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A Dangerous Enterprise
A Dangerous Enterprise
Nov 8, 2024 2:19 PM

Author:Tim Spicer

A Dangerous Enterprise

Between 1942 and 1944 a very small, very secret, very successful clandestine unit of the Royal Navy, operated between Dartmouth in Devon, and the Brittany Coast in France. It was a crossing of about 100 miles, every yard of it dangerous. The unit was called the 15th Motor Gunboat Flotilla: crewed by 125 officers and men, it became the most highly decorated Royal Naval unit of the Second World War.

The 15th MGBF was an extraordinary group of men thrown together in the most secret of adventures. Very few were regular Royal Naval officers: instead the unit was made up of mostly Royal Naval Volunteer Officers and 'duration only' sailors. Their home was a converted paddle steamer and luxury yacht, but their work could not have been more serious.

Their mission was to ferry agents of SIS and SOE to pinpoint landing sites on the Brittany coast in Occupied France. Once they had landed their agents, together with stores for the Resistance, they picked up evaders, escaped POWs who had had the good fortune to be collected by escape lines run by M19, as well as returning SIS and SOE agents.

It is a story that is inextricably entwined with that of the many agents they were responsible for - Pierre Hentic, Yves Le Tac, Virginia Hall, Albert Hué, Jeannie Rousseau, Suzanne Warengham, François Mitterrand and Mathilde Carré, as well as many others. Without the Flotilla, such intelligence gathering networks as Jade Fitzroy and Alliance would never have developed, and SOE's VAR Line and MI9's Shelburne Escape Line would never have been realised.

Drawing on a huge amount of research on both sides of the Channel, including private archives of many of the families involved, A Dangerous Enterprise brings the story of this most clandestine of operations brilliantly to life.

Reviews

What Mr Deighton did for the Battle of Britain in Fighter he has done for the land-war here ... A rattlingly good yarn.

—— Guardian

Deighton has a desire, unobtrusive but inflexible, to see the truth ... Blitzkrieg is full of insights, quietly expressed but as a rule uncomfortably true.

—— Financial Times

Contains some gems of research and some arresting conclusions.

—— New Statesman

Fascinating but disturbing

—— Daily Mail

Chilling collection of eye-witness testimonies ... bringing nuance to our understanding of the horrific experience of war

—— Financial Times

Enthralling and often chilling

—— Wales on Sunday

An incredible, well-written, must-read book

—— Glasgow Evening Times

Laurence Rees has done more for good history on television in this country than anyone else. Over several series, he has examined the most terrible aspects of the Second World War with a passionate longing to understand, while rejecting facile moral judgment ...Their Darkest Hour comes from a selection of his interviews with both perpetrators and victims ...The cumulative effects of Rees's observations, to say nothing of the stories themselves, become deeply disturbing

—— Anthony Beevor , Daily Telegraph

Rees has made an important contribution to our understanding of the Second World War. His great urge to comprehend the mentalities of those who took part in the conflict is fired by a passionate curiosity, and his wide body of work is distinguished by a fierce intellectual honesty

—— Antony Beevor, author of STALINGRAD

Rees is one of the few people - perhaps the only one - who has met and interviewed at length not only hundreds of people who suffered from the barbarities of World War Two right across the globe but also, crucially, many of the perpetrators ... All this has given Rees a comparative, cross-cultural perspective on the horrors of the war that no academic could match

—— Daniel Snowman, author of HISTORIANS and THE HITLER EMIGRES

Laurence Rees has devoted much of his life to trying to understand how the atrocities of the Second World War were possible. Nobody else has penetrated as far into the motivation and psyche of such a varied group of people from the war. We should be grateful to him for his work - and we should all read this book

—— Andrew Roberts, author of A HISTORY OF ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES SINCE 1900

The absence of high-profile participants and broad range of source material gives this emotive, elegantly written work an indelible authenticity that will be difficult to erase.

—— Glasgow Herald

A horrifying, spellbinding work

—— BBC History magazine

Knowing differently is key to the movement as we newly reckon with what has been memorialized in our past. We are lucky to be in Rebecca Hall's wake as we look again toward the future, with fresh eyes from visualizing a deeper relationship to the revolutionary black feminist spirit that brought us here.

—— Gina Dent, Associate Professor in Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz

For those who want to understand the Germans, Aftermath is essential reading. An engrossing study on all counts, Jähner's analysis of people's response to the Nazis' monstrous crimes and how perpetrators and victims merged into a new nation is especially compelling. Anyone with even the slightest interest in history and the human condition should read this book.

—— Julia Boyd, bestselling author of Travellers in the Third Reich

A fascinating account of a forgotten moment in Europe's history, of utter desperation leading to tentative hope.

—— Simon Jenkins, bestselling author of A Short History of England

A fiercely compelling book that brings vivid illumination to an era of twilight and brutal ruins. Harald Jähner beautifully explores the hinterland of human nature in all its shades

—— Sinclair McKay, bestselling author of Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness

[Jähner] does double duty in this fascinating book, elegantly marshaling a plethora of facts while also using his critical skills to wry effect. Even though Aftermath covers historical ground, its narrative is intimate, filled with first-person accounts

—— Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

Aftermath is a transfixing account and subtle analysis. A scrupulous investigation of the past, it reads, constantly, like a prelude to what is still unfolding.

—— Geoff Dyer, New Statesman (Books of the Year 2021)

Aftermath captures brilliantly the atmosphere of everyday life in the destroyed cities of divided postwar Germany

—— Financial Times (Best Books of 2021)

Subtle, perceptive and beautifully written

—— Wall Street Journal

Many consider the years before 1945 to be the most crucial in understanding Germany and the Germans. Wait until you have read this book.

—— Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

Harald Jähner's deeply researched, panoramic account of how Germany rebuilt and discovered itself from 1945-1955 is an eye-opening, thrilling read

—— Bernhard Schlink, bestselling author of The Reader

A magnificent overview of the astonishing decade in Germany that followed the defeat of Nazism

—— Daily Telegraph (Best Summer Reading)

Eye-opening and often moving... a sobering look at how societies rebuild

—— BBC History Magazine

Highly readable... Counter-intuitive but thoughtful

—— Peter Fritzsche, New York Times

[A] thoughtful narrative... filling the yawning gap on bookshop shelves between a growing number of modern German history texts and the oversupply of Nazi studies that end in Hitler's bunker

—— Irish Times

Aftermath takes in the immediate postwar years where Germany was administered by the Allies... Jähner excels

—— Giles MacDonogh, Financial Times

Fascinating... Books about Word War II continue to spill out by the ton, but there has been less attention paid to how Germans coped with the country's shameful Nazi past after the conflict was over

—— Irish Independent (Summer Reads)

Rarely has a non-fiction book so skilfully combined vividness, drama and eloquence.

—— From the Jury's reasoning for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Non-Fiction 2019

Jähner's gripping 500-page X-ray-vision tale of an often overlooked and misperceived phase of German history reveals, like all great history books, as much about the first decade after the war as about today.

—— The German Times

Clearly written, full of empathy for everyday life, which is far too seldom taken into consideration... You devour it like a novel.

—— Welt am Sonntag

A popular work of non-fiction in the best sense.

—— Die Zeit

The Siege of Loyalty House ... tingles with a discerning historical imagination

—— Spectator, *Best Books of 2022 II*

[A] thrilling tale of war

—— Mail on Sunday

[A] gripping tale of a royalist house standing its grown against the Roundheads ... Atmospheric, unflinching, and at times extraordinarily witty

—— UK Daily News, *Best History and Politics Books of 2022*

[A] poignant book... the story is timeless

—— Economist, *Books of the Year*

Compelling

—— Spectator, *Books of the Year 2022*

Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, [The Siege of Loyalty House] tells the story of the epic two-year siege of Basing House, a royalist mansion finally captured by Oliver Cromwell in 1645.

—— Daily Express, *Books of the Year 2022*

When you are as good a writer as Jessie Childs, and as assuredly immersed in the archives, the pages zing with the technicolour of celluloid. ... [A] masterpiece.

—— Critic, *Non-fiction books of the year 2022*

Childs writes an engrossing, spellbinding narrative while laying out a clear and comprehendible history

—— New York Journal of Books

The broad subject of this poignant book is what happens to people during civil war: how quickly and imperceptibly order becomes chaos and decency yields to cruelty. In other words, how close to inhumanity humanity always is. The focus is on an episode in the English civil war, but the story is timeless

—— Economist

A gripping account of the agony at Basing, The Siege of Loyalty House is also a potted social history of the civil wars and how they started. Jessie Childs, [is] a gifted storyteller

—— London Review of Books
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