Of course, I had read "The Guns of Navarone" during my Alistair MacLean-days, so when Padma brought home a DVD of the movie, I watched it immediately as I wanted to see how Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn and David Niven single-handedly defeated the Third Reich's "Wehrmacht".
Alistair MacLean is no war historian but a fiction writer and the Greek island of Navarone is a figment of his imagination; however, the story takes place within the real historical context of the Allies' campaign to capture the German-held Greek islands in the Aegean.
In real life, it took a huge war effort and millions of men with all their weaponry to bring Germany to its knees. Today it takes just a million so-called Syrian refugees clad in designer jeans and equipped with nothing more lethal than mobile phones to do to same.
I seem to have got out just in time!
