Carve their names with pride

‘Women,’ Captain Selwyn Jepson, SOE’s senior recruiting officer, once wrote, ‘have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men.’ This questionable assumption is not actually the reason why the women were recruited. That was down to their ability to move around enemy-occupied territory carrying messages, arms or heavy wireless sets without arousing as much suspicion as able-bodied men. But lonely courage was an essential virtue for the female agents, who had to face long weeks of keeping a low profile, with very little support, in between hours of terrifying activity. Most of them only met each other during training or, in several cases, in detention after capture.

The great strength of Rick Stroud’s book is that it does not further isolate the female agents by segregating each into her own chapter, as previous histories have tended to, but rather interweaves the women’s narratives through the story of SOE-supported resistance in Nazi-occupied France.