Map on lining papers.

Enemies in the dark -- Web of empire -- Rifts in the rock -- The Abyssinian crisis -- Rebellion of the right -- Death from the air -- Deutschland über alles -- Guns over Gibraltar -- Scrabbling on the brink -- The disrupters -- Fight and flight -- Operation Boomerang -- ‘An absolutely bloody business’ -- The Indian boy and his cook -- Diplomatic dandies – Digging in -- Operation Felix -- The price of Dakar -- Helen among the Trojans -- Every inch must be pulverised -- The greatest mistake -- Nosey parker -- On the run -- From the new world – Helen’s return – Bloody war -- Hands across the sea -- The clandestine struggle -- Lighting the torch -- The North African landings -- Underwater Gibraltar -- Undercover and underhand – ‘The end of Poland’ -- A vision of battlements -- The Atlantic outposts.

"Two months before he shot himself, Adolf Hitler saw where it had all gone wrong. By failing to seize Gibraltar in the summer of 1940, he had lost the war. The Rock of Gibraltar, a pillar of British sea power since 1704, looked formidable but was extraordinarily vulnerable. Though menaced on all sides by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Vichy France and Francoist Spain, every day Gibraltar had to let thousands of foreigners across its frontier to work. Among them came spies and saboteurs, eager to blow up the Rock's twenty-five miles of secret tunnels. In 1942, Gibraltar became U.S. General Eisenhower's headquarters for the invasion of North Africa, the campaign that lead to Allied victory in the Mediterranean. Nicholas Rankin's revelatory new book, whose cast of characters includes Haile Selassie, Anthony Burgess and General Sikorski, sets Gibraltar in the wider context of the struggle against Fascism, from Italy's invasion of Abyssinia to the Spanish Civil War. Defending the Rock also chronicles how the Gibraltarian people emerged in 1945 with a longing to govern themselves in their own homeland. It is a trenchently intelligent look at the course of the Second World War." Taken from dust jacket.