SOE, the Special Operations Executive, was a wartime initiative formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to "Set Europe Ablaze. He instructed Colonel Maurice James Buckmaster to create an organisation capable of building, training and supplying an active and effective force of Resistance in occupied France; and to gather intelligence beneficial to the Allied war effort.
Buckmaster knew his agents, because he was directly involved in their training. He writes touchingly of the terrific achievements and terrible fates of many of his agents on the ground between 1941 and 1944. This extraordinary memoir also evaluates the effect of SOEs agents in Occupied France on the outcome of the war. He argues that SOE directly contributed to the rapid and successful advance of Allied forces across France in the days and months after D-Day, the invasion of Europe, 6th June 1944.
They Fought Alone is a unique look at how SOE operated from the inside of its London headquarters, from where Buckmaster coordinated acts of sabotage, resistance and terror against the occupying Nazis.
