Behind the lines

Description

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.

Description

"Compiled from interviews, diaries, letters and contemporaneous first-person accounts - many unpublished until now - this oral history follows the adventures of the courageous men and women who volunteered for service with Britain's Special Operations Executive and the United States' Office of Strategic Services. They parachuted behind enemy lines, often alone, with orders to cause mayhem. Arrest almost always resulted in torture and imprisonment; sometimes in execution.". "Trained in the black arts of warfare - sabotage, subversion, espionage, guerilla tactics and undermining enemy morale by the distribution of insidious propaganda - theirs was a war fought in the shadows. Their activities extended to every theatre of operations: in occupied France, equipped with false identities, they played a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Gestapo; in the Balkans they discovered that the fiery politics of the region were as dangerous as the enemy; in the Burmese jungle, in some of the worst combat conditions of the war, they led native marauders in surprise attacks against the Japanese. From Britain they were supported by a team of back-room boffins who produced expertly forged documents and dreamed up ingenious devices like exploding rats and invisible ink."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

Genres

• Personal narratives, American
• Personal narratives, British

Links

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Other Editions

• Behind the lines: the oral history of Special Operations in World War IISt.Martin's Press2002-01-01
• Behind the linesSecker & Warburg2002-01-01
• Behind the LinesPaperbackPimlico2003-01-01
• Behind the LinesNAL Trade2004-02-03