Roman imperial expansion over the entire Mediterranean basin was going full tilt in the first century BC. Nobody had been able to stop them and their inexorable legions, which were bound together by a discipline and unit cohesion seldom found anywhere else in the ancient world. They had rolled over the Punics, the Celts, the Macedonians and everyone else standing in their quest for global (as seen then) dominance. However, there was another people expanding out of the east who would finally confront the Romans in a way they had never encountered before.

Operation Colossus was an airborne commando raid into Italy early in the war to interdict a particular aqueduct vital to the towns in the ‘heel’ of Italy. The operation is not very well known and this book is a welcome addition to anyone’s WWII library as it fills a void not covered in other publications. Author Lawrence Paterson spends a great deal of time at the beginning of the book relating the story of the creation and training of the UK’s airborne forces, going into some detail as to the people and personalities involved as well as the training and equipment used. If you have any interest in airborne forces, you will find this part very interesting and even if you don’t, it is written in a very readable manner, so it will hold your interest.

The Setting

On June 25, 1950, President Harry Truman was flying back to Washington, D.C. to deal with the outbreak of war in Korea. He thought, “In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong attacked the weak. I recalled some earlier instances: Manchuria, Ethiopia, and Austria. I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act, it encouraged the aggressor to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had acted, ten, fifteen, twenty years earlier . . . If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war.”

As I sit writing this review, I cannot help but think that I should just be returning from seeing some of you at the IPMS Nationals in San Marcos. Well, hopefully there are better days ahead, and I do already have my hotel reservation set for Las Vegas next year. Like many of you, I have met some great folks over the years and look forward to seeing at least some of those folks again in the future, and meeting even more fellow modelers.

So how much can you really say about masking sheets? Well, this new set from Mig contains five sheets measuring 280 by 195mm or roughly 7-11/16 by 11-1/16 inches, which seems to be a pretty good value for the price. The sheets are yellow in color for the masking material with a slightly rough texture. I measure the masking material as 0.0035 inch or 0.08 mm in thickness with an adhesive similar to that used by Tamiya on their masking tapes as far as “stickiness” is concerned.

If you are looking to learn about the battle for Crete in WWII, Crete, The Battle for Heraklion, 1941 may not be the book for you to start with. This book deals almost exclusively with the battle for the town and airfield of Heraklion, only one of three landing areas for the German paratroopers on Crete. However, if you are interested in the stories of those on the “sharp end of the stick” in a battle, this book is great as it depends heavily on first person accounts of those who were actually there. While some British, Commonwealth and Germans are included, most of the stories are of the Greeks/Cretans involved, which is good because they are usually overlooked or de-emphasized in most histories which tend to concentrate on the German paratroopers or the British and/or Commonwealth forces involved.