SOE In France; An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France 1940-1944 [This is a volume of the History of the Second World War]

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1966. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Good. xxvii, [3], 550 pages. Footnotes. Analytical Table of Contents. Illustrations. Maps (four in back pocket. Appendices (A-J--includes Sources and Table of Dates). Index. Ink notation on fep. Cover has some wear and soiling. Michael Richard Daniell Foot, CBE, TD (14 December 1919 - 18 February 2012), known as M. R. D. Foot, was a British military historian and former British Army intelligence officer and special operations operative during the Second World War. Foot joined the British Army on the outbreak of the Second World War and was commissioned into a Royal Engineers searchlight battalion. In 1941 searchlight units transferred to the Royal Artillery. By 1942, he was serving at Combined Operations Headquarters, he then joined the SAS as an intelligence officer and was parachuted into France after D-Day. He was for a time a prisoner of war, and was severely injured during one of his attempts to escape. For his service with the French Resistance he was twice mentioned in despatches and awarded the Croix de Guerre. After the war he remained in the Territorial Army, transferring to the Intelligence Corps in 1950. After the war Foot taught at Oxford University for eight years before becoming Professor of Modern History at Manchester University. His experiences during the war gave him a lifelong interest in the European resistance movements, intelligence matters and the experiences of prisoners of war. He became the official historian of SOE, with privileged access to its records, allowing him to write some of the first, and still definitive, accounts of its wartime work, especially in France. Foot established his reputation with the publication of his official history The SOE in France (1966), writing as MRD rather than Michael Foot to avoid confusion with the Labour politician. The venture proved difficult, not only because of the fog of secrecy and myth enveloping the operations, but also because the reputations of French resistance groups and the exploits of SOE agents were placed under scrutiny. While strongly supportive of resistance in principle, and of SOE's role in aiding and co-ordinating it, Foot concluded that the scale of French resistance had been exaggerated, as had its military contribution to the success of Overlord, the allied invasion of Europe in 1944, and the ending of German occupation. Some French resistance groups resented the criticism of their heroic myth, while several British agents, who felt their exploits had been undervalued, took libel actions against the author. Foot's engaging style, sardonic wit and love of anecdotes (often footnoted as "personal experience") rendered this controversial volume unusually readable for an official history.