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Armed with little more than cyanide pills, countless men and women parachuted behind enemy-held lines during WWII despite forebodings of the worst imaginable fate should they be captured. Miller tells how Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) got started and later worked with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the latter the forerunner of the CIA. Modeled largely on Ireland's Sinn Fein, Chinese guerilla operations against Japan, Spanish irregulars, and the Nazis, both agencies fomented industrial and military sabotage, labor agitation, disinformation, attacks against leaders like Hitler and Heydrich, boycotts, and riots. Volunteers were secretly selected, with the ablest ones trained in martial arts, radio telegraphy, cryptography, and parachuting. Others made false passports, foreign-appearing clothing, and even stuffed disemboweled rats with explosives. Sixty-plus years after WWII, a hundred or so ex-participants in both SOE and OSS gave Miller firsthand accounts of their exploits. Both famous and obscure patriots tell all: the rigors of training, the horrors of landing in the wrong places, their treatment by traitors in France and elsewhere, the cruelties of Gestapo and Japanese interrogators, and the deprivations they faced from lack of food, horrible terrain, failed communications, and worse. Miller has edited this first-of-a-kind compilation of interviews with typical British wartime "chinupmanship" and has taken the unusual step of naming one Steve Sierros, secretary of Virginia's OSS Society, as nondeserving of thanks for ignoring the requests for returned phone calls, letters, or faxes. An excellent recounting of events worldwide that involved heroic doings beyondthe call of usual wartime service.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Secret service, British Personal narratives, Great Britain. Special Operations Executive, United States. Office of Strategic Services, United States, Great Britain, World War, 1939-1945, American Personal narratives, Special operations (Military science), History, Special forces (Military science), World war, 1939-1945, secret service, great britain, World war, 1939-1945, secret service, united states, Great britain, special operations executivePlaces
Great Britain, United StatesTimes
20th centuryShowing 4 featured editions. View all 4 editions?
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1
Behind the Lines: The Oral History of Special Operations in World War II
February 3, 2004, NAL Trade
in English
045121112X 9780451211125
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2
Behind the Lines: The Oral History of Special Operations in World War II
2003, Pimlico
Paperback
in English
0712667369 9780712667364
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3
Behind the lines: the oral history of Special Operations in World War II
2002, St.Martin's Press
in English
- 1st U.S. ed.
0312266421 9780312266424
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4
Behind the lines: the oral history of Special Operations in World War II
2002, Secker & Warburg
in English
0436205343 9780436205347
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Book Details
First Sentence
"BY THE hot summer of 1940, much of mainland Europe had succumbed to the Nazi blitzkrieg."
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- Created April 29, 2008
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