coast of Italy. As Tango-George heads towards Israel, military chiefs there, concerned that what appears to be a flying nuclear bomb is intended for them, send aircraft and naval craft to intercept it. By this time, Nato is also planning to shoot the hijacked plane down over sea or desert. Another change of course takes Tango George south over the Nile Delta, narrowly missing being shot down by Egypt's automatic air defences around the Aswan dam, and continues south down the Red Sea.

Nato and Israeli military chiefs assume that Tango George's cargo is destined for Arab terrorists known to have bases in the southern part of Yemen. French jet-fighters take off from the former French colony of Djibouti with orders to shoot the rogue aircraft down.

But Tango-George seems to have disappeared. In fact, one of her two engines had to be shut off, and a forced landing is made at an airfield near Port Sudan. The Sudanese government, acceding to every demand in order to get the nuclear peril out of their country, sends engineers to repair the faulty engine. Israel plans to raid the airfield at Port Sudan and take over the plutonium. Just in time, Tango-George takes off again, bound for Aden until the hijack leader hears on the radio that Aden airport is closed with its runways blocked with lorries and buses. The hijackers intended to use equipment called a nut-cracker, capable of turning the plutonium into a bomb, at the oil-distillery at Little Aden, and it seemed their comrades in Aden had been ousted from power. Tango-George is almost out of fuel after flying around uncertain where to head, and makes another emergency landing, this time at Jeddah, its original destination. There a Holy Man approaches the aircraft which is parked at the end of a runway, and after an argument with the Hijack leader he is shot. Tango-George takes off again as thousands of Muslims rush the airport intent on tearing apart the killers of the Holy Man.

Meanwhile, a RAF control aircraft has been following in the wake of Tango-George, carrying the British prime minister's adviser on nuclear security. In case the British pilot is involved as seemed the case earlier, he has taken the pilot's old lover and her husband with him. The former lovers' reunion when Tango George is allowed to land at Riyadh, the Saudi capital, is part of a startling denouement.

My father’s war, known as the Great War, ended nearly six years before I was born, but the slaughter in the trenches of the Western Front brooded over my childhood like a malevolent ghost; constantly present in the faces of my father, my surviving uncles and their contemporaries. The nightmare of shelling, poison gas, close-quarter bayonet fighting, teeming rats, a constant smell of putrefying  bodies, the cries of the wounded cut off in no-man's land, lost hopes kindled by fraternisation between the lines with soccer matches in no-man's land on the first Christmas, all  near and real to them. Memories of the Menin Gate, the Angel of Mons, the "Wipers" salient, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, Passchendaele and the Somme haunted them.

At school most of my teachers belonged to this haunted generation -- echoes of their nightmares often permeated the classroom. In the beginning the message that such horrors must never happen again was given with confidence. During my last years at school this changed to fears that a similar ordeal was facing my generation. News-reels in the cinemas indicated that another European war threatened even greater frightfulness than experienced in the Great War. No longer would war mainly involve soldiers, sailors and airmen. Massed bombing fleets must mean that civilians, women, children, the old and the infirm would have to suffer enemy action too. No city dweller would be safe, even in our island so long a happier land than its continental neighbours, safe within the moat of the sea. The cinema, the main entertainment for most people, sharpened the grim prospect as we watched flickering news film of the bombing of Chinese and Spanish cities with fascinated foreboding, and the frightening goose-stepping mass rallies in Hitler's Germany.

Dread of another great war, along with some realisation that the harsh Versailles Treaty had given Germany grievances that brought Adolf Hitler to power, led to widespread support of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, and the sacrifice of the "far away country" of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Soon after that, my half-brother Gordon, a sergeant-pilot in 49 Bomber Squadron, flew on operations to test London's defences, and was later killed in an aircraft collision.

Aged 14 at the start of the 1939-45 war, I served first as a Boy Scout messenger at the village Air Raid Precautions headquarters, later in the Home Guard, then followed my elder brother, Douglas, who had left a reserved occupation to fly with the RAF a year before. He was a flying-officer navigator with 101 Bomber Squadron and was killed on the night of the day I reported for RAF flying training. Given compassionate leave, I missed my platoon and a faulty needle on being immunised against tropical diseases put me in hospital, and this delay in my training meant that I was among later entries made redundant for air crew. Robbed of the joy of flying, as a volunteer I was able to transfer to the Royal Navy, and was a Coder aboard the destroyer HMS Petard on operations to recapture Singapore when the atomic bombing of Japan suddenly ended the war.

The elders of my generation fought what was perhaps the only really just war. They undoubtedly saved the world from Nazi domination, even though victory turned sour so quickly. The generations that followed mine were Europe's fortunate young people.. Despite decades of nuclear containment they have been able to get on with their own lives without losing the brief years of youth. Even those of us lucky enough to survive paid that price.

The Vietnam War as seen by a British foreign correspondent who covered the main developments of the conflict over a period of 15 years. In 1961 Communist Vietcong guerrillas were so thin on the ground, only able to operate in darkness, that he called it the Sunset War. United States Vice-President Lyndon Johnson visited Saigon while he was there, and at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport shortly after Johnson left he watched the arrival of a US Air Force C46 transport carrying young Americans wearing jeans, carrying kit-bags. They made for the bar where one of them told the author, "We've come to show the Vietnamese how to kill Communists." They were the first of 600 combat advisers to the South Vietnamese army.

During following years, he covered the controversial 1964 Tonkin Gulf affair that led to huge American involvement; the Vietcong's 1965 Monsoon offensive; the devastating 1968 Vietcong Tet offensive; continued fighting in 1973 after the American withdrawal under the Paris Peace terms; and the North Vietnamese offensive and the fall of Saigon in 1975. He left Saigon from the roof of the American Embassy in a United States marine helicopter as North Vietnamese tanks crashed through barriers over a river bridge three miles away.

Many correspondents were killed or wounded reporting these events, but the author survived terrorist bombs, mortar, artillery, machine-gun fire and sniping, only to be bitten by an Elephantitis-carrying mosquito that began sapping his strength two months before the fall of Saigon, involving surgery when he returned home.

The American author Philip Caputo, was among marines landed to protect the Danang air base in 1965, and returned as a TV correspondent to report the 1975 defeat. His novel, A Rumour of War was published in this country in 1977. In it he wrote this epitaph to one of the first young Americans who died, "I'm sure you died believing it was pro patria. You were faithful. Your country is not. The country for which you died wishes to forget the war in which you died. Its very name is a curse. There are no monuments to its heroes, no statues in small town squares and city parks, no plaques or public wreaths, nor memorials, Your country wishes to forget and has forgotten."

During convalescence the present author attempted to get memories of Vietnam out of his system by writing a novel called Live till Tomorrow, also published in 1977 in Britain by Collins. The American publisher Doubleday, having published his first novel, told him that nobody in America wanted to know about Vietnam. It took years for this deep American trauma over Vietnam to fade.

In order to present the true atmosphere at the height of conflict, the author of this present account, quotes many of the stories he filed over 30 years ago, a time when British newspapers were only a few pages bigger than during wartime newsprint rationing. Many of these stories about a foreign war were savagely cut, mainly for space, frequently from sub-editorial ignorance of their significance. This is the first time many have been properly aired.

Stephen Harper tells his own story of a boyhood dream coming true when the legendary editor Arthur Christiansen took him on the Daily Express and started him on a long career as a foreign correspondent. Those were the balmy days when foreign correspondents were the aristocrats of Fleet Street and the Express sold close on 4 1/2 million copies a day.

Name a dateline and the odds are Harper was there. As New Delhi correspondent his mobbing in Kashmir was debated in the Security Council, and he was in Cairo for the Suez crisis of 1956, later he climbed to 22,000 feet reporting a fatal all-woman Himalayan expedition. He was held hostage in Stanleyville in the Congo during the first United Nations peace mission. In Cold War Russia he covered the early space missions, the Cuban crisis and pulled off a world scoop on Krushchev's New Year message soon afterwards and was drugged by KGB thugs on his way to visit Stalin's birthplace. As Rome and Vatican correspondent he covered the last months and death of Pope John XXIII, moving on to six years based in Beirut. He covered the end of empire in Aden, and the Nasser years. A Saudi prince poured his Scotch down a drain when he was tried for bringing a noxious fluid into the Holy land on the morning he interviewed the country's new King Feisal at his coronation. He covered the last years and death of General Franco , where the regime labelled him 'un hombre pelligroso' - a dangerous man. He became Chief Foreign Reporter of the Daily Express with a global responsibility covering stories of his choice.

He covered three Arab-Israeli wars, the wars between India and Pakistan and highlights of the Vietnam War the Vietnam War from the arrival of the first American advisers in 1961 until leaving from the roof of the US Embassy as North Vietnamese tanks approached. He met most world leaders of the time as well as many celebrities.

This story is much more than simply a memoir, however rich in anecdote, of a veteran newsman. It is a salute to a heroic era in British journalism and a lament for the lost glory of Fleet Street from a man who lived through its decline and fall, from the time when Lord Beaverbrook instructed his reporter to stay in the best hotels. On his final trip to cover the end of the Vietnam War the foreign budget was cut so low that he used the travel manager's 'freebie' air ticket to South-East Asia.

Harper, now 82, carries his tale into his retirement reflecting on the kind of Britain totally different from the one in which he grew up.