The Secret War
Tuts book covers SOE operations in France, Holland, Norway and Denmark. Two-thirds of it concern France; then come a hundred pages on Holland, and fifty each on Norway and Denmark. The author had the usual difficulties over access to documents. But he went ahead, interviewed (he tells us) some 600 people in various countries, and found, as so often happens, that some papers restricted in Great Britain are easily available elsewhere.
But in May last, when this book had already left the printers, there was published SOE in France, by M. R. D. Foot, based on the SOE archives and covering exactly the same ground as the first 400 pages of Inside SOE. This latter work gives some additional details, and repre- sents a considerable effort on the part of the author. He is, throughout, meticulously careful to be fair to all concerned. But of the two books, it is the `official' history that is the more authori- tative; and some may find it more readable. Mr Cookridge's style of writing is not always happy, and we have sentences like 'the war galvanised a considerable number of upper-class women out of their rut of pleasure and lethargy.'
In the last third of his book the author has the field more to himself. Moreover, his theme is more manageable. It is hard indeed to evolve a lucid narrative from the crowded and compli- cated tangle of SOE operations in France. Else- where the pattern was more straightforward. What SOE accomplished in Norway and Den- mark are stories that are well worth telling. And we are given a moving account of the grim and protracted tragedy in Holland, where the Ger- mans succeeded, over far too long a period, in duping SOE headquarters in London.
DAVID FOOTMAN
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