Published by Michael Joseph, 1995, hardcover, illustrated, index, 338 pages, ex library book with usual stamps & labels, otherwise condition: very good.
The true story of four brave women secretly sent into the darkness of Nazi-occupied France to carry out Winston Churchill's plan to "set Europe ablaze." Caught in a web of deception surrounding the preparations for the D-Day invasion, their mission ended in betrayal and sacrifice. An engrossing history based on first-hand interviews with agents of the Special Operations Executive and revelations about the secret organization and the courageous women who served it. There was the French working-class courier who helped downed pilots and escaped POWs on their way to freedom; the fashionable parisienne who returned thinking she could outwit the Gestapo; the upper-crust English member of the Auxiliary Transport Service who volunteered to join SOE because she loved France; and the Romanian Jewish refugee who told her mother, "If we don't help ourselves, no one will help us" and fell in love with the leader of her resistance group. Each of them, the men they worked with under cover of darkness, and the enigmatic woman who saw them off into the unknown, was a remarkable character, their stories told here in vivid detail for the first time. This is an excellent book which focuses on the fates of four women sent into occupied France by the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.). By detailing these four brave women's selection, training, and deployment to France to aid the Resistance and try to outwit the Gestapo, the reader learns general lessons about how the SOE tried to get agents into France before D-Day. In many cases SOE made poor choices and was almost throwing lives away, and that comes through in the book. But the thing that really struck me was what it took, the sheer nerve it took to go where they went and to do what they did. Andree Borrell and Elizabeth Rowden in particular knew exactly how dangerous their lives in France would be, and they went anyway. The average SOE operative survived less than three months in the Paris area. Some areas, like southwest France, were safer for the Resistance fighters, but in Paris the Gestapo maintained a force of over 30,000 officers and men, and this was an overwhelming and deadly obstacle to the Resistance operatives in Paris. Ultimately this is a heartbreaking book, but so well written and researched.
Reading this book led me to later read some of the other classic SOE histories and narratives, like The White Rabbit, Maquisard, and M.R.D. Foot's histories. The story of the resistance movements in the occupied countries still has not received the attention it deserves, particularly with respect to how the Resistance significantly helped the success of the D-Day landings by hindering the German heavy divisions from reaching Normandy until the Allies were established in their beachheads. The work that people like these women did to keep the Resistance networks alive prior to D-Day was critical, and Rita Kramer fully gives them their due in her book.
The author Rita Kramer's previous books include Maria Montessori: A Biography, At Tender Age, Ed School Follies, and When Morning Comes. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, American Heritage, Commentary, The American Spectator, the Wilson Quarterly, City Journal and other magazines and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad.
