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Recommended books
Click on each cover for more information ...
SOE's Robert 'Bob' Maloubier led a life straight out of a spy thriller, and would eventually become known as "the French James Bond". Bob's first-hand account of his missions in occupied France as a saboteur and weapons trainer is finally available in English ... unique in style, poignant and brutally truthful.
Paul McCue's biography of Amédée Maingard, the young Mauritian SOE agent whose circuit supported the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur (FFI) and the arrival of fifty-five men of 1st SAS Regiment for the ill-fated Operation BULBASKET shortly after D-Day. (Second edition, now available in paperback.)
In 1942, the Gestapo would stop at nothing to track down a mysterious ‘limping lady’. Their target was Virginia Hall, a glamorous American with a wooden leg who broke through the barriers against her gender and disability to be the first woman to infiltrate Vichy France for the SOE.
Using previously classified documents, David Kenyon casts the work of Bletchley Park in a new light, as not just a code-breaking establishment, but as a fully developed intelligence agency. He shows how preparations for the war’s turning point—the Normandy Landings in 1944—had started at Bletchley years earlier.
David Abrutat reveals the intelligence and covert missions that went into the D-Day planning, including the signals intercepts, agent running operations, the clandestine work of the X-Craft and the diver teams that scoured the Normandy coast months before the June 1944 deadline.
In 1942 SOE began using women as agents in occupied France. Sarah Rose draws on recently declassified files, diaries, and oral histories to tell the thrilling stories of three of these remarkable women - Lise de Baissac, Andrée Borrel and Odette Sansom.
The debonair Special Operations Executive agent Richard 'Dick' Mallaby was the first Briton to be sent into Italy by parachute as an SOE operative in August 1943. He would later help negotiate the armistice with Italy - for which he was awarded the Military Cross.
Biography of SOE's Peter Fleming, the elder brother of the creator of James Bond, and married to the actress Celia Johnson. Fleming worked as a travel writer and journalist, serving with distinction throughout World War II and played a crucial role in British intelligence operations in the Far East.
Tony Brooks was barely out of school when recruited in 1941 by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the wartime secret service established by Churchill to 'set Europe ablaze'. After extensive training he was parachuted into France in July 1942 - being among the first (and youngest) British agents sent to support the nascent French Resistance.
