Continuing on from his study of the Oran operation of July 1940, when the French warships were destroyed at Mers-el-Kbir, the author investigates the allied expedition of September that year, with De Gaulle present, which unsuccessfully attempted to break the French at Dakar away from the Vichy Government. Using Admiralty and Cabinet papers, as well as private sources of information, Marder weaves a skilled course through all the complex material to produce a masterly case-study of how an operation is mounted and how it can go disastrously wrong. It is a classic, tragi-comic illustration of the fog of war.
