Agents by Moonlight

Ref: 5391

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Price: £30.00

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{detailed description}The history of the Royal Air Force's Special Duty squadrons during the Second World War reveals British airmen at their most dogged, skilled and valiant. But, throughout the war, clandestine operations were largely considered an unusual and peripheral aspect of the RAF's work. The subsequent hostile environment in which the squadrons had to work, while at the same time having quickly and often painfully to learn specialised aviation techniques, makes their achievement all the more commendable. The pre-war SIS networks had been overrun and the chances of inserting new agents on closely guarded coasts or through the strict border checks with neutral states was slim. Similarly, hopes of locating, encouraging and co-ordinating resistance against the Nazi oppressor were blighted by a shortage of information about prevailing conditions in the occupied countries. The Special Operations Executive (SOE), the secret British organisation formed to aid the resistance movements of Europe, would prove to be stillborn unless it could find the means of regular and reliable transportation of men and supplies into enemy territory. It was evident that aircraft offered the best means of establishing clandestine links with Europe. Therefore, in the Summer of 1940, SIS approached the Air Ministry with a suggestion that experiments might be undertaken to investigate the feasibility of landing aircraft and parachuting agents into enemy territory. The Special Duty squadrons had been born. Freddie Clark's analysis is based primarily upon the squadrons' records in the Public Record Office, coupled with his own insight as a wartime Special Duty pilot with No. 138 Squadron. It offers a fascinating exposition of the development of a unique type of military aviation and reflects the immense difficulties and dangers encountered in these secret wartime operations. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in his account of the tragic Englandspiel during which the German counter-intelligence services devastated British and Dutch clandestine operations in the Netherlands. The Allied networks were penetrated and their wireless traffic controlled so that Dutch agents were regularly delivered to dropping zones in German hands. The ghastly fate of most of the agents has been the subject of several books but here we are made graphically aware of the additional cost in airmen's lives. Freddie Clark's researches reveal a dreadful litany of the RAF losses on these compromised operations. The files disclose the shooting down of aircraft en-route to their objectives or on the way back to base, their fate constituting a macabre bonus to the German successes on the dropping zones.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by Freddie Clark
published by Tempus 1999 1st edn. 338pp profusely illustrated, index 19x25
{condition}slightly bumped corners, otherwise fine inc. d/j
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