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Agent Michael Trotobas and SOE in Northern France by Stewart Kent,Nick Nicholas Pdf
The exceptional exploits, courage and leadership of British SOE Agent Trotobas have long been recognised in France but not in his own country despite being recommended for the Victoria Cross.Captured on his first mission, Trotobas led a mass break-out from Mauzac Internment Camp and eventually returned to England. He immediately volunteered to return and established and ran a resistance group around Lille and the Pas de Calais for a year. As the Nazis closed in, he refused to leave the French men and women who had shown him complete loyalty. He paid the ultimate price, fighting to the death rather than undergo capture.As well as describing the operations of the Sylvestre-Farmer circuit, the authors record the rivalries and intrigues that sprang up culminating in betrayals and extraordinary demand for the court martial and execution of the Circuit's British second in command.This book is a major addition to the bibliography of the SOE and French Resistance.
Secret Agent, Unsung Hero by Peter Dowding,Ken Spillman Pdf
Young Australian teacher Bruce Dowding arrived in Paris in 1938, planning only to improve his understanding of French language and culture. Secret Agent, Unsung Hero draws on decades of research to reveal, for the first time, his coming of age as a leader in escape and evasion during World War II. Dowding helped exfiltrate hundreds of Allied servicemen from occupied France and paid the ultimate price. He was beheaded by the Nazis just after his 29th birthday in 1943.
Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945 by Halik Kochanski Pdf
New Yorker • Best Books of 2022 “This is the most comprehensive and best account of resistance I have read. It addresses the story with scholarly objectivity and an absolute lack of sentimentality. So much romantic twaddle is still published . . . it is marvelous to read a study of such breadth and depth, which reaches balanced judgments.” —Max Hastings, The Sunday Times (UK) Resistance is the first book of its kind: a monumental history that finally integrates the many resistance movements against Nazi hegemony in Europe into a single, sweeping narrative of defiance. “To resist, therefore. But how, when and where? There were no laws, no guidelines, no precedents to show the way . . .” —Dutch resister Herman Friedhoff In every country that fell to the Third Reich during the Second World War, from France in the west to parts of the Soviet Union in the east, a resistance movement against Nazi domination emerged. And every country that endured occupation created its own fiercely nationalist account of the role of homegrown resistance in its eventual liberation. Halik Kochanski’s panoramic, prodigiously researched work is a monumental achievement: the first book to strip these disparate national histories of myth and nostalgia and to integrate them into a definitive chronicle of the underground war against the Nazis. Bringing to light many powerful and often little-known stories, Resistance shows how small bands of individuals took actions that could lead not merely to their own deaths, but to the liquidation of their families and their entire communities. As Kochanski demonstrates, most who joined up were not supermen and superwomen, but ordinary people drawn from all walks of life who would not have been expected—least of all by themselves—to become heroes of any kind. Kochanski also covers the sheer variety of resistance activities, from the clandestine press, assistance to Allied servicemen evading capture, and the provision of intelligence to the Allies to the more violent manifestations of resistance through sabotage and armed insurrection. For many people, resistance was not an occupation or an identity, but an activity: a person would deliver a cache of stolen documents to armed partisans and then seamlessly return to their normal life. For Jews under Nazi rule, meanwhile, the stakes at every point were life and death; resistance was less about national restoration than about mere survival. Why resist at all? Who is the real enemy? What kind of future are we risking our lives for? These and other questions animated those who resisted. With penetrating insight, Kochanski reveals that the single quality that defined resistance across borders was resilience: despite the constant arrests and executions, resistance movements rebuilt themselves time and time again. A landmark history that will endure for decades to come, Resistance forces every reader to ask themselves yet another question, this distinct to our own times: “What would I have done?”
'Defying Vichy takes us into the heart of the French Resistance: the Dordogne region (in) this moving account of the darkest and brightest period in French history.' – Matthew Cobb, author of The Resistance Vichy France under Marshal Pétain was an authoritarian regime that sought to perpetuate a powerful place for France in the world alongside Germany. It echoed the right-wing ideals of other fascist states and was a perfect instrument for Hitler, who drew more and more power and resources from a beaten France whose people suffered. Resistance was an unknown until a small number sought to make a stand in whatever way they could. Each would play their part in destabilising the Vichy state, all the while rejecting the Nazi occupation of their eternal France. The Dordogne was one of many hotbeds of early refusal and its dramatic stories are here told against the backdrop of the rise and fall of Vichy France. These stories, like so many others of often ordinary people – men and women, young and old – tell of a period of betrayal, refusal and heroism.
When World War I ended, hundreds of British veterans stayed in France to work for the newly chartered Imperial War Graves Commission. Through the 1920s and 1930s, these veteran-gardeners married local women, raised bilingual children, and dedicated themselves to caring for the graves of their fallen comrades. When World War II swept through Europe in 1940, more than 200 War Graves gardeners were stranded in Nazi-occupied France. Their bosses explicitly ordered them to remain at their posts, even when their villages were under attack by the invading Germans. While some escaped, others were arrested by the Nazis. A handful managed to stay free and join the French Resistance. With their English-language skills and unshakable loyalty to the Allied cause, the gardeners and their families took on crucial roles in the effort to save British and American airmen shot down in France. In some cases, they hid the airmen in World War I cemeteries. In The Caretakers, internationally renowned cemetery expert Caitlin Galante DeAngelis tells the true story of three of these unlikely heroes: Ben Leech, a barman from Manchester who became a cemetery gardener in Beaumont-Hamel and joined the Resistance; Rosine Witton, the wife of a British gardener, who served as a key conductor on the famous Comet Line and survived Ravensbrück; and Robert Armstrong, an Irish gardener who worked for the Resistance until he was captured by the Nazis and sentenced to death. Through meticulous research, never-before-published journals and papers, and compassionate storytelling, DeAngelis honors the sacrifices made by War Graves gardeners and their families.
Blackmail Sabotage: Attacks on French industries during World War Two by Bernard O'Connor Pdf
In late-1943 Harry Rée, one of Britain's secret agents operating in eastern France, witnessed an RAF bombing mission on Peugeot's automobile factory in Sochaux/Montbéliard. As many bombs missed their target, damaging houses and killing innocent French civilians, he was aware that it could turn public opinion against the Allies. With the agreement of his boss in the Special Operations Executive, he approached one of Peugeot's directors and made him an offer: Agree to have your vital machinery sabotaged or have the factory destroyed by British or American bombers. To help the director decide, he was offered compensation by the Allies after the war. When this novel approach proved successful, SOE set up a blackmail sabotage committee which targeted over thirty French factories. Over twenty specially trained agents, both men and women, were infiltrated on missions which included blackmail sabotage. This book details their successes and failures.
Robert Gildea’s penetrating history of France during World War II sweeps aside the French Resistance of a thousand clichés. Gaining a true understanding of the Resistance means recognizing how its image has been carefully curated through a combination of French politics and pride, ever since jubilant crowds celebrated Paris’s liberation in 1944.
Unearthing Churchill's Secret Army by Martin Mace Pdf
The Special Operations Executive was one of the most secretive organizations of the Second World War, its activities cloaked in mystery and intrigue. The fate, therefore, of many of its agents was not revealed to the general public other than the bare details carved with pride upon the headstones and memorials of those courageous individuals.Then in 2003, the first batch of SOE personal files was released by the National Archive. Over the course of the following years more and more files were made available. Now, at last, it is possible to tell the stories of all those agents that died in action.These are stories of bravery and betrayal, incompetence and misfortune, of brutal torture and ultimately death. Some died when their parachutes failed to open, others swallowed their cyanide capsules rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo, many died in combat with the enemy, most though were executed, by hanging, by shooting and even by lethal injection.The bodies of many of the lost agents were never found, destroyed in the crematoria of such places as Buckenwald, Mauthausen and Natzweiler, others were buried where they fell. All of them should be remembered as having undertaken missions behind enemy lines in the knowledge that they might never return.
World War II: The Resistance by C. David North Pdf
France fell to Hitler's forces in less than two months. It was not until 1942 that widely dispersed underground organizations would band together to form a united opposition to the occupying Germans. It was not until then that resistance would become the Resistance - a disciplined multi-national movement that would play a significant part in the outcome of World War II. In each occupied nation, resistance groups would grow, gathering and sending information to London, planning increasingly complex sabotage operations, and assisting thousands of people, particularly Jews, in fleeing Nazi-occupied territories. Their actions would eventually become a focused counteroffensive against the German army in 1944, when Allied troops gathered in Great Britain to prepare for the invasion of France. As their widespread activity weakened German outposts in France and other occupied countries, the Allies would gain the foothold they needed to win the war. This is their story.
Olivier Wieviorka’s history of the French Resistance debunks lingering myths and offers fresh insight into social, political, and military aspects of its operation. He reveals not one but many interlocking homegrown groups often at odds over goals, methods, and leadership. Yet, despite a lack of unity, these fighters braved Nazism without blinking.
A history of the British intelligence group’s operations in France during the Second World War. During the summer of 1940, as Britain was fighting alone for its survival, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, instructed the newly formed and clandestine Special Operations Executive to “set Europe ablaze.” From that moment on the S.O.E. took its own war to Nazi-occupied Europe by conducting a mix of espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance missions, with its F Section dedicated to aiding the liberation of France. The risks and dangers of being associated with the S.O.E were obvious, and the consequences of being caught could only be imagined by those who volunteered. Yet the volunteers still came, from all walks of life, and each a specialist in their own field. Amongst those recruited were Gus March-Phillipps, who led the Small Scale Raiding Force, Peter Churchill, who survived by convincing his captors he was related to the British Prime Minister, Tommy Yeo-Thomas, known to the Gestapo as the White Rabbit, and the legendary Newton “Twins” who waged their own private war against the Nazis simply to get personal revenge. As F Section grew in numbers, it turned to recruiting women and from its ranks came some of the bravest to have operated in occupied Europe. These included women such as Odette Sansom, Vera Leigh, Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo and Nancy Wake. Then, as the Allies invaded Europe in 1944, the S.O.E. inserted small elite teams, known as Jedburghs, deep behind enemy lines to link up with the French resistance and to coordinate more widespread and overt acts of sabotage to prevent the German reinforcement of Normandy. Peter Jacobs describes the extraordinary contribution to the Allied war effort made by the S.O.E. in France and tells the gripping story of the men and women who so bravely operated behind enemy lines, many of whom were betrayed and did not live to tell the tale. It pays tribute to the extreme courage and bravery of the individuals who did exactly what Churchill asked of them; they set France ablaze. Praise for Setting France Ablaze “Overall this is a useful examination of SOE’s operations in France, and a tribute to the courage of so many of the agents who attempted to carry out Churchill’s instructions to ‘set Europe ablaze.” —History of War “A very readable account of the SOE and what went on during the war, from the early days of setting up the operation. . . . This book is filled with the stories of agents being inserted into France from the early stages following the German invasion. . . . A very interesting, and thought-provoking account of SOE operatives, and also a way of remembering the many who never came home.” —Military Modelling Online