Oddball
04-26-2005, 06:48 PM
Shall we have a bash, chaps?
Max Hastings reviews Secret War Heroes by Marcus Binney.
The conduct of conventional war demands discipline - rigorous planning, obedience to rules and deference to hierarchies. Many senior commanders warmly disapproved of the wartime Special Operations Executive, because it flew in the face of these precepts.
SOE, warmed by Churchill's sponsorship, gathered together an extraordinary range of individualists and exhibitionists, heroes and lunatics. It waged war against the enemy in a fashion that would cause heart failure at any staff college, but achieved some remarkable things as well as some extravagant nonsenses.
Marcus Binney successfully plundered a treasure trove of agents' personal files to write an earlier book about some of SOE's women agents. Now, he has trawled the archives once more, and come up with a collection of gems of little-known wartime derring-do, and their perpetrators.
http://arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/03/27/bobin227.xml
Max Hastings reviews Secret War Heroes by Marcus Binney.
The conduct of conventional war demands discipline - rigorous planning, obedience to rules and deference to hierarchies. Many senior commanders warmly disapproved of the wartime Special Operations Executive, because it flew in the face of these precepts.
SOE, warmed by Churchill's sponsorship, gathered together an extraordinary range of individualists and exhibitionists, heroes and lunatics. It waged war against the enemy in a fashion that would cause heart failure at any staff college, but achieved some remarkable things as well as some extravagant nonsenses.
Marcus Binney successfully plundered a treasure trove of agents' personal files to write an earlier book about some of SOE's women agents. Now, he has trawled the archives once more, and come up with a collection of gems of little-known wartime derring-do, and their perpetrators.
http://arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/03/27/bobin227.xml