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 i...

A gripping biography of Mathilde Carré, the French double agent who betrayed resistance and allies alike.Clever, charismatic and daring, Mathilde Carré lived up to the image of the intrepid female spy. Codenamed “The Cat”, she co-founded the largest intelligence network in Occupied France and inspired her recruits to fight a secret war against the Germans. Carré delivered priceless information to the Allies, and her commitment to their cause seemed beyond question....

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...

In May 1940 Francis Suttill was commissioned into the East Surrey regiment of the British Army. He was later recruited by the SOE, and after being trained during the summer of 1942, Suttill was chosen to create a new resistance network in northern France, based in Paris, with the operational name Physician. His code name was Prosper and his assumed identity was François Desprées.The circuit of agents grew fast until June 1943, when the Gestapo discovered l...

"Never Be Afraid: A Belgian Jew in the French Resistance" is the powerful, poignant, at times funny story of Bernard Mednicki, a working-class, activist member of his socialist union in pre-Nazi Belgium who flees with his family to southern France when the Nazis invade, assumes a Christian identity, and, through a series of events, joins the Maquis, the French resistance. Mednicki is a survivor and a fighter, a role model for anyone who has ever faced adversity. For Jews who grew up in the...

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...

Memoirs of SOE agents have always been rare - so many were either killed in action or executed - and today they are almost unheard of. But Sydney Hudson's story, which he has waited nearly sixty years to tell, is just about as dramatic and thrilling as any to have ever appeared. After volunteering for guerilla operations should the Germans occupy Britain, he transferred to SOE. He spent most of the Second World War in France, remarkably surviving 15 months captivity and interrogation befor...

Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia were all German allies in the Second World War, unlike the other countries of Europe which had either been forcibly occupied by the Nazis or remained neutral. SOE Missions mounted within their borders were thus doubly hazardous for they were conducted in enemy-populated territory, heavily policed by military forces and gendarmerie. Furthermore all these states had well developed and experienced security services, usually supplemented by Gestapo and A...

A highly illustrated account of the conflict between the German Army and security forces and the French resistance in the Alps.Fighting insurgents has always been one of the greatest challenges for regular armed forces during the 20th century. The war between the Germans and the French resistance, also called FFI (Forces Françaises d'Intérieur), during World War II has remained a near-forgotten chapter in the history of these 'Small Wars'. This is all the more asto...

'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...

From the bestselling and prize-winning author of ‘A Brilliant Little Operation’ comes the long neglected D-Day story of the largest action by the French Resistance during WWII, published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings.In early 1941, three separate groups of plotters – one military, one political, one intellectual – began to organise and plan on and around the forbidding mountainous plateau near Grenoble – the Vercors. The aims of the groups were the ...

Nechama Tec's Defiance, an account of a Jewish partisan unit that fought the Nazis in the Polish forests during World War II, was turned into a major feature film. Yet despite the attention this film brought to the topic of Jewish resistance, Tec, who speaks widely about the Holocaust and the experience of Jews in wartime Poland, still ran into the same question again and again: Why didn't Jews fight back? To Tec, this question suggested that Jews were somehow complicit in their own exterm...