Ferdinand Otto Miksche was an officer in the Czechoslovakian Army, the British Army, and ultimately the French Army; and was also a prolific author on politico-military subjects. He attended the (Austro-Hungarian) Imperial Military College, and also the Ludovika Military Academy in Budapest; he began his service with the Czechoslovakian Army in 1927. After serving with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, he returned to Czechoslovakia. He escaped his fallen country at the end of the 1930s, and spent WWII in various positions with the Allied Forces. He served for some time during the war on the personal staff of General de Brigade Charles De Gaulle, and became advisor on central European affairs to SHAEF in 1945. After the war, he was appointed Czechoslovakian Military Attaché for both France & Belgium, but after the communist regime took power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, he accepted a commission in the French Army. In 1950, he became a professor at the Portuguese Insituto de Altos Estudos Militares. In 1955 he went back to France and was posted as a Military Engineer Officer in the French Army Defense Office, DEFA (Direction des Etudes et fabrication d'Armements). He continued to write on politico-military affairs right up to the late 1980s, and his widely read & influential books were eventually published in at least ten different languages.