The most surprising thing about Mr Foot’s book is that it is there. When one considers the scale of the official war histories, one volume for the momentous events of El Alamein and Tunisia, one volume for Normandy, one volume for Singapore, one for Mandalay, military operations involving the deployment of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of men over wide areas of the globe, with final strategic issues in the balance, it comes as rather a shock to find that the compass of one volume is also required for a branch of operations directly involving a force of British and French agents numbered merely in hundreds. The reason is quite simply that these operations have become the focus of at least as much interest and concern as any other single aspect of the war in Europe. There can have been few supposedly clandestine operations bathed in a brighter glow of publicity. The organisers and agents of Special Operations Executive have written about its activities in many countries, and it was high time someone dredged through the archives and at any rate attempted a balanced and neutral account of what happened after Winston Churchill set Hugh Dalton at the head of the organisation with the dramatic order: ‘Set Europe ablaze!’

Mr Foot has worked under severe limitations. SOE controlled a good many activities in France, not all of which are fully covered by this book. He deliberately excludes the running of escape routes, and of the two sections which ran saboteurs into France, RF Section and F (French) Section, the latter is his real concern.