World War II Database

Full Title: Special Ops 1939-1945: A Manual of Covert Warfare and Training

How do you frustrate the local German occupation forces?

So you tried to start the fire, but was caught by a German soldier, who had you by the throat. What would you do?

You got away from the guard and now need to hide. How would you blend in to the crowd?

When I picked up Special Ops 1939-1945, it was almost a natural reaction, having recently read Spirit of Resistance and was fascinated the story of SOE agent Harry Peulevé. This next book was a compilation of six war time documents originally published by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS); in other words, manuals that Peulevé might had studied as he trained for his missions in France. The documents in this book provided war time training materials on disguise, unarmed combat, recruitment, sabotage, etc., things that an agent must learn well and be able to execute as if instinct as he or she operated behind enemy lines. Stephen Bull opened the book with an introduction which briefly described the early histories of the SOE and the OSS, providing background and context for the documents to be presented in the main portion of the book.

Overall, I found the documented compiled in Special Ops 1939-1945 extremely interesting, with certain portions that begged me to re-read more than once, sometimes finding myself waving my hands in front of my face to get a sense of how to execute a chin jab while other times nodding, agreeing that a lie about Hitler being a puppet of the SS just might damage enemy morale. The only complaint I had was rather cosmetic; to make the book appear like it was typed in the 1940s, certain pages (including Bull's introduction) and section titles were printed in a gray color that at times was difficult to read against the off-white paper. Looking past that minor flaw, I certainly enjoyed this book. I certainly had read books on clandestine operations in the past that had better content, but this one had proven to be rather entertaining.