In World War II, 37 women were dropped in occupied France to work as Special Operations Executive agents and 'set Europe ablaze'. 13 never returned. They were executed in Hitler's concentration camps.This is the fascinating story of eight of those female agents, all striking beauties (despite the need to be inconspicuous), all from civilian life, who were warned of the likelihood of arrest, torture and a brutal death before they volunteered. None demurred. These young women were gi...

On September 13th 1943, two young British officers seized the chance to escape their PoW convoy after the capitulation of Italy. This catapulted them onto a two-month, seven-hundred-mile journey through enemy territory down the spine of Italy, helped by many brave local families. This new edition of The Long Walk Home sets the record of this extraordinary adventure straight. It gives Frank Simms equal billing as author, something that was denied him by the tragic early death of his compani...

Founded by Churchill, Special Operations Executive (SOE) was the forerunner of the SAS, and during WWII they sent many hundreds of specially-trained agents deep undercover in Nazi-occupied Europe. Here Marcus Binney explores the extraordinary stories and daring exploits of some of the male agents who made up these little-known war heroes, and who helped change the course of the twentieth century with their bravery and sacrifice.The author has undertaken ground-breaking research in ...

The best way of discovering London is on foot or from the top of a bus. No other large cuty is more rewarding to wander around, with a wealth of interesting things to see, both grand and intimate in scale. Watercolour painter Graham Byfield set out to capture the essence of the place, and his impressions are recorded in the London Sketchbook.Britain's capital is varied and cosmopolitan. It has no formally planned centre; each area has its own particular style and atmosphere. ...

'I am a very ordinary woman to whom a chance was given to see human beings at their best and at their worst... I completely believe in the potential nobility of the human spirit.'During some of the darkest days of the Second World War, a young Frenchwoman living as a mother and housewife in England left her ordinary life to become a British agent, working covertly in France to aid the Resistance. Entering a murky and deadly world of espionage and double-dealing, she was betrayed to...

Set Europe ablaze.' The order came from Churchill himself. The result was the Special Operations Executive - the SOE. Established in 1941 with the aim of supplying Occupied France with a steady stram of highly trained resistance agents, this clandestine Second World War network grew to become a cricual part of the Allied arsenal. Ingeniously engineering acts of sabotage, resistance and terror in the face of the occupying Nazis, the SOE dealt devastating and fatal blows to the German war ef...

On the night of the 22 September 1943 Pearl Witherington, a twenty-nine-year-old British secretary and agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), was parachuted from a Halifax bomber into Occupied France. Like Sebastian Faulks' heroine, Charlotte Gray, Pearl had a dual mission: to fight for her beloved, broken France and to find her lost love. Pearl's lover was a Parisian parfumier turned soldier, Henri Cornioley, who had been taken prisoner while serving in the French Logistics Corp...

The French resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II was a struggle in which ordinary people fought for their liberty, despite terrible odds and horrifying repression. Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and women carried out an armed struggle against the Nazis, producing underground anti-fascist publications and supplying the Allies with vital intelligence. Based on hundreds of French eye-witness accounts and including recently-released archival material, The Resistanceuses dramati...

It seems at first commonplace: a group photograph of peasants at harvest time, after hard work well done, resting contentedly with their tools behind the fruits of their labor. But when one finally notices the "crops" scattered in front of the group, what seemed innocent on first view become horrific skulls and bones. Where are we? Who are the people in the photograph, and what are they doing? The starting point of Jan Tomasz and Irena Grudzinska Gross's Golden Harvest, this haunting photo...

" In 1941 Berek Jakubowicz (now Benjamin Jacobs) was deported from his Polish village and remained a prisoner of the Reich until the final days of the war. His possession of a few dental tools and rudimentary skills saved his life. Jacobs helped assemble V1 and V2 rockets in Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau; spent a year and a half in Auschwitz, where he was forced to remove gold teeth from corpses; and survived the RAF attack on three ocean liners turned prison camps in the Bay of Lubeck. Th...

This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine.Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a l...

The testament to a tragedy.Voices from The Holocaust follows the whole history of the 'Shoah' from Hitler's rise to power to the Nuremburg trials, but of course the exterminations and death camps of 'The Final Solution' take centre stage. It tells the story from the perspective of the people who were there, and were witnesses - on both sides - of the horror.While some of the eye-witnesses are well-known, such as Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Heinrich Himmler, the book...