D-Day Girls -The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II by Sarah Rose
In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To "set Europe ablaze," in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women as spies. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France.
In D-Day Girls, Sarah Rose draws on recently de-classified files, diaries, and oral histories to tell the thrilling story of three of these remarkable women. There's Andre Borrel, a scrappy and streetwise Parisian who blew up power lines with the Gestapo hot on her heels; Odette Sansom, an unhappily married suburban mother who saw the SOE as her ticket out of domestic life and into a meaningful adventure; and Lise de Baissac, a fiercely independent member of French colonial high society and the SOE's unflap-pable "queen." Together, they destroyed train lines, ambushed Nazis, plotted prison breaks, and gathered crucial intelligence--laying the groundwork for the D-Day invasion that proved to be the turning point in the war.
Rigorously researched and written with razor-sharp wit, D-Day Girls is an inspiring story for our own moment of resistance: a reminder of what courage--and the energy of politically animated women--can accomplish when the stakes seem incalculably high. Source: Booktopia
The Author:
Sarah Rose (born 1974) is an author and journalist known for D-Day Girls and For All the Tea in China.
Born: Chicago : Nationality: United States:
Education: University of Chicago, Harvard University
Occupation: Author, Journalist: Rose was The Wall Street Journal's Dynasties columnist, writing a bi-weekly news column covering New York's billionaire real estate families.
Books: D-Day Girls, For All the Tea in China: Television-Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys
Awards : New York Foundation for the Arts Source: Good Reads
Reader & Industry Reviews:
*"Rigorously researched . . . a] thriller in the form of a non-fiction book."--Refinery29
*"Equal parts espionage-romance thriller and historical narrative, D-Day Girls traces the lives and secret activities of the 39 women who answered the call to infiltrate France. . . . While chronicling the James Bond-worthy missions and love affairs of these women, Rose vividly captures the broken landscape of war."--The Washington Post
*"Gripping history . . . thoroughly researched and written as smoothly as a good thriller, this is a mesmerizing story of creativity, perseverance, and astonishing heroism."--Publishers Weekly Source: Good Reads
Our Review:
This month our book club meeting was held in a very public restaurant due to unusual circumstances and it was difficult to conduct an in-depth discussion about such a complex book, there-fore this review is quite general. The group felt it was a bit boring in parts, too much detail about the spy networks and how they were set up. The individual stories of the women involved were interesting and a spy book, based on women, was unusual and long overdue. In the light of what is happening in Ukraine at the moment and what we are seeing on our nightly news reports, we did have quite a long discussion of what life and feelings of civilians would be if your country was invaded and at risk; feelings of sacrifice for country and the difficulty of choosing country and service over family responsibilities in times of war. This book certainly made us all have a better understanding of the difficulties, danger and success of the role of these brave women during the years of the WW11 Nazi occupation of France.
As a history lover, I loved this book. It was wonderful to read the stories of a group of women, who had previously never been recognised for their part, successes and failures, during the war.
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Thank you to Margaret Cassidy for supplying this review.
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