Product Description

On average a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent would be dead within three months of being parachuted into action. Terry Crowdy tells the extraordinary story of these agents, some of whom were women as young as 22, following them through their experiences beginning with their recruitment and their unorthodox training methods, which included hand-to-hand combat and parachuting. Packed with photographs and full-colour artwork, this book recounts the incredible combat missions of the SOE agents from their role in the attacks on a heavy water plant in Norway, to operations in the field with Yugoslav and Greek partisans, as well as sabotage missions ranging from blowing up bridges to the raising of full-scale partisan armies as they attempted to fulfill Churchill's directive to set occupied Europe ablaze.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53984 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

Customer Reviews

New Osprey classic, superb
Osprey managed to produce a good one again. First for a long time.
They often fail to deliver in foreign subjects due to minimalist or no research, it being a British subject they made wonderful use of pictures and document materials for this one.
Takes you through recruitment, training schools and their syllabus, with short looks at two SOE operations.
Interesting even for someone well versed in WW2 spec ops.
Osprey classic.

good introduction
I thought this book gave a good introduction to the training and deployment of SOE agents, I was especially interested in the details of the training camps in the UK. Towards the end the book gave an idea of what it might actually have felt like to be an SOE agent embarking on a mission. Osprey books are not cheap though, hence 4 out of 5!