During the Second World War a number of daring military actions were carried out by Allied and Axis land, sea and air forces against targets carefully selected for their strategic or propaganda values. These raids were as individual in character as the men who carried them out, and equally as different in their objectives. In Raiders, John Laffin relates more than twenty such operations mounted by British, German, American, Australian, Italian and Canadian forces, including a British commando strike against Rommel's HQ in the North African desert, the raid on the German capital ship Tirpitz in Tromso fjord by Royal Navy X-craft midget submarines; the German gliderborne assault on the great Belgian fortress of Eben Emael and SS officer Otto Skorzeny's dramatic mission to snatch Mussolini from his mountaintop prison.