The F-Section of the SOE was a department that stood for French Section, whose job it was to carry out Churchill's famous command to 'set Europe alight'. This is the story of F-Section.

**OVER A MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE • A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERChosen as a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by NPR, the New York Public Library, Amazon, the Seattle Times, the Washington Independent Review of Books, PopSugar, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, BookBrowse, the Spectator, and the Times of LondonWinner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography“Excellent…This book is as riveting as any thriller...

This WWII espionage biography brings "one of America's greatest spies back to life" in a "story of derring-do and white knuckles suspense" (Patrick O'Donnell, author of Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs)Virginia Hall left her comfortable Baltimore roots in 1931 with dreams of becoming a Foreign Service Officer, but her gender—and her wooden leg—kept her from pursuing politics. As Hitler advanced across Europe, she put her gift for languages to use with the B...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The dramatic, untold history of the heroic women recruited by Britain’s elite spy agency to help pave the way for Allied victory in World War II“Gripping. Spies, romance, Gestapo thugs, blown-up trains, courage, and treachery (lots of treachery)—and all of it true.”—Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City and Dead WakeIn 1942,the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every abl...

Nancy Wake, nicknamed 'the white mouse' for her ability to evade capture, tells her own story. As the Gestapo's most wanted person, and one of the most highly decorated servicewomen of the war, it's a story worth telling.After living and working in Paris in the 1930's, Nancy married a wealthy Frenchman and settled in Marseilles. Her idyllic new life was ended by World War II and the invasion of France. Her life shattered, Nancy joined the French resistance and, later, began work wi...

The thrilling and inspiring true story of Violette Szabo, the fearless British cloak-and-dagger agent who infiltrated Nazi occupied France.Switchboard operator and volunteer for the Women's Land Army, Violette Szabo was only twenty-two years old when her husband, Etienne, a captain in the French Foreign Legion, died at El Alamein. His death only made the resilient young widow more determined than ever to join England's war effort in World War II. To Violette's surp...

"A thrilling, challenging and educational book . . . examines the roles of spies such a Edith Cavell, Mata Hari, Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan" ( Pennant Magazine).Women spies have rarely received the recognition they deserve. They have often been trivialized and, in cinema and popular fiction, stereotyped as vamps or dupes. The reality is very different. As spies, women have played a critical role during wartime, receiving and passing on vital infor...

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...

In the tradition of Agent Zigzag comes this breathtaking biography, as fast-paced and emotionally intuitive as the very best spy thrillers, which illuminates an unsung hero of the French Resistance during World War II—Robert de La Rochefoucald, an aristocrat turned anti-Nazi saboteur—and his daring exploits as a résistant trained by Britain's Special Operations Executive.A scion of one of the most storied families in France, Robert de La Rochefouc...

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...

The author of Flames of Calais details life in the top-secret department of Britain's War Office during World War II in this military memoir.Airey Neave, who in the last two years of the war was the chief organizer at M.I.9, gives his inside story of the underground escape lines in occupied North-West Europe, which returned over 4,000 Allied servicemen to Britain during the Second World War. He describes how the escape lines began in the first dark days of ...

This account by a woman who fought the Nazis alongside her husband is "an indelible portrait of extraordinary strength of character" ( The New Yorker).Virginia Roush fell in love with Philippe d'Albert-Lake during a visit to France in 1936; they married soon after. In 1943, they both joined the Resistance, where Virginia put her life in jeopardy as she sheltered downed airmen and later survived a Nazi prison camp. After the war, she stayed in France with P...