The Phantom Major, Virginia Cowles
The Phantom Major, Virginia Cowles
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
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The Phantom Major
The Story of David Stirling and His Desert Command

Author: Virginia Cowles

Narrator: Robert Whitfield

Unabridged: 8 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/14/2010

Synopsis

In the dark, uncertain days of 1941 and 1942, when Rommels tanks were sweeping toward Suez, a handful of daring raiders were making history for the Allies. These were the SASStirlings desert raiders, the brainchild of a deceptively mildmannered man with a brilliant idea. Small teams of resourceful, highly trained men would penetrate beyond the front lines of the opposing armies and wreak havoc where the Germans least expected it. The Phantom Major is the classic account of these desert raids.

About Virginia Cowles

Virginia Cowles OBE was born in Vermont in 1910.

She gravitated to journalism in her youth, writing features for Hearst Newspapers, and reported from Civil War Spain in 1937. She then covered wartime Europe as a roving correspondent for the Sunday Times among other publications, as well as the BBC and NBC.

Celebrated by Antony Beevor as "one of the truly great war correspondents of all time," Cowles recalled her experiences in her memoir Looking for Trouble. She later reported from North Africa as special assistant to the American ambassador in London.

In 1945, Cowles married Aidan Crawley, a British journalist and former fighter pilot who had spent years in a German POW camp and later became a politician and film-maker; they had three children.

As well as writing a play with Martha Gellhorn, Cowles was a historian and biographer whose subjects included Winston Churchill and the Romanov, Rothschild, and Astor families.

She was killed in an automobile accident in France in 1983.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jane on December 10, 2014

4 ½ stars. Great subject, but the book could have used something more. I’d like a different author to do it. The greatest thing about this book is the character David Stirling and the unbelievable things he and his guys did. David conceived the idea of the SAS and got permission to train a group of m......more

Goodreads review by David on July 10, 2016

Virginia Cowles did a superior job describing how L Detachment was the brainchild of David Stirling, eventually developing into the S.A.S. (Special Air Service). This book is highly entertaining for those who enjoy historical novels about World War Two, and it's equally entertaining for fiction-love......more

Goodreads review by Dennis on March 08, 2023

This is a full-on adventure story of the type I would have read in the British Boy's Annuals that I was familiar with before my 10th birthday. That's not to say it is juvernile. Major David Stirling was a legend who rewrote the book of war in the Desert Warfare against the Germans and the Italians i......more

Goodreads review by Matias on June 13, 2021

Time has not necessarily been kind to the style of writing. While the subject matter is gripping the writers style detracts from the experience. The tale of how the SAS came to be deserves to be heard and it is a shame this book does not deliver on the promise. It is written in a simpler time. The a......more

Goodreads review by ParisianIrish on June 23, 2022

Very interesting book which gives a great insight into the Stirling and his company of de-facto guerilla soldiers. The book is a chest thumping account of British military heroics which in most over exaggerated. Cowles fulfills her role perfectly as a tool of the British foreign office in glorifying......more

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