Download or read book Memories of an S O E Historian written by M. R. D. Foot and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2009-04-29 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historian of the British World War II intelligence organization chronicles his life and service career in this memoir. Michael (M.R.D.) Foot enjoys the rare distinction of being the only person referred to by his real name in a John Le Carré novel. A highly significant tribute to the man entrusted with writing the official record of the Special Operations Executive. He authored first (1966) the History of SOE in France and twenty years later the highly sensitive accounts of SOE operations in Belgium and Holland (which the Germans infiltrated with disastrous results). With his own war service background and academic reputation M.R.D. was an inspired choice for these historic tasks. He was fearless in pursuit of the truth and in thwarting bureaucratic attempts to muzzle him. His war exploits make thrilling reading. His behind-the-lines mission to track down a notorious SD interrogator went badly wrong, and he only just escaped with his life. His career has brought him into close contact with an astonishing cast of characters, and his tongue-in-cheek account of academic life makes lively reading.

Download or read book Memories of an S O E Historian written by Michael Richard Daniell Foot and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mission France written by Kate Vigurs and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The full story of the thirty-nine female SOE agents who went undercover in France Formed in 1940, Special Operations Executive was to coordinate Resistance work overseas. The organization’s F section sent more than four hundred agents into France, thirty-nine of whom were women. But while some are widely known—Violette Szabo, Odette Sansom, Noor Inayat Khan—others have had their stories largely overlooked. Kate Vigurs interweaves for the first time the stories of all thirty-nine female agents. Tracing their journeys from early recruitment to work undertaken in the field, to evasion from, or capture by, the Gestapo, Vigurs shows just how greatly missions varied. Some agents were more adept at parachuting. Some agents’ missions lasted for years, others’ less than a few hours. Some survived, others were murdered. By placing the women in the context of their work with the SOE and the wider war, this history reveals the true extent of the differences in their abilities and attitudes while underlining how they nonetheless shared a common mission and, ultimately, deserve recognition.

Download or read book Agent Paterson SOE written by Ernest van Maurik and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ernest Van Maurik, known to all simply as Van, joined the illustrious Artists Rifles regiment in the Territorial Army in 1936, but when war broke out he was commissioned into the Wiltshire Regiment. In the summer of 1940 the regiment was posted at Folkestone to defend the South Coast in the event of an invasion, during which time he undertook a course at Hythe Small Arms School and found himself involved with the SOE, the Special Operations Executive.This led to him to Scotland, first to the Commando Training School at Lochailort and then to Arisaig, where he became responsible for helping organise resistance to the Nazi regime in occupied countries. This involved the training of prospective agents in small arms, demolition and other special forces activities. At this time, he helped train a number of Czech soldiers who went on to participate in Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of SS-Obergruppenfhrer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague.Van was then transferred to the SOEs headquarters in Baker Street, London. There he was to work for notable figures such as Maurice Buckmaster and General Colin Gubbins. He also got to know a number of individuals who were to become famous agents, people such as Peter Churchill, Odette and Yeo-Thomas (The White Rabbit). His main work was to get agents both in and out of Occupied France but then it was his turn to go into the field.Van was initially sent to Malta to help with the dropping of agents into Yugoslavia. His next mission was to Switzerland via Occupied France to assist SOE agents in France and also deal with couriers from F Section SOE who used Switzerland as a channel for communicating with London.After many adventures, Van reached Switzerland where he carried out his task until the end of the war in Europe. He then was involved in assisting the investigation into the fate of the many SOE agents who had been captured by the Germans and were still missing.

Download or read book Spirit of Resistance written by Nigel Perrin and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-12-19 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of a British World War II secret agent who escaped the Buchenwald concentration camp. One of the most determined and courageous secret agents of the Second World War, Harry Peulevé joined the BEF in 1940 before volunteering for F Section of the Special Operations Executive. On his first mission to occupied France to set up the SCIENTIST circuit, he broke his leg on landing and, after numerous close calls, made a heroic crossing of the Pyrenees on sticks in December, 1942. Imprisoned, he escaped and eventually returned to England in May, 1943. He formed a close friendship with Violette Szabo before setting out to train a Maquis group in central France. Despite the Gestapo’s repeated attempts to catch him, he built a secret army of several thousand resistance fighters. Eventually betrayed and captured, he was tortured at Avenue Foch but never broken. By coincidence, he and Violette met while in captivity before Harry was sent to Buchenwald where he not only avoided execution but also managed to escape, reaching American lines in April, 1945. Sadly, Peulevé never fully recovered from his wartime traumas, but nothing can detract from his outstanding courage and contribution.

Download or read book SOE in Denmark written by and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a small number of clandestine activities against the German occupation of Denmark in 1940, a sophisticated resistance movement developed which by 1944, with the support of Special Operations Executive, had become a highly effective intelligence gathering and sabotage organisation. Denmark is composed of a mainland and more than 500 islands, a fifth of which are inhabited, and the countryside is devoid of any inaccessible or mountainous region. Together this made communication between resistance cells difficult and meant that there were no natural bases from which guerrilla operations could be mounted. Nevertheless, thanks to supply drops of explosives, weapons and ammunition arranged by SOE, the Danes harassed the Germans and raised the moral of the Danish people in the latter, and most brutal, stages of the war. This largely forgotten story of SOE and its agents in Denmark, the latter facing extremely hazardous conditions, was written immediately after the war by a SOE staff member and read and validated by the Director of SOE, Major General Colin Gubbins. A very large number of documents were burned at SOE’s London headquarters in Baker Street when the organisation was wound down in 1946 making this history of the Danish Section an invaluable and irreplaceable study. SOE in Denmark was written at a time when SOE was still largely unknown to the general public and its operations a closely guarded secret. It was expected that its activities would never be officially acknowledged and the study of its actions in Denmark was compiled with the aim of provide a lasting record of its achievement. Within its pages we read of the dangers the agents faced, the logistical mountains they had to overcome, and the successes achieved in the face of a ruthless enemy. Completed with unique photographs from the Danish archives, SOE in Denmark is an essential addition to the SOE literature.

Download or read book Code Name Pauline written by Pearl Witherington Cornioley and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pearl Witherington Cornioley, one of the most celebrated female World War II resistance fighters, shares her remarkable story in this firsthand account of her experience as a special agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Told through a series of reminiscences—from a difficult childhood spent in the shadow of World War I and her family's harrowing escape from France as the Germans approached in 1940 to her recruitment and training as a special agent and the logistics of parachuting into a remote rural area of occupied France and hiding in a wheat field from enemy fire—each chapter also includes helpful opening remarks to provide context and background on the SOE and the French Resistance. With an annotated list of key figures, an appendix of original unedited interview extracts—including Pearl's fiancé Henri's story—and fascinating photographs and documents from Pearl's personal collection, this memoir will captivate World War II buffs of any age.

Download or read book The Secret Ministry of Ag Fish written by Noreen Riols and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘My mother thought I was working for the Ministry of Ag. and Fish.’ So begins Noreen Riols’ compelling memoir of her time as a member of Churchill’s ‘secret army’, the Special Operations Executive. It was 1943, just before her eighteenth birthday, Noreen received her call-up papers, and was faced with either working in a munitions factory or joining the Wrens. A typically fashion-conscious young woman, even in wartime, Noreen opted for the Wrens - they had better hats. But when one of her interviewers realized she spoke fluent French, she was directed to a government building on Baker Street. It was SOE headquarters, where she was immediately recruited into F-Section, led by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster. From then until the end of the war, Noreen worked with Buckmaster and her fellow operatives to support the French Resistance fighting for the Allied cause. Sworn to secrecy, Noreen told no one that she spent her days meeting agents returning from behind enemy lines, acting as a decoy, passing on messages in tea rooms and picking up codes in crossword puzzles. Vivid, witty, insightful and often moving, this is the story of one young woman’s secret war, offering readers an authentic and compelling insight into what really went on in Churchill’s ‘secret army’ from one of its last surviving members.

Download or read book The End of Silence written by Soe Tjen Marching and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the stories of individuals, who were - and still are - affected by violence and stigmatisation in the name of suppressing communism in Indonesia during the late 1960s.

Download or read book I Heard My Country Calling written by Sue Elliott and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a tragic childhood among the Great War cemeteries of Flanders Fields, a troubled young woman searches for love and meaning in war-ravaged Europe. Elaine Madden's quest takes her from occupied Belgium through the chaos of Dunkirk, where she flees disguised as a British soldier, into the London Blitz, where she finally begins to discover herself. Recruited to T Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) as a 'fast courier', she is parachuted back to the country of her birth to undertake a top-secret political mission and help speed its liberation from Nazi oppression. Elaine Madden never claimed to be a heroine, but her story proves otherwise. Its centrepiece – war service as one of only two women SOE agents parachuted into enemy-occupied Belgium – is just one episode in an extraordinary real-life drama of highs and lows, love, loss and betrayal. Relayed to the author in the final years of her life, Elaine's true story of courage and humour in testing times is more intriguing, more compelling than fiction.

Download or read book Working Memory written by Marlene Kadar and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II speaks to the work women did during the war: the labour of survival, resistance, and collaboration, and the labour of recording, representing, and memorializing these wartime experiences. The contributors follow their subjects’ tracks and deepen our understanding of the experiences from the imprints left behind. These efforts are a part of the making of history, and when the process is as personal as many of our contributors’ research has been, it is also the working of memory. The implication here is that memory is intimate, and that the layering of narrative fragments that recovery involves brings us in touching distance to ourselves. These are not the stories of the brave little woman at home; they are stories of the woman who calculated the main chance and took up with the Nazi soldier, or who eagerly dropped the apron at the door and picked up a paintbrush, or who brazenly bargained for her life and her mother’s with the most feared of tyrants. These are stories of courage and sometimes of compromise— not the courage of bravado and hype and big guns, but rather the courage of hard choices and sacrifices that make sense of the life given, even when that life seems only madness. Working Memory brings scholarly attention to the roles of women in World War II that have been hidden, masked, undervalued, or forgotten.

Download or read book The Special Operations Executive SOE in Burma written by Richard Duckett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mountains and jungles of occupied Burma during World War II, British special forces launched a series of secret operations, assisted by parts of the Burmese population. The men of the SOE, trained in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, worked in the jungle, deep behind enemy lines, to frustrate the puppet Burmese government of Ba Maw and continue the fight against Hirohito's Japan in a theatre starved of resources. Here, Richard Duckett uses newly declassified documents from the National Archives to reveal for the first time the extent of British special forces' involvement - from the 1941 operations until beyond Burma's independence from the British Empire in 1948. Duckett argues convincingly that `Operation Character' and `Operation Billet' - large SOE missions launched in support of General Slim's XIV Army offensive to liberate Burma - rank among the most militarily significant of the SOE's secret missions. Featuring a wealth of photographs and accompanying material never before published, including direct testimony recorded by veterans of the campaign and maps from the SOE files, The SOE in Burma tells a compelling story of courage and struggle in during World War II

Download or read book Dadland written by Keggie Carew and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As her father’s memory fails, a daughter explores his military past: “Part family memoir, part history book . . . Compelling and moving from start to finish” (Financial Times). One of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ten Best Books of the Year For most of Keggie Carew’s life, she was kept at arm’s length from her father’s personal history. But when she is invited to join him for the sixtieth anniversary of the Jedburghs—an elite special operations unit that was the first collaboration between the American and British Secret Services during World War II—a new door opens in their relationship. As dementia begins to stake a claim over Tom Carew’s memory, Keggie embarks on a quest to unravel his story, and soon finds herself in a far more consuming place than she bargained for. Tom Carew was a maverick, a left-handed stutterer, a law unto himself. As a Jedburgh he parachuted behind enemy lines to raise guerrilla resistance first against the Germans in France, then against the Japanese in Southeast Asia, where he won the nickname “Lawrence of Burma.” But his wartime exploits were only the beginning. A winner of the Costa Book Award, Dadland takes us on a journey through peace and war and shady corners of twentieth-century politics; though the author’s English childhood and the breakdown of her family, and into the mysterious realm of memory. “Brings to mind Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk in the way it soars off in surprising directions, teaches you things you didn’t know, and ambushes your emotions.” ―NPR “Astonishing . . . Mixes intimate memoir, biography, history and detective story: this is a shape-shifting hybrid that meditates on the nature of time and identity . . . Tom Carew was a razzle-dazzle character, larger than life and anarchically self-invented . . . For all its vigor and comic zest, Dadland is a careful and tender discovery that patiently circles around a man who spent his life mythologizing and running away from himself.” ―The Observer

Download or read book Belsen in History and Memory written by David Cesarani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on documentary and oral sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Dutch and French, this book challenges many sterotypes about Belsen, and reinstates the groups hitherto marginalized or ignored in accounts of the camp and its liberation.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Sound Memory and the Senses written by Joy Damousi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound studies has emerged as a major academic field in recent times. However, much of this material remains ahistorical or focused on technological advances of sound. This book departs from previous studies by drawing out connections between sound, memory and the senses, and how they emerge within a variety of historical contexts.

Download or read book All the King s Men written by Robert Marshall and published by Canelo + ORM. This book was released on 2022-04-11 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of one of the most astonishing episodes of espionage and deception of World War Two. This is the tale of two men: Claude Dansey, deputy head of MI6, and double agent Henri Dericourt, who was planted with the rival wartime secret service – SOE – at Dansey’s instructions. From there began a terrifying trail of destruction. After making contact with Dansey in 1942, Dericourt was recruited to SOE as the man desperately needed to organize top-secret flights in and out of occupied French territory. But at the same time Dericourt was in touch with German counter-espionage in Paris. As SOE congratulated themselves on a new asset, Dericourt gave the Nazis everything; every flight, operation and coded message he could. Against a background of unprecedented deception and betrayal, Dansey’s secret MI6 operation eventually led to the arrest of nearly one thousand men and women, hundreds of whom died in concentration camps. How did it go so wrong? A shocking, enthralling account of a devastating episode in the history of the British secret services, perfect for readers of Ben MacIntyre.

Download or read book SOE in France written by Michael Richard Daniell Foot and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: