Eight months after the extraordinary success of operation "Postmaster", in which a British commando, led by Captain Gustavus March-Phillips, had kidnapped three Axis vessels in Fernando Po Harbour in Spanish Guinea, the Small Scale Raiding Force headed towards Normandy, in their Royal Navy speed boat, on the night of the 12th of September 1942.
Onboard, the same intrepid commander and 10 of his best men, toughened by previous victorious raids against German coastal defences, such as the foolhardy operation "Dryad" on the Casquets Lighthouse on the northern tip of the Channel Islands, were now preparing to disembark on the Normandy shores, 8 miles west of Arromanches.
This new episode of the history of the SSRF, has all of the ingredients of a war spy thriller: the very secret Special Operations Executive, created by Winston Churchill, a commando of courageous men from diverse and quite singular backgrounds, including an authentic English Lord, a member of the Free French Naval Forces, a Dutchman, a Pole, a Sudeten German communist; but also valorous members of the French Resistance in Normandy who were to be betrayed by a double agent fallen into the clutches of the fearsome Hugo Bleicher, one of the aces of the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht's counter-espionage service.
Nevertheless, the whole "Aquatint" operation, and the unexpected events that were to follow were so ominously true, that the Führer's High Command took full advantage of them and hence fed its diabolical propaganda campaigns led by Dr Joseph Goebbels.