Midnight at Mormugão: the Secret British Raid on Neutral Goa and Untold Story of Operation Longshanks in World War II

In March 1943, under cover of darkness, a battered steam barge slipped into the harbour of neutral Portuguese Goa.Its passengers were not elite commandos. They were businessmen, accountants, planters and part-time soldiers drawn from the Calcutta Light Horse and Calcutta Scottish. Their target was the Ehrenfels, a German merchant ship suspected of transmitting Allied shipping movements to U-boats operating in the Indian Ocean.Britain could not attack openly. Goa was neutral territory, Portugal was a vital diplomatic ally, and any official military action risked an international crisis. The operation therefore had to be secret, deniable and carried out by men the British government could disown.What followed was one of the strangest covert missions of the Second World War.Drawing on wartime records, intelligence files, naval reports and later testimony, Midnight at Mormugão reconstructs the planning, personalities and violence behind Operation Longshanks. It follows the ageing barge Phoebe on its hazardous voyage, the Bengali sailors whose role was largely forgotten, the German crews trapped far from home, and the British officers willing to violate neutral waters to silence a suspected spy network.But was the transmitter aboard the Ehrenfels really guiding German submarines? Did the raid save Allied ships-or was it based on intelligence that could never be proved?Written with the pace of a wartime thriller, Jim Saxon's narrative history reveals a hidden conflict of espionage, sabotage and political deception in a corner of the war that history almost forgot.Perfect for readers of Ben Macintyre, Damien Lewis, Giles Milton and true stories of secret operations, wartime espionage and extraordinary military missions.