Book description
SOE, the Special Operations Executive, was a small, tough British
secret service, a dirty tricks department, set up in July 1940.
Recruited from remarkably diverse callings, the men and women who were
members of this most secret agency in the Second World War lived in
great and constant danger. Their job was to support and stimulate
resistance behind enemy lines; their credentials fortitude, courage,
immense patience and a devotion to freedom.
The activity of the SOE was world-wide. Abyssinian tribesmen, French
farmers, exiled Russian grandees, coolies, smugglers, printers,
policemen, telephonists, tycoons, prostitutes, rubber workers,
railwaymen, peasants from the Pyranees to the Balkans, even the regent
of Siam - all had a part to play as saboteurs, informers, partisans or
secret agents.
In this engrossing and illuminating study, the eminent Second World
War historian, M. R.D. Foot, sheds light on the heroism of individual
SOE agents across the world and provides us with the definitive
account of the Executive's crucial wartime work.
With an introduction by David Stafford.
M. R.D. Foot was an army officer throughout the 1939-45 war, and
received the French Croix de Guerre for work with the SAS in Britanny.
He taught politics and history at Oxford, was for six years Professor
of Modern History at Manchester and the first editor of Gladstone's
diaries, and has written - among other books - SOE in France,
Resistance, M19 and Six Faces of Courage. He helped Ian
Dear edit The Oxford Companion to the Second World War. He died
in 2012.
David Stafford is the author of several books on intelligence
history, including Britain and European Resistance,
Churchill and Secret Service, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of
Secrets, Flight from Reality and Ten Days to D-Day. He
was Professor of History at the University of Victoria in British
Columbia, Executive Director of the Canadian Institute of
International Affairs, Chairman of the Canadian Association for
Security and Intelligence Studies, an Associate Member of St. Antony's
College, Oxford, and Project Director at the Centre for the Study of
the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh, where he is
currently an Honorary Fellow.
