This is a history of the first fifty years of the Parachute Regiment, by an author who has served with both the Paras and the SAS. The Regiment began as a response to the German blitzkrieg in 1940, with the aim of supplementing the actions of the British Army and Airforce. The book details the first and most famous of the early raids - on Bruneval in 1942 - alongside the ill-fated assault on Holland in September 1944 that established the Parachute Regiment as an elite force. In the postwar period, they have gone on to prove their worth in action in Suez, Malaya, the Falkland Islands and Northern Ireland.