Has the role of resistance in the second world war been exaggerated?
When in 1941 Winston Churchill famously declared that the newly formed Special Operations Executive, set up to encourage resistance movements, would ‘set Europe ablaze’, neither he nor anyone else could have known the extent of the help the partisans would provide to the liberation of the continent. Nor, indeed, did anyone envisage the fact that not all of them would prove as biddable to Allied wishes as they hoped. As Halik Kochanski shows in her compendious book on the six-year underground war, resisters came in all shapes and sizes, not easily controlled or corralled into categories. She divides her survey into three periods. The first runs from March 1939 and
